Consider the kind of extravagant love the Father has lavished on us—
He calls us children of God! It’s true; we are His beloved children.
And in the same way the world didn’t recognize Him,
the world does not recognize us either.
My loved ones, we have been adopted into God’s family;
and we are officially His children now.
The full picture of our destiny is not yet clear,
but we know this much: when Jesus appears,
we will be like Him because we will see Him just as He is.
1 John 3:1-2 The Voice
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We must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us –
through gritted teeth – as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do.
Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being,
the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it.
The fondness, the endearment,
the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures
is the natural outflow of what he is to the core –
which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word “love”.
Dallas Wiilard