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How Do You Know if God Loves You?
August 2007
How do you know what God thinks about you? How do you know if He's smiling or frowning? How do you know if God hates you or loves you?
Do you look around at your circumstances? If this are going well (the weather is nice, my health is good, there is peace in my family) then God must be pleased with me. On the other hand, if things are going poorly (the weather is nasty, I'm sick or dying, my family is fighting, there's not enough money, or whatever else has gone wrong) then God must hate me, or at least be mad at me. If we look at our circumstances to determine how the Lord feels about us, then we will always be unsure, uncertain, standing on shifting ground.
How do you know, then, what the Lord thinks of you? Do you consider your feelings? If I feel close to God then He must be happy with me, and if, on the other hand, I feel far from God, he must be angry. If we use our feelings to determine how God considers us, then, again, we will always be unsure, uncertain.
Dear saints, are God's feelings toward us as changing as our circumstances or as fickle as our feelings? No. These are all the devil's traps. The devil wants us to be unsure of God's love and uncertain of the Lord's compassion and mercy. The devil tempts us to think and say things like, “If God really loved me then He wouldn't allow this or He would give that...” But the Lord wants us to be sure about His great love for us.
How do we know if God loves us? In the midst of the changing circumstances and feelings in this life, we look to the unchanging truth of Jesus' cross. There we know, are certain, that God is love and that He loves us. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” In the giving of the Son unto death we have an immovable monument of the Father's love. With our eyes fixed on the cross we can be absolutely sure, without any doubt, that God loves us.
So the next time the devil tempts us to think that God is far away, or that He doesn't care, or that the misery that you're going through means that God doesn't love you, send him packing with the certainty of faith which clings to Jesus' cross. In life and in death we know that we belong to the Lord Jesus, because He gave Himself for us on His cross. Amen.
The Lord's Blessings in Christ,
Pastor Wolfmueller
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Romans 8:31-39 If God is for us, who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? 33 Who shall bring any charge against God's elect? It is God who justifies. 34 Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died--more than that, who was raised--who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written, "For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered." 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.