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.