Sweet on You
By Steve Bietz
Burke County
The phrase was immortalized by William Shakespeare who included it in
The Tragedy Of Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark. “Sweets To The Sweet.” In
February, we buy a lot of sweets for our sweeties. Someone might convey
that another person is “sweet on you.” Do we believe that God is sweet
on us?
The apostle Paul tells us that God’s character has been misunderstood
and misinterpreted since the beginning of the world. People knew something
about Him once, but they didn’t glorify Him as God. As a result, they “became
vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves
to be wise, they became fools and changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an
image made like a corruptible man, and to birds, and four footed-beasts, and creeping
things” (Romans 1:21-23).
It is possible for us, in our minds, to change God into something other than He really is, even if we don’t bow down to idols of wood and stone. If we don’t have the proper understanding of His character, then we’re worshiping a false God! Unless we know what God is really like, we won’t be able to reveal Him to the rest of the world! Jesus came to demonstrate to the world what the Father is really like.
One day Jesus and His disciples passed by a blind man (John 1:9). The disciples asked “Master, who sinned? this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?”
Their question was based on the common concept of God and evil. The people of
Christ’s day believed that disease and death were God’s arbitrary punishment
for wrongdoing, either by the sufferer himself or by his parents. Because of this,
the suffering person had the additional burden of being considered a great sinner.
Jesus corrected their error by explaining that sickness and pain are caused by Satan.
But one of the devil’s clever traps is to project his own attributes onto God and as a
result, millions of people through the centuries have blamed God for suffering, sickness,
and death.
But John 3:16 and 17 tell us that God loved the world so much that He sent His own Son to redeem us. He “sent not His Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through Him might be saved.” In other words, God is really, really sweet on us! That’s the gospel. That’s redemption!
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Steve Bietz is the pastor at Morganton Seventh Day Adventist Church. You can read more good Christian news from Pastor Steve Bietz HERE.
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Blue Ridge Christian News covers Burke County, McDowell County, Mitchell County, Yancey County, Madison County, in North Carolina, and Christian news from around the country.
