I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ. (Phil. 1:6)
One of the major difficulties we have with believing that God loves us is that we think he’s a lot like us.
We love starting over. We tell ourselves that what’s needed is a fresh start, and so we throw ourselves into new relationships and situations. We trade romantic partners, begin friendships, move into different neighborhoods, and give ourselves to new jobs with starry-eyed enthusiasm, certain that these relationships and settings will be better than what we’ve left behind.
Then reality settles in. Our new friends let us down. The neighborhood doesn’t feel as warm and welcoming as it once did. The new company has its own dysfunctional ways of doing things that pinch us in different ways. Everyone knows exactly what we mean when we sigh, “Yeah, the honeymoon is over.”
But then we start looking around all over again, wondering, “Is the grass over there less brown than it is here?”
We all do this. So it’s not surprising that we expect God to feel the same way toward us—“Surely at some point he has to realize the mistake he made getting involved with me and will decide he is ready to move on.” We mistake him for a Pollyannaish optimist who is hopelessly naïve and hasn’t yet had a strong enough dose of reality to turn him into a jaded cynic … like the rest of us. We look at the hard-heartedness and half-heartedness that we offer him and cannot imagine him—or anyone—hanging in with us, much less passionately loving us.
We get trapped because we make too much of ourselves and too little of him. We see the mess and failure of our lives as being too great for anything to reshape them. And we see the strength of his commitment to us as being too weak to match the self-destructiveness that we carry inside.
It’s time to give him more credit.
God is not surprised that your life doesn’t perfectly reflect his glory. But he does intend it to. Jesus did not die for the mere possibility that you might end up a little bit better than you used to be. He died to guarantee that one day you would be pure and perfect, just like him.
One thing stands out throughout Scripture: everything that God starts, he finishes. When he brought you into a relationship with himself, he first committed himself to finishing the work that he would begin in you (see Phil. 1:6). His commitment to you not only predates your commitment to him; it is the foundation upon which your commitment is built (see Eph. 1:4, 11–12).
Be confident then. One day you will love him just as fully and completely as he loves you.
THINK ABOUT IT: In your friendship with Christ, do you spend more time thinking about your relational weaknesses and failures or about his relational strengths?
THINK ABOUT IT: Jesus is much more committed to you than you are to the sin that keeps you from him.
NOW: Make a list, from Scripture and from your personal life, of all the ways that Jesus has shown how committed he is to you.
GOD LOVES US!!!
OUR GOD WILL NEVER STOP LOVING US!!!
PASTOR ANDRA HIGGINBOTHAM
EVERLASTING SALVATION CHURCH OF GOD MINISTRIES
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