Welcome to the exploration part of this blog! In this section I invite you to read along and seek answers to some difficult questions.
In my post Does God Care?, readers like you are challenged to explore and pinpoint what it is they believe especially as it relates to God and His written Word. This is so important to work through, because life can sometimes be tough! Being firmly grounded in faith will help you find peace…oh, and going through that discovery process will undoubtedly answer the question, “Does God care?”
Dear friend, if you are in a struggle or simply question God’s love for you, I want to offer you hope!
As far as this blog is concerned, hope will always be embodied in the Person of Jesus Christ and the Word of God will always be the authoritative source used to share that hope with you (John 1:1).
It is through this Hope that you can stand tall, live without fear, and live a life full of laughter and peace. I’m not saying you won’t live a life full of stinky circumstances. I’m saying you can have all of those things in spite of stinky circumstances!
I can tell you how wonderful Hope is, but until you dig into His word and experience Him for yourself, you won’t fully know what I am talking about.
For example, I went to Asia once and found myself trying to explain to a group of women how delicious oooey-gooey S’mores are…a slightly browned marshmallow pulled straight off the campfire stick, rested on a melted slab of milk chocolate, and sandwiched between two crispy graham crackers. If you’re smiling you know what I’m talking about because you’ve experienced it!
But with these ladies in Asia there was no comprehension! So..what did we do? We had S’mores on the beach! Ahhhh….then there was the light, and you could even see it in their eyes! Finally, they experienced what I had been trying to tell them. How much more so, then, does experience apply when it comes to personally tasting the goodness of Christ?!
I can tell you God cares, because He’s shown me. But you need to know that God cares for you because He’s shown you.
Similarly, you need to know how much God loves you… and that is also going to come from your experiencing and knowing Him.
How do you do that?
- Pray and ask Him to teach you and show Himself to you.
- Read His Word! If you are not a reader, push past that little hiccup and do it anyways. I promise you that He will reveal more and more of Himself to you as you honestly seek to know Him.
- Repeat!
Yes, that was a short and simple list, but the process works. Trust it.
Do not lose the forest for the trees. Hold on to the basic truths that God does care for you, and even better, that He does love you. Even if you don’t believe it at the moment, keep seeking Him and He will prove to you otherwise!
The apostle Paul knew these things. It’s because he knew firsthand what it was like to struggle! He suffered a lot for his decision to follow Christ, but God showed Himself in a mighty way to Paul. Through trusting Him, Paul was used in a significant way to spread the good news of Christ and ultimately write much of the New Testament.
In the passage Romans 8:31-39, Paul walks us through what he had personally learned about the love of God.
1. No one can overpower God. **verse 31 What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?
2. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for everyone, including you! **v32 He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?
3. God is the ultimate judge. **v33 Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies.
4. Jesus reconciles believers to holy God and prays for them. **v34 Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.
5. Nothing can stop the love of Christ. **v35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
6. Believers will face struggle or persecution. **v36 As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.”
7. God gives strength and victory. **v37 Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
8. Nothing can stop the love of God. **v38-39 For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Who can separate you from the love of God through Christ Jesus? No one! Paul was persuaded. Are you? If you’re not there yet, keep seeking.
Christ is the ultimate prize, hope, and promise given to the Christian believer. He is God’s ultimate display of love.
“We love Him because He first loved us.” 1 John 4:19
In His inseparable love,
ENERGIZED BY FAITH 