God loved you and picked you out…

God loved you and picked you out…   Romans 5.8-11; 1 Timothy 1.12

My mother was 45 years old when she gave birth to me – so yes, I was the caboose!  To say I was born to old school parents would be a major understatement … so, when at a young age I asked how I got here, my mom would say, ‘We found you under the rocks…’ Now that I think about it, that wasn’t the most auspicious of beginnings, was it?  ‘But I loved you the moment I saw you,’ she assured me.  As I grew older, I knew my mother loved and adored me from the moment she knew she was ‘expecting’.  (We couldn’t say pregnant—that was too brash)  It was the same for me – oh, how I loved each of my four children from the moment I knew he existed - that God and I were cooperating to bring a beautiful baby—my beautiful baby into the world!  Yes, I loved them before they were viable human beings.

Now, here’s the question—   WHEN do you think God started loving you?                                          Hmmm . . . that’s a head scratcher. 

Paul wrote that, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  That means that he didn’t wait until we cleaned up our act to love us, but that he loved us in our original state . . . hey, WAIT!  Paul is pointing to us as living human beings, so did God only start loving us once we were born and our consciences developed?  Or did he begin loving us before that?

Here’s my opinion:  God began loving us—all of us (humanity) and each of us (individually) — when he decided to create Adam and Eve— that is to say, even before we were ‘a gleam in his eye’.  Of course, he knew who and what we would be . . . but then he loved us into existence . . .             

Paul continues, ‘But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.   Now that we are set right with God by means of this sacrificial death, the consummate blood sacrifice, there is no longer a question of being at odds with God in any way. If, when we were at our worst, we were put on friendly terms with God by the sacrificial death of his Son, now that we're at our best, just think of how our lives will expand and deepen by means of his resurrection life! Now that we have actually received this amazing friendship with God, we are no longer content to simply say it in plodding prose. We sing and shout our praises to God through Jesus, the Messiah!’1

And whether we love him or not, he loves us.  ‘Doubt me?  Consider with me the Prodigal Son’s position – is he so different than you, than me?²  “Over and over again I have left home.  I have fled the hands of blessing and run off to faraway places searching for love!  Why should I leave the place where all I need to hear can be heard?  I realize that the true voice of love is a very soft and gentle voice speaking to me in the most hidden places of my being.  And . . . it is a voice that can only be heard by those who allow themselves to be touched.’³

And this was the description our Lord gave to illustrate the great love of the Father for us, his children.  Even when we spurn him, he yet loves us.  Amazing grace?  I should think so . . . and more.  Illogical.  Inequitable.

Still, so many think they have to get their lives in order and THEN, they will come to Christ … and then they will start going to church, and then they will enter into their faith . . . that is why I yet love the song I heard as a young girl being sung at a Billy Graham Crusade, 1971, Oakland, California.  The melody lifted the words higher in the coliseum, ‘Just as I am, and waiting not to rid my soul of one dark blot ... O Lamb of God, I come, I come …’

And then I remember Paul’s words, ‘while I was yet a sinner, Christ died for me.’ Before I had repented, before I had turned from my wicked ways, he loved me.  Yes, even before I was born, God indeed showed his love for me.

Christine

PastorWoman.com