The God Who Created You Wants All of You

This is an excerpt from MasterLife Together Bible Study by Matt and Allison Willis.

In this very moment, the God who created you is actively loving you. You are not simply a human being. You are a human being loved by God. His love for you has nothing to do with what you have or haven’t done. God is loving you right now because of who He is. God is love. God created you to experience His love and belong to Him. Scripture teaches that you are His masterpiece. He has engraved you on the palms of His hands. Your life matters because you matter to the Master. God’s immeasurable love for you is the truest thing about you. You are fully known and fully loved by God.

This is your true identity. Satan will relentlessly attack it, just as he first attacked Jesus’s identity after He spent forty days in the wilderness. Satan repeatedly said, “If you are the Son of God” prove your identity by doing: Make the stones bread. Throw yourself down. Bow down to me. Satan will likewise tempt you to prove your identity by what you do for God. He will convince you that you must achieve the relationship you’ve already received. Jesus didn’t give in to the temptation to prove Himself. He rebuked Satan with truth from God’s Word and commanded him to flee. Jesus wants you to mimic Him by rooting your identity in the love of God. Only these roots will lead to abundant life in Him.

God’s love for you steadily flows and He desires that you soak it up as a personal, experiential reality every single day. The abundance of His love allows you to further love and accept yourself. You are only able to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself because God first loved you. The quality of the love you give God directly relates to the quantity of love you’ve received from Him. God’s love is the foundation of the gospel, so it must be the foundation of your relationship with Him.

God’s love needs to be received and basked in regularly. The quality of your obedience and the extent of your surrender to Him depend on it. It is possible to halfheartedly follow God and not love Him. But be assured that you can’t truly love Him and not follow Him. If you’re like me, being loved can feel uncomfortable and vulnerable.

I am better at giving love than receiving it. But God took the initiative and first loved us, so you and I must receive His love empty-handed, over and over again. Everything you have you received from God, so what can you even give Him that He doesn’t already have? The answer is both simple and radical: all of you. He doesn’t want your acts of service, your money, or your time as much as He wants you. All of you—your heart, soul, mind, and strength, as the verse you will memorize this week highlights.

Each week of this journey, you will look at one aspect of the diagram to the right, which will help you conceptualize what it is to be all His. Get ready to explore the God who created you and to figure out how to be an all-in, fully alive participant in His unfolding story.