My Valentine's Day blog for 2011

I want to wish everyone a happy Valentine's Day!  Some of you immediately receive that, but others are thinking, “I'm not in a romantic relationship right now, so what good is to me to be wished a happy Valentine's Day?”

The reason I am wishing everyone who reads this a happy Valentine's Day, whether you are in a romantic relationship or not, is because there is someone who loves you deeply: the God of all the universe.  He said in Jeremiah 31, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”  Make no mistake about it: God loves you.  He loves you with a love that will last forever!

I can conceive of two objections that may come to your mind when you read that God loves you.  First, you may think, “God can't love me.  Not after what I've done.  I have done so many selfish, sinful, ungodly things.  When He looks at me, He must think, ‘OK, this one isn't worth loving.’”

Let me assure you, I understand this one.  We are all tempted to think this at times.  We forget that the love that God has for us is not based on our performance.  Someone has said, “There is nothing that we can do to make God love us less, and there is nothing that we can do to make God love us more.”  In other words, His love for us is based on who we are, not on what we do.

A second objection that comes to my mind is, “If God loves me, why do I suffer so much?”  I acknowledge that some of you reading this may be going through the worst storm of your life, a storm that is absolutely overwhelming to you.

 

In the midst of that storm, I don’t want to minimize or deny your pain.  I don’t want to deliver a trite, simple answer.  Suffering is a big subject to cover.  In fact, sometimes I feel like I bite off more than I can chew with these blog topics.  For me to adequately address some of these issues would take a 4-5 page paper, not a few paragraphs.  Just know that I hurt with you as I think about the pain you may be going through.  I don’t dismiss it as trivial or unimportant.

So all that said, I believe it was Adrian Rogers who said that when you want to gauge God's love for you, don't look at your circumstances; look at the cross.  On the cross of Calvary, Jesus Christ willingly went to the cross to show us how much God loves us.  Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this than to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).  It's true, dear reader, God loves you.

Kevin Bauer

(Romans 5:8)