How Can God Love Me So?
posted by Navigators on December 21st, 2024 in Gospel | Jesus | Person of God | Prayer
By Lindsey Swarzentruber
I want to try to tell you some of who God has revealed Himself to be this year.
There have been three significant stressors in my life this year which have all led me to various ends of my strength. I have been mentally exhausted with no other ideas, no backup plans and no answers. I have relationally had nothing left to give, no ability to empathize, no strength to muster a smile, and no desire to interact. I have been physically helpless, unable to respond to treatment and broken despite all of my research and efforts. My utter ineptitude in each of these areas has been indubitably obvious to me.
Cry to the Lord. Photo: Fa Barboza (Unsplash)
Yet, utterly unable to turn anywhere else, “[i]n my trouble I cried to the Lord, and He answered me” (Ps 120:1). He used all three ongoing circumstances that confronted me as overwhelmingly unconquerable to meet me with peace, rest, strength and healing in ways that could only have come from Him, and in each instance I felt shocked, humbled and loved.
“How can He love me so? – He is so good!”
“Would He really answer that prayer for me?”
“He tenderly gave exactly what I needed in my weakness!”
These stark manifestations of His love to me were all the more shocking not because I have had trouble believing that He actually loves me but because I have always believed that He has! I cannot think of any time in my life where I have not been unwaveringly convinced of His love for me. In my darkest sins and deepest griefs I have always been assured of this. “So why”, I wondered, “would He go to such lengths to show me what I already believe?”
“You don’t have to do this – I would still love You! I know that You love me and I was not doubting Your goodness!” was part of my grateful prayers to His answers. I did not think that I needed to convince Him of what was in my heart, but I was overcome with how intentionally He was revealing Himself to me. It was so like Jesus in the way that He interacted with those He healed while with us as a man and how He never just addressed their earthly troubles without speaking to their soul. Yet, He had already spoken to my soul and now He was going back to address my earthly troubles! “He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him over for us all, how will He not also with Him freely give us all things?” (Rom 8:32). The truth of His sacrifice in Jesus certainly gives hope for His help in this life, but why? Why when I already “know” the depth of His love because of Jesus?
I think that it is because “He Himself knows our frame; He is mindful that we are but dust” (Ps103:13-14). It works both ways: so many of Jesus’ followers became such because of how He showed His love to them in their earthly trials, but His love is so great that He does not stop there; He continues to reveal His love to us at increasingly deeper levels by working in our earthly trials and by answering our prayers to show us that “the Father Himself loves [us]” (Jn 16:23-27). When we get this, we begin to see how to abide in His love, just as Jesus did, so that we can share the same full joy that Jesus had – knowing the Father’s love (Jn 15:9-11).
It is not in the answers themselves but in what His answering teaches me about His love for me that makes my heart say in response, “because Your lovingkindness is better than life, my lips will praise You. So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands in Your name. My soul is satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth offers praises with joyful lips” (Ps 63:3-5).
Lindsey and her husband, Levi, live in Canberra, where they work with students at the Australian National University. To find out more about them and their ministry, visit: navigators.org.au/staff/swartzentruberll/