"Do You Love Me More Than These?"
| What has made us love Jesus
more than anything else? |
| His love for us through His baptism,
which washed away all our sins, even all our future sins |
God entrusted His lambs to His servants, who completely believed in the gospel of the remission of sins. Jesus asked three times, "Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?" and Peter answered each time, "Yes, Lord, You know that I love You." Now, let us think about Peter's answers. We can see that this was not the expression of his will, but his faith in the gospel of the remission of sins.
When we love someone, and if that love is based on our wills, it can falter when we weaken. But if that love depended on the strength of God's love, then it would last forever. The Love of God, namely, the abundant atonement for all our sins, the salvation of the water of the baptism of Jesus and the Spirit, is like that.
Our faith in the gospel of the remission of sins must become the foundation for our love and works for the Lord. If we loved Him only with our wills, we would stumble tomorrow and end up hating ourselves for our iniquities. However, Jesus washed away all our sins: original sin, our daily sins of the past, the sins of today and tomorrow, and all the sins throughout our whole lives. He has not left anyone out of His salvation.
All this is true. If our love and faiths depended on our wills and resolutions, we would fail in our faiths. But because our love and faiths depend on the gospel of remission Jesus has given us, we are already God's children, the righteous. Since we believe in the salvation of the water and the Spirit, we are without sin.
Due to the fact that our salvation came, not from the form of godliness in ourselves, but from the love of God and His law of true salvation by the remission of our sins, we are righteous no matter how incomplete or weak we are in life. We will enter the Kingdom of Heaven and praise God through all eternity. Do you believe this?
1 John 4:10 states, "In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins." Jesus saved us with the water and the Spirit, so we should have faith in the gospel of remission, the baptism of Jesus and His blood.
If God hadn't saved us with the gospel of the remission of sins, we could not have been saved, no matter how fervently we believed. But Jesus washed away all the sins we commit in our hearts and with our flesh.
In order for us to become righteous, we must be certain of our salvations through faith in the words of the water and the Spirit, the gospel of atonement. The gospel of the remission of all the sins of the world is composed of the baptism of Jesus and His blood. The gospel of remission is the content of the true faith, the true foundation of salvation, and the key to enter the Kingdom of God.