By Robert Wilkerson
It is easy to be loved by Jesus. He loves each and every one of us. That is what he meant when he said, “God so loved the world” (John 3:16).
God loves us, but that doesn’t mean that our sins have been forgiven, that we are rightly related to God, or that we have a heavenly home. Those things come to us only when we accept God’s Son, Jesus Christ, as our Savior.
To be loved further, we must not only “be,” we must be born again. Through the new birth, we become part of God’s family, and we gain an intimacy with Christ that could not have existed before. John, writing about this new relationship, says with great joy, “How great the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God” (1 John 3:1)
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As a child of God, we can have a very close relationship with Jesus Christ. It can be a growing relationship as we grow in grace and knowledge. It can be a continuous relationship extending from the day we become part of the family until the day we die, and then it has only just begun.
Christ will not leave us, but some of us may leave Him. We are encouraged in 1 John 2:28 to “continue in him, so that when he appears, we may be confident and unashamed before him at his coming.”
We need to ask ourselves, “Have we been born again?” and “are we living like it?”
Dr. Robert Wilkerson is a minister, writer, and founder of People for the Christian Way, an organization whose mission is to encourage all people to practice Christian principles in business, politics and every area of life.