One of the songs we sang in Sunday School went, “Jesus loves me, this I know/’cause the Bible tells me so.” Simple as it is, nothing’s more truthful. And His love isn’t temporary or fickle. Through the prophet, the Lord told His chosen, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). The word everlasting indicates God’s love for us had no beginning, is always present, and has no end.
That’s absolutely amazing. Especially to a habitual sinner like myself who often doubts he’s numbered among God’s elect. Why? Because I’m so aware of how unrighteously I act. Ian Hamilton wrote, “There are times when remaining sin seems to rule over us, although its rule has been decisively broken via our union with Christ in His death and resurrection.” I tend to overlook, concerning believers, that Jesus declared: “No one will snatch them from my hand” (John 10:28).
God’s everlasting love is the foundation of the gospel we’ve been commissioned to spread across the globe. The Scriptures exclaim, “See what sort of love the Father has given to us: that we should be called God’s children – and indeed we are!” (1 John 3:1). God’s love is our immovable anchor. I’m not implying it’ll prevent storms from violently rocking our boat. It won’t. Rather, His love’s the anchor that keeps those storms from causing us to drift away from Him. As Paul taught, there’s no force disruptive enough to “separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39).
I’m comforted knowing I’m not alone in sometimes judging myself unworthy of God’s love. Henri Nouwen testified, “I knew I was broken. I knew I was a sinner. I knew I continually disappointed God, but I could never accept that part of me. It was a part of me that embarrassed me. I continually felt the need to apologize, to run from my weaknesses, to deny who I was and concentrate on what I should be.”
But Henri then concluded, “I came to see it was in my brokenness, in my powerlessness, in my weakness that Jesus was made strong. It was in the acceptance of my lack of faith that God could give me faith. It was in the embracing of my brokenness I could identify with others’ brokenness. It was my role to identify with others’ pain, not relieve it. Ministry was sharing, not dominating; understanding, not theologizing; caring, not fixing.”
Honestly, I find God’s everlasting love for sinners like me downright scandalous. Yet that’s what it’s always been. One can’t read through Kings and Chronicles and not become dismayed over Israel’s steady decline that reached rock bottom during the reign of Manasseh, an immoral monster of a tyrant who even let babies be cruelly sacrificed to idols. He was, by any measure, the worst of Judah’s horrible kings. God justly had him arrested by the occupying Assyrian army and hauled away. “They seized Manasseh, put hooks in his nose, bound him with bronze chains, and carried him away to Babylon” (2 Chronicles 33:11).
If anyone was undeserving of God’s love it’d be Manasseh, right? But God is incredibly gracious. “In his pain Manasseh asked the LORD his God for mercy and truly humbled himself before the God of his ancestors. When he prayed to the LORD, the LORD responded to him and answered favorably his cry for mercy. The LORD brought him back to Jerusalem to his kingdom. Then Manasseh realized that the LORD is the true God” (vv.12-13).
Nobody would accuse God of unfairness if He’d let Manasseh rot in prison. I dare say that’s what most of us would’ve sentenced him to suffer. Yet God’s forgiveness knows no bounds. His love confounds us and assures us at the same time. It also raises the question, “Who are we to withhold love from those we deem beneath us?” Jesus commands us to love everyone. No exceptions. Hamilton opined, “It’s one thing to have a theology of grace and another to live grace.”
We mustn’t abuse God’s grace. Too many Christians, myself included, are prone to let it serve as a legitimate excuse for letting our flesh have its iniquitous way. Paul, aware of this heretical reasoning, wrote, “What shall we say then? Are we to remain in sin so that grace may increase? Absolutely not! How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (Romans 6:1-2).
As Voddie Baucham likes to say, our response to those verses should be either an “amen” or an “ouch!” I must confess to uttering the latter. If I think I’m less sinful than, say, king Manasseh, I’m badly mistaken. By the same token, if I consider myself less deserving of God’s amazing love than my pastor I’m wrong on that count, too. Jesus loves me. This I know.
Brennan Manning wrote, “At every moment of our existence God offers us this good news. Sadly, many of us continue to cultivate such an artificial identity that the liberating truth of our belovedness fails to break through. We huff and puff to impress God, scramble for Brownie points, thrash about trying to fix ourselves, and live the gospel in such a joyless fashion that it has little appeal to nominal Christians and unbelievers searching for truth.”
Frederick Buechner commented, “Repent and believe in the gospel, Jesus says. Turn around and believe that the good news that we’re loved is better than we ever dared hope, and that to believe in that good news, to live out of it and towards it, to be in love with that good news, is of all glad things in this world the gladdest thing of all!”
Buechner mentioned repentance. Never forget that repentance, like faith, is a gift from God. Spurgeon preached, “He who’s gone into His glory, raised into all the splendor and majesty of God, has abundant ways of working repentance in those to whom He grants forgiveness. He’s even now waiting to give repentance to you. Ask Him for it at once.”
Even Christians Get the Blues 