Bask in His Love.

Laying the foundation.

Romans 8:31-39

“What shall we say about such wonderful things as these? If God is for us, who can ever be against us? Since he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us all, won’t he also give us everything else? Who dares accuse us whom God has chosen for his own? No one—for God himself has given us right standing with himself. Who then will condemn us? No one—for Christ Jesus died for us and was raised to life for us, and he is sitting in the place of honor at God’s right hand, pleading for us.

Can anything ever separate us from Christ’s love? Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death? (As the Scriptures say, “For your sake we are killed every day; we are being slaughtered like sheep.”) No, despite all these things, overwhelming victory is ours through Christ, who loved us.

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord”.

His great and unexplainable love

Have you ever stopped to think how much God loves you? I don’t fully understand God’s love, mainly because it makes no logical sense to me. How can God who knows me so well, who knows my inner thoughts, those secret things that I think that no one ever gets to know about, the same God who sees my heart for what it is and not what I paint it to be, the God who knows me inside and out-how can He love me? The me that even I sometimes try to hide from because that chick is cray! I know what you are thinking, “Psycho!” Lol. Its ok, its nothing that crazy but its craziness all the same and we all have a bit of it inside of us but we hide it well. Just because we are good at hiding it from others around us does not mean that God does not see it. Yet, He chooses to love us all the same. How He does it, I don’t know but I am thankful that He already predetermined before I was born that He would love me.

God loves us. He loves us with all that baggage from our pasts, with all the things we carry in our hearts, with all the craziness in our thoughts, He loves us completely. See, God’s love does not need to make sense to us. We just need to know that He loves us and we need to accept that. He loves us with our flaws and all. He knows we are not perfect because He knows that only He is perfect and even though we are made in His image, we are not God so we can never be perfect and He gets that. That is why He gave us Jesus so that instead of us trying to be perfect, we stand in His perfection instead and we can rightfully claim His perfection as our own. We are holy and righteous before God because Jesus took our place that we might take His, (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). Now that is love.

He did not create us so we spend our days worrying that we are not perfect or trying so hard to get everything right, He created us so we could bask in His love. We were made from Love and for Love. We were created for Him to lavish His affections on us. 

If only we could see ourselves the way God sees us: flawless, without fault, without blemish, justified and righteous, then maybe we could accept His love. But we see ourselves through tainted eyes and all we see is our faults but He sees us through eyes of love and He sees us clothed in robes of white. Covered in His Son’s righteousness. All He wants to do is to cover us with His love that we may get to know Him and have relationship with Him.

I love the part of our verses in Romans 8 that says not even angels nor demons can separate us from God’s love. I used to wonder why angels were put in that equation, was it for a complete picture or it was to help us understand how much God really loves us? I think it was for the latter reason that angels were included. God is the God of angel armies, (Jeremiah 16:9MSG). The angels go to war for God. That means sometimes God’s love for us can be so far-fetched and crazy that His angel armies may think, “No way, this is not a battle worth fighting”, but God will not allow anything to stand in the way of His love for you and I.

Imagine what it must have been like in heaven as the angels stood back and watched God crucified on the cross. They could have jumped in at any moment and rescued Jesus but the Father had a plan and no one, not even His angels were going to get in the way of that elaborate plan to save the lives of His dear children. What a blessing it is to be a child of God!

The crux of it all

I want you to be mindful of one thing- have your mind full of this: God knows your future as well as your past and right now in this moment, He loves you completely. That means if you drop the ball tomorrow, the same God who loves you today will still love you tomorrow. If you do something crazy ten years from now, the same God who loves you now will still love you then. That is one thing I love about God, He does not change, He is constant. We shift and change because we think when we do something wrong, God loves us less. He knew you would do that long before you knew you would do that so don’t worry, He still loves you.

Ask for His forgiveness and move on because He already has. Accept His love for you. He will never stop loving you. Every day, choose to lean into His love and just receive it for yourself. There is freedom and peace that comes from knowing that God is not going anywhere, He loves you and He is here to stay (see Hebrews 13:5).

I imagine God’s love to be like the sunshine, we all see it but not all of us bask in it. Take some time to just bask in His love. To savor His love. To taste and see that He is good, (see Psalms 34:8). The apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:1-13 paints us a picture on love. I like to take verses 4-8 and replace the word “Love” with “God” because God is love, (see 1 James 4:8) so it reads,

God is patient,

God is kind,

He is not jealous;

He does not brag and is not arrogant,

He does not act unbecomingly;

He does not seek His own,

He is not provoked,

He does not take into account a wrong suffered,

He does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;

He bears all things,

He believes all things,

He hopes all things,

He endures all things.

God never fails.

This is the God who loves us. He is gentle, merciful and kind. Jonah said this about God in Jonah 4:2, “I knew that you are a merciful and compassionate God, slow to get angry and filled with unfailing love. You are eager to turn back from destroying people”. God loves us and it is His eternal hope to bring us to Him, to draw us to Himself that we may all savour His love. Enjoy His love. Experience His love. Oh, what joy it is to live life knowing that you are forever loved! God loves us. He loves you, dearly and completely.

Have a blessed week.