Message: “Because of This Love, vol. 1: Receiving This Love” from Ross Stackhouse

There’s an adjective that gets used just one time in the entire New Testament section of the Bible. It’s found in 1 Peter 4:8. When you translate it from the original language, it means something like: intense or deep. 1 Peter 4:8 says, “Keep this deep/intense love among you because love covers a multitude of sins.” What is this intense love though? What is so different about this love that comes from God–the love that made everything exist? And have we received it? Have we lost it? Have we given up on it?

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From Series: "Because of This Love"

1 Peter 4:8 tells its readers "to keep this intense love among you." That adjective–translated here to “intense”–occurs only here. The verb that shares the same root means “to stretch” such as when Jesus stretches out his hand to heal. This is the love we’re trying to recall and recover in this series. From the beginning and even before the beginning, God’s character has been purely that of love and goodness. God’s drive to create life–from the big bang to the consciousness of humankind crowned with glory and grandeur (Psalm 8)–was out of an intense love and desire to extend love, power and glory to created things. But a hallmark feature of the world in which we live and our existence in it is that it is so easy to miss or forget God’s intense love. In this coming weeks, our goal is to reach into our souls, our experiences, our Scriptures, into God’s heart as revealed in Jesus to recover what we’ve lost: this love that covers practically everything (Eugene Peterson’s translation of 1 Peter 4:8).