The Scope of God's Love Includes Sinners
The Good News of Great Joy with regard to Sin
That sinners are included in the scope of God's love upsets the saints. It always has and always will
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The sanctimonious are way more parsimonious with God's love than God is - preferring to be conservative with it than liberal. The serpent also raised the unworthiness argument in his bid to empty God's most sacred heart of his love for us. Jesus repudiated the unworthiness argument by emerging from the dead with his heart still full to the brim with love for the sinners who tortured and killed him
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Yet, the echoes of the unworthiness argument are still heard today because we cannot get our minds around the fact that God's love for sinners is unconditional. We still think that we must earn the gift of God's love. His love is given freely. There is nothing to earn. God is not conservative with his love for us. God is liberal with it.
Repentance
Why does God want us to repent? The God with the bloody wounds whom we tortured and killed offers us real food and drink . The impostors who pretend to be god offer us cotton candy. We cannot survive on a diet of cotton candy. It is in our best interest to avoid the cotton candy.
How can we recognize an impostor? An impostor does not have the bloody wounds. Our God earned his bloody wounds by loving us. His bloody wounds are the badges that remind us that his love for us survived the evil we did to him. Sanitize God - strip him of his bloody wounds - bowdlerize him of them and you distort the fair and accurate representation of himself that God gave to us in the narrative of salvation that passed from the Crucifixion, through his bloody wounds, to the Resurrection. Better no representation of him than a distorted and inaccurate representation .