Accepting God’s love comes pretty easy for us. Unconditional forgiveness for our past sins and being considered a child of God despite them is the most generous gift ever. I had a friend who got saved about every Sunday of the seventh grade. He loved accepting the forgiveness.

Embracing God’s love asks us to know the Father, adopt His ways and seek His righteousness. This is a little tougher. We have to turn away from our sins and walk with Him, His way. It’s so easy to see this part as some kind of repayment, like having to give your aunt a kiss for the Christmas gift she got you. Even though you liked it, if you have to pay her back it wasn’t really a gift, was it?

Embodying it is the ultimate step. We are called not only to stop sinning, but to be like Jesus. Wait, that means giving out grace. We didn’t want to forgive others. We just wanted to go to Heaven. Now it’s just starting to feel like a really divine pay it forward project.

But embracing the love of God is the second gift we get from salvation. To stop at the forgiveness part is like getting a set of keys for Christmas and ignoring the new car parked outside. It allows us to feel an ongoing love like we’ve never felt and want to become more like its source. It gives us the love for others to want to share it. And that becomes its own gift, the fuel for the car that shows us why we were even given the set of keys to begin with.

So many things about God are counterintuitive to us, because we are not like Him. He doesn’t call us to be like Him because He’s selfish and petty. He calls us to be like Him because He is good, and He wants us to get to experience what that feels like. A little more each day, until it is eternal. That’s the gift.

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