It’s that time of year again when the stores are filled with everything pink and red and covered in hearts. Ideas of romance surround us and leave us with one haunting question: Am I loved?
We do desperate things for human love. After all, the world defines us by our beauty and our performance. We long for a sense of significance by adhering to these ideals. Everything in our culture tells us that we are alone and that we must search for someone to fill us up.
But what happens when that someone fails us? What about when we don’t find anyone at all? What if we are unable to meet the standards that the world sets for us and are rejected again and again?
The Lover of Our Souls
There is good news for us. Finding love is not a matter of being known by other people, but of being known by the living God. This God, the Creator of the universe, the cosmic Lord, the King of kings, is the Lover of our souls. And this love does not depend on our beauty or our performance.
The romance portrayed around Valentine’s Day shows us a love that depends on having the right clothes, the perfect gifts, the ideal look, and the best sex. But God, our true Romancer, chooses to love us even when we make mistakes. His love is spontaneous, free, uncaused, and undeserved.
It is easy to forget how marvelous the love of our Lord is. But when we truly see ourselves as we are—sinful beings unable to reach a holy God by our works—we understand the glory of this love for us. God completely covers the gap between us and Him through His Son Jesus Christ.
Security in Our Savior
Despite knowing that God loves us, we still think that we can satisfy our souls through other means. We think that we have a better idea for our lives than God does. We look for security in our loved ones, whether spouses or dates or friends or family. We pursue them as if they can give us more security than God’s love can. But these people are human, and so they fail. Only the love that God has for us can be our true security. He is the only One who will never fail us.
Think of the darkest sin you’ve tried to hide from everyone around you. God has already seen it. He knows us through and through, and there’s nothing that we can hide from Him. Even knowing the absolute worst of us, His love is unconditional. He chooses to love us despite our unloveliness, ugliness, and foolishness.
We may not always feel these things to be true, but we must not reason from our performance to our position. Unlike what the world offers, we do not have to work to earn acceptance from God. Our security and significance in Christ are not threatened by earthly feelings of rejection. We are safe in the arms of the Lover of our souls, and out of His love we’re able to love in return.
Copyright © 2020 Ken Boa, used with permission.
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