Week 14 // 3 Month Review // Creator, Holy, Love
In this devotion we are looking at different natures, qualities of God. Although we are separating these qualities to study and explore them, it is crucial to remember that God is complete and undivided. Each aspect of God is always present and always at work. They cannot be separated from each other as he breathes, moves, and speaks.
This week is purposefully set aside to let the last 12 weeks digest, while considering how these three characteristics of God—Creator, Holy, and Love—work, interlock together. To help get you started, consider these questions: How does Creator God reveal his holy and loving nature? In what ways is love the driving force in creation? Why is holiness a crucial part of our redemption and discipleship?
Following is a review of each nature from the past 12 weeks. As you consider the daily scriptures for this week (pulled from previous weeks), read them as if there were three filters in place: Creator, Holy, Love. Using the summary below and anything the Lord impressed on your heart during the past 12 weeks, look for traces of the Creator God, Holiness, and Love within each passage.
Summary of Weeks 1 – 13
Creator
- God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) have always existed, and live in perfect community of sacrificial and creative love. God’s original intent for creation was relationship with us. All of nature reveals his glory, and it provides humanity with place to live in community with God.
- When humanity broke relationship with God, he revealed (it’s always existed) a way back to him. Jesus became one of us (fashioned together, created, in Mary’s womb) in order to redeem us from sin through his life, death, and resurrection.
- We become new creations through Jesus.
- God is making all things new. There will be a new heaven and new earth.
Holy
- God is uncommon. God is not only uncommon, there is nothing like him.
- Jesus lived a holy life on earth even though he was human.
- The Holy Spirit is unlike any other spirit because he testifies of Jesus’ lordship.
- God’s holiness is also revealed through us. We are called to be holy as he is holy.
Love
- The first mention of love in the Bible was between God, Abraham, and Isaac in shadow of God’s love for us.
- His love is steadfast, never ending, eternal. It’s not just love; it is steadfast love.
- His love changes the hardest of hearts. Paul was a Christian-murdering Pharisee until he had an encounter with God’s love. It changes the rude to kind, the faithless to enduring, the hopeless to believers, the prideful to gentle.
- His love is perfect and will drive out fear that keeps us from know him, loving him, and loving others.
Daily Scriptures
Day One
Psalm139:13-18 For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance, in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. How precious to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them! If I would count them, they are more than the sand. I awake, and I am still with you.
Day Two
Hebrews 4:14-16
Since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Day Three
Ephesians 3:16-19
…that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Day Four
Colossians 1:19-23 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him, if indeed you continue in the faith, stable and steadfast, not shifting from the hope of the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed in all creation…
Day Five
1 John 4:7-12
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we lave loved god but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.
Day Six
Yet among the mature we do impart wisdom, although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”— these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. 1 Corinthians 2:1-10
Day Seven
Selah
Brave Sparrow 