Do you remember the scene in The Little Mermaid where Ariel plucks the petals off the flower one by one, imaging Prince Eric in her mind: "He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not... He loves me!" Even now, 25 years later, I can hear her voice crescendo with hope when she stops on, "He loves me!"
I heard a message recently by one of our pastors' wives on Romans 8:31-39 where she reflected on our tendency to do this very same thing with the Lord. When good things are happening: He loves me. When we are faced with trials: He loves me not.
But this is not how our great God operates. In all things, God loves us. When we place our faith in Christ, we surrender to and recognize this great love: "For God so LOVED the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).
The good news is this: "If God is for us, who can be against us?" God uses our trials to transform us, and we must not mistake this for His absence or His unwillingness to love us.
So I thank God today that my assurance rests in Him and not in me, that even in the desert I am loved, that I don't have to pick the petals off the flower: He loves me; He loves me not.
He loves me.
Nothing--no nothing--can separate us from the love of Christ!
31 What, then, shall we say in response to these things? If God is for us,who can be against us? 32 He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things? 33 Who will bring any charge against those whom God has chosen? It is God who justifies. 34 Who then is the one who condemns?No one. Christ Jesus who died—more than that, who was raised to life—is at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us. 35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? 36 As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”[a]
37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[b] neither the present nor the future, nor any powers,39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 8:31-39