Recently God has been dealing with me on the issue of love—His love. You see, I don’t think any of us really truly understand the nature of God’s love, nor the enormity of it. We look at it in terms of the kind of love we know, human love (flawed, fickle, and conditional). I’ve come to believe that understanding, believing in and receiving God’s love is the answer to all of our problems. It is what we were created for: to love God and receive His love. It is the answer to depression, loneliness, self-worth, insecurities, fears, worries, doubt and a host of other human problems.
But how do we transfer knowing God’s love from our heads into our hearts where it counts? That’s the problem. Many people know about God’s love, but they’ve never experienced it for themselves. So they still worry and fret and get lonely and think they are worthless. How that must break God’s heart!
In my novel The Blue Enchantress, my heroine, Hope, finds herself standing on an auction block on an island in the Caribbean about to be sold as a slave to a local farmer. She has gotten herself into this horrific predicament by her own bad behavior. In other words, she deserves her fate for the things she has done. Yet, along comes the hero, Nathaniel, who has loved Hope from afar for a long time even though she has constantly rejected him.
Sound familiar? It did to me. We are all Hope at one time in our lives. We have all done bad things and deserve our fate: to be sold into slavery. And God, who has loved us from afar since before we were born—a God whom we often reject and from whom we turn away—sees our predicament, and His heart breaks. Like Nathaniel, He runs up to the auction block in a panic and places a bid to free us. The mob haggles. Bets shoot through the air, but God will not give up, even though we have turned away from Him, though we have ignored Him, though we have rejected Him, still He persists until finally the bets are too high and He has only one thing left to give: the life of His one and only beloved Son. He hesitates. His eyes fill with tears at the thought. His heart crumbles in His chest, but then He looks up and sees you. Just you. There’s no one else on that auction block. He’s not bartering to free a group of people or a church, He is bartering to free you.
And he shouts out his bid. “My only Son for this one. I’ll give you my only Son!”
The auctioneer agrees. The crowd mumbles in disappointment. But you are set free, and you run into your Father’s arms.
This is God’s love for you and you alone. May you grasp just a bit of it today and hold it near to you, and may it change your life.
Then I saw a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain, standing in the center of the throne . . . And with your blood you purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation (Revelation 5:6–9 NIV).
MaryLu Tyndall