The Safe Place of God’s Love

In a recent Sunday School class, Jeff Tyner taught on how God transforms people to make us more like Him. We learned that God begins this process by miraculously creating a new life inside of anyone who puts their faith in Jesus – by giving us new hearts with the desire and the power to love and obey Him. Here is how Jeff so beautifully and eloquently described the work of God’s spirit in changing us and the implications of this work for daily life:

God loves you! He chose you. That is why you are a Christian. It wasn’t your doing. It was His doing. When you were his enemy, he made you his friend. And he made you more than his friend; he made you his child. He adopted you. You were alone and without anyone in the universe to truly love you. He directed his love toward you and chose to make you his son or daughter. He has irrevocably written you into his will and made you an heir, sharing the inheritance with His firstborn, Jesus.

You were broken, disabled, and disfigured. You were unlovely. You were ugly. But He came and found you, picked you up, and took you home, lavishing you with kindness and everything eternally good you could ever hope for. Anyone else – if they knew as much about you as He knows about you – would have been sick to their stomach and walked away, rejected you and left you to die. But not Him! Knowing your ugliness, your sick secrets, and even your insane God-complex, he looked at all of it and didn’t flinch. He even smiled – and continues to smile – a tender, loving smile. No, as he studied every nook and cranny of your strangeness, ever fold of your deformity, every ugly, sinful bump and stain – He already knew them. How did he know them? He knew them because he had already carried every one of them to the cross of his love – the cross of your atonement.

The very birthmark of Adam that marked you as a deeply broken, totally stained, irreconcilable enemy of God, your loving Father has generously removed, paying for the operation out of his own inexhaustibly deep pockets. You see, Jesus has taken your stain to the cross and – holding it up to the awesome and terrible blast of God’s infinite, holy fury – He has destroyed it. No stain remains.

And he did this knowing that you would often reject Him and His love. Be honest – Since becoming his son or daughter, in spite of the loving tenderness and care he has lavished on you, you still mostly refuse to believe that He loves you and has good, kind intentions toward you. Other times, you take His love for granted and fail to see how amazing, and unwarranted it is. Sometimes you decide to believe he loves you only based on your current performance – that His love for you waxes and wanes with how you’re doing these days – in spite of His repeated, clear statements to you in scripture that this is absolutely not the case. Any other father would have His feelings hurt. But not this one. He continues to lavish you with loving, fatherly care. He. loves. you!

And in his great, sovereign love, He continues to work all things for your good. He loves you.

You are safe in His love.

In His sovereign, fatherly love, He has erased your shame. I’ll say it again – Jesus has erased your shame. He has erased the shame of sins done against you and to you – and by you. And that includes not only the shame you feel from your life before you were a Christian – it also includes the shame you feel about your present life. He has erased the shame you feel about your mistakes, about your embarrassing sinful thoughts, and about your mediocre performance as a Christian. Maybe you can muster the faith to believe that your sinful life before you were saved is forgiven, but you can’t escape the feeling that He must be disappointed in your B- or C+ as a Christian. He has erased the shame you presently feel! In his perfect life and death, Jesus meant to consume and has in fact consumed the stain of your shame – and you bear it no longer. So, as your loving father invites you to his table, he sees no ugly mark on you! He knows you, and He loves you.

You couldn’t be safer in His love. In the safety of His love, He has given you His Holy Spirit, His very living presence, to be with you and help you and to remind you of all of this and to keep it before you and to HELP YOU BELIEVE IT! And His Holy Spirit uses the truth and the commands of the Bible and the ministry (or failures) of His people (called the church) to shape you into his image.

Proverbs 27:6 says “Wounds from a friend can be trusted”. God is far more than your friend, and if He wounds you in the shaping process, you can trust those wounds because His purpose in shaping you is GOOD! His purpose in shaping you is to grow your capacity to experience, and to reflect, and to share the enjoyment of this glorious, loving Father. That is, to drink deeply of Who He is and What He’s done for you in saving you, and to pour out what you’ve experienced from Him to others in both words and actions, causing you and them to experience – both as giver and receiver – the same kind of love that all His adopted kids have received from God in Christ, and to put His glory on display.

So, having said all that, when God undertakes to shape and sanctify you… You couldn’t be in a better place!!!

And in this place, there is no need to self-justify or be defensive.

You are safe in His love.