God’s Love

“If you love me, why are you treating me this way?  Wouldn’t love treat me better than this?”

That was my heart’s cry to God in the middle of the night on a cold basement floor in Ambridge, Pennsylvania in 1997. I was in my first year of seminary and life looked bleak. My father had recently died. We had moved from the South to the North and were experiencing both culture shock and seasonal affective disorder.  We had to relocate 2 more times in a span of four months due to terrible and unsafe housing situations — and that with a 3 year old and a very pregnant wife. Our last move came as the result of a plumbing issue that caused our basement to back up with all the sanitation waste from the houses on the hill above us.  The wretched filth destroyed all of our family pictures and important mementos.   The timing of the last move came just days before Christmas – we could barely celebrate due to boxes and exhaustion.  By January it was utterly bleak.  We had 15 days straight of ice and snow; and not the pretty, serene kind you see on postcards and movies. This was infused with the pollution of steel country and had a greyish black look to it.   At three in the morning I was up and in my study in the dark, cold basement. My heart boiled over at that point.

I wept before the Lord. I was confused and disappointed.  I had left my lucrative and rising career to serve God with my life. I had removed my young family from all that was known and safe to us and jumped on what felt like “Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.” I was missing my father, whom I had led to faith in Christ not long before his death.  It seemed as though I had just gotten him back and he was taken away from me again. And perhaps the worst part of it, I was spiritually empty.  I had come to a community of faith where people were joyfully loving and serving God, yet to me, the experience was as dry as  dust in my mouth.

I cried out to God, “If you love me, why are you treating me this way?  Wouldn’t love treat me better than this?” As I lay on the floor splayed out before the Lord I had a vision.  It was of the cross of Jesus Christ.  It wasn’t the pretty bronze cross that we process behind as we enter church. It was the bloody, cruel instrument of torturing death.  I saw the body of the Lord in his brokenness and pain. I felt the loneliness of Jesus that came from his friends’ betrayal and abandonment. I sensed the derision and scorn of the religious elite. I saw the anguish on his face as His Father looked away from him as the sin of the world, as my sin, was placed upon him. It nearly broke me.  And then I heard the Lord speak to my heart. He said, “On that day in space and time my love for you was forever demonstrated and sealed.”

And I had the answer.  God’s love is not dependent upon anything but himself.  God’s love for us is not proved nor disproved by the outward circumstances in life.  God’s love is not conditioned by our behavior.  God loves because God loves us. As the Apostle John tells us, “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins,” (1 John 4:9-10).

No matter what you are experiencing today, whether good times or hardship, know this: God loves you and has demonstrated his love decisively in the cross of Jesus Christ.  He has done absolutely everything necessary to bring you to himself.  Let the cross be your guide today.  Keep it before your eyes and close to your heart. Meditate on its beauty and power and embrace the love of God for you.