Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written:
“For your sake we face death all day long;
we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” – Romans 8:35-36
The rhetorical questions Paul has been asking climax here, and really they have all been asking a version of this question: who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Really, this whole chapter has been answering that question because the reality of life is that a lot of it doesn’t look or feel like love. And yet, the only way to live faithfully through the pain and suffering is to be completely assured of the all-encompassing, unfailing, everlasting love of God. Living in assurance of God’s love enables us to be at once hopeful and realistic; to work towards improvement with vigour and hope without becoming disheartened or despondent when you run up against sin and its effects.
It is the love we need that holds us close, propels us forward and receives us when we get there.
But how does the love of God do anything in our lives? Is it a nice ‘warm fuzzy’ feeling we get when we think about God? If you have been reading Romans 8, you know that it is much more than this. It is grounded in the reality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. it is a love that takes action, as all real love does; it is a love that does not let go and does not leave us where we are.
And yet to actually feel, and grow in, personal assurance of that love takes something more than intellectual assent or understanding. It must be experienced. To be clear, our experience (or not) of God’s love does not alter the truth of God’s love for us; but to really know God’s love for ourselves, we must do more than read or talk about it.
We need to lean into the reality of God’s love so that we can experience it.
In the last decade or so of my grandmother’s life, she fell many times. Before she moved into a nursing home, members of my family arrived home or came in from another part of the house to find her on the floor. She was a very strong, fiercely independent woman. There were some occasions where she would call out for help, but more usually, we would find her struggling to pull herself up. Even when we found her, she would insist that she was able to do it herself and we would painfully watch her struggle on until she admitted she needed help. Though she lived to be nearly 100, I did not detect, in the 30-odd years that I lived with her, that she had learned to ask for and accept help. As I think on it now, it wasn’t just help she hadn’t learnt to accept; it was love. Love was bought, love was owed, love was earned, a commodity to be traded, love was demanded, but it was not accepted freely. Not even to lift her up when she had fallen. There was love there for her to receive, but she would not lean into the reality of it and find out if it was there to be received. Had she done so, she would have found arms willing, not just to pick her up when she fell, but to embrace her.
Have you done one of those trust exercises where you fall backwards into (hopefully!) waiting arms? You won’t really know or experience trusting the group unless you test it by leaning back and falling. It’s terrifying in many ways, but there’s no other way to know. It won’t help you to read about it or hear the assurances of the group. It will help you a bit to hear the testimony of others who have been caught, but the only way to really know is to lean back and fall.
What does it look like to lean into the reality of God’s love? It looks like prayer. Prayers where you call out for help, where you cry out in pain, where you question what He’s doing, where you ask when it will end. It looks like pressing into the truths of God and trusting that He has a plan, that He is working even this together for our good. It looks like not trying to find someone to blame or frantically find any way to get out; but rather waiting and enduring patiently for God’s answer to your prayers. It feels like deep peace and spiritual arms picking you up and embracing you, even if the situation has not ended.
There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.
Lean in and trust the reality of His love and you will find that you are met with more and more and more and more. There is no end, no limit, to His love. He wants for you to know it, to experience it, and to grow in absolute assurance, secure and free.
Prayer focus:
- Praise God that His love is infinite and eternal and we can be completely assured and secure in it
- Pray that we would grow in assurance of His love for us, that we would learn to trust that love by experiencing its reality in our lives
- Pray that God’s love would overflow in our hearts, that we would grow more like Him in the way we love others. Pray that we would be people who draw others to Him because of the love others see in us
