The Power of God's Love

Many of us like to display family photographs on our walls. I have a picture in my office of my family taken in the 1930’s showing my father, grandmother, great grandmother, and my great, great grandmother. These family pictures are reminders of our past. Ephesians 2:1-10 describes a picture of our past as we were hopelessly dying in our transgressions and sins. We are reminded of how hopeless and useless we were without Christ. Do we recognize this portrait of our past? Do we see that our Heavenly Father was willing to take dramatic action to rescue us from our death and destruction?

Ephesians 2:4-5 says, “But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.” What a beautiful picture of our present after God’s rescue of us! Because of God’s love and mercy, He was willing to make us alive when we were deserving of wrath and dead in our transgressions.

Now let’s consider a picture of our future as we read Ephesians 2:7 & 10 – “In order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus . . . For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” My father was a welder. He used his skills to make pieces of angle iron and pipe into a beautiful and useful trailer. We are God’s beautiful hand-tooled masterpiece. Can He be proud of us? Do our thoughts, our words, and our actions please Him? The words of a great old song come to mind:
Something beautiful, something good.
All my confusion He understood.
All I had to offer Him was brokenness and strife.
But He made something beautiful out of my life.

May this not only be a song we sing or a prayer we pray, but may it be the life that we live!