God Loves You!
I know we Christians say this all the time and wear it on our t-shirts, but when you receive the truth of that, it changes your life. The God who made the entire universe, genuinely loves you. The God who holds every atom together, made you and said you were his favorite creation. The God who is in control of everything, is taking care of you and wants to bless you.
Sometime a few weeks ago, God revealed to me that I don’t really know how to receive His love. I consciously know he loves me and I trust the Bible that says He loves me, but I don’t know how to truly receive it — how to lavish in it and live like it and appreciate it.
After realizing that, I had no idea what I was supposed to do to change that. I didn’t know how to make myself understand something that I didn’t understand. However, after spending some time talking with God about it, I was able to move forward with at least a little direction and a few goals.
A few days after that, we took a week’s break for something called an awakening, which is a time for prayer, worship, and teachings. One of the first teachings was about God’s love. The speaker started her message by telling us to close our eyes and imagine the infinite vastness of outer space. Then, she walked us through zooming in a layer at a time. We imagined The Milky Way with its billions lions of stars, we imagined our solar system with its 8 planets orbiting the sun, we imagined the earth with 8 billion people on it, and finally we imagined ourselves. We were meant to be focusing on how big God is and how vast His creation is. While she was talking, I couldn’t help but realize how little I understand about God’s power and intentionality. It never fails to blow my mind that God created EVERYTHING and He still KNOWS me so deeply.
In that moment, the realization extended even deeper than it had before. Why do I think that amount of detail wouldn’t extend one level deeper to things that may sometimes seem insignificant to us? We can write something off as normal or ‘coincidental’, but God genuinely cares about every little thing. He cares about the tiny little speck in the universe that is me and His care is far beyond what I can grasp. He cares enough to put that butterfly in my path. He cares enough to make my data work for an extra minute. He cares enough to place the precious, sleepy baby at ministry on my lap. He’s planning every piece of our paths. His intricacy never ends.
During that week, I also started reading the Psalms. I was in search of a deeper understanding of God’s love, so next to every verse that showed me that God loves me, I wrote ‘You love me”. At first, the main verses that stuck out to me were ones that said He loved me outright or ones about Him saving me. However, as I went on, I started to see God’s love for me in so many more ways.
Psalm 18:16 says, “He reached down from on high and took hold of me; he drew me out of deep waters.” And verse 19 says, “He brought me out into a spacious place; he rescued me because He delights in me.”
These verses encapsulate many others. In reading the Psalms, these themes are repeated over and over. God is our rescuer, our safety, our refuge, our defender, our salvation. He blesses us with so much. He gives good gifts and He gives them in abundance. We don’t deserve it. We didn’t earn any of it. We’re so lost without Jesus, but He saves us because He loves us. He takes care of us because He loves us. He literally Is Love.
Everything God does is because He loves us.
