Keeping Christ central
A weekly series from HOPE’s director of spiritual integration
In a recent staff devotions, I asked our team a simple question: “How many of you have thought sometime today, ‘God really loves me’?”
Everyone in the room had John 3:16 memorized, knew other verses about God’s immeasurable love, and could chime in on “Jesus Loves Me” in the time it takes to say flannelgraph. So every hand shot up, right? In actuality, four hands out of 30 went up. Only four.
And this isn’t unique to HOPE. In asking this question to dozens of followers of Jesus, I hear the same thing:
I just don’t think much about God’s love for me on a daily basis, and if I’m honest, I struggle to believe it.
This struggle isn’t usually due to lack of information. We know God’s love led to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. But our conviction that God’s love secures our salvation doesn’t always translate into confidence that He really wants us near Him today. It’s like we are playing the old game of “He loves me”—pull off a petal—“He loves me not”—pull another one, laughing at our foolishness even as we hope for some feeling of certainty.
