In my last blog post, I talked about battling anxiety. As I had mentioned, the battle has seemed more intense in the last 3 months or so. The voices of Doubt, Accusation, Fear, Distrust and Insecurity have become The Hum of Anxiety that plays in my head on a loop.
Also, after praying, I realized that The Hum was storytelling. I was telling myself stories about the love of my husband, my family and my friends. Really just not believing they could possibly love me, or if they did, it wouldn’t last. All untrue, but invasive no less.
Over the years, I had also convinced myself that God didn’t love me. Not in the sense that He hated me, but in the sense that there was no intention behind it. He loved me because He HAS to love me. It felt nebulous, and unremarkable. I just happened to fall into the net of who God loves.
Years of this. Years of sitting in a church and believing this. Years of listening to pastors and believing this. Years of never really trusting God because I couldn’t trust His love as something reliable and real. I never developed my relationship with Him because it didn’t seem all that necessary with someone who only loved me because he HAD to.
I spent a lot of years robbed of getting to know Him better. My relationship with Him was casual and being a Christian was something I did because I thought it was what I HAD to do. Kind of tit for tat with God. If Your love for me is casual, right back at ya!
But I was wrong. His love is never casual and never by chance.
Maybe we don’t get taught very well about God’s love. I think that we have spent a long time removing the mystical aspect of His love from the equation. There is something mysterious and beautiful about being loved as a part of a large humanity, yet loved specifically for who we are.
But it’s true.
We have told ourselves and others stories about His Love that are false, but here are the stories that HE tells us. The true stories.
You can’t earn it. It’s not possible to earn something which is already ours. When Jesus died on the cross it was for every person that God loved (John 3:16). Even us, in the future. We received the love of God through Him sacrificing His son before we were even born. Before our ability to do the right things and say the right things. It was ours. We are also told in Ephesians 2:4-5 and Romans 5:8, that because of His great love for us in the midst of our sinning, He still made the offer of coming alive in Jesus Christ. So even while we are dead in our deeds, He still loved us to provide a path to life through Christ.
God’s love is BIG! As I was researching for this post, I saw the word agape used quite a bit. It is one of the Greek words for love. It means a charitable love or even a benevolent love. But if you drill down a bit, it also is a word used for love feasts. Isn’t that fun?! I would like to think of God’s love as a feast. We are always invited to sit, eat our fill and take some with us to share with people who are missing out. I chuckle thinking about God sending us home with bowls and plates to share with neighbors just so we can say “this is just a sample, you really need to get it straight from the table. Anytime you want to feast, the table is set!” I would like to think that God’s love is so big, we can’t help but share. But… we can only do that if we are sitting at the table.
His love is SPECIFIC. It’s so hard to wrap my head around this concept. There are 7.8 billion people on earth at this moment. Who knows how many people have inhabited the earth to this point. SO many! God loves and LOVED all of them. That in and of itself is amazing. But we can also count on the specificity of His love. In Luke 12:6 Jesus says that God knows all the sparrows. All of them! I have barn swallows that fly around my house and I have no idea if they are same ones from yesterday or if they are new. I don’t have that capacity. But God knows. Then Jesus goes on to tell us that the hairs on our head are numbered by God. How can He not know and love us specifically when he has the hairs on our head numbered? It wouldn’t make sense, would it?
Aren’t these three truths about God’s love so relieving, life giving and uplifting? His love is ours, we can’t and don’t need to earn it. His love is BIG and we can feast on it and invite others to the table. Finally, His love is specific to me, to you, to your friend, everyone!
This is The Love Story that we can believe.