UNCONDITIONAL: CHOICES

Our sermon series Unconditional continues with the sermon, Choices.  Our lives are filled with choices!  No one can deny the power of choice.   We often think of life’s big choices such as marriage, career, or buying a home, but there is also great power in the smaller choices.  Our smaller choices accumulate to determine the quality of our lives.  We cannot avoid this.  Our decision not to decide is still a choice that will have consequences!  Choosing to accept God’s unconditional love is an important choice because according to 1 John 3:1-9, this is a “lavish” love that adopts us into God’s family.  If we neglect to choose this option, we are on a path to destruction rather than new life.  In order to truly discover the power of this new life and the depth of this unconditional love, we need to understand what it means to be God’s child and how this alters our lives.  As you read 1 John 3:1-9, it is our prayer that you sense this “lavish” love and that it gives strength and confidence to your life! 1 John 3:1-9: See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. 3 All who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. 4 Everyone who sins breaks the law; in fact, sin is lawlessness. 5 But you know that he appeared so that he might take away our sins. And in him is no sin. 6 No one who lives in him keeps on sinning. No one who continues to sin has either seen him or known him. 7 Dear children, do not let anyone lead you astray. The one who does what is right is righteous, just as he is righteous. 8 The one who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work. 9 No one who is born of God will continue to sin, because God’s seed remains in them; they cannot go on sinning, because they have been born of God.