Oh, How He Loves ME!

Some revelations in the Bible are so powerful, when we receive them, they begin transforming not only our thinking, but our entire identity, making us more like God.  I think the phrase "God is love" falls into this category.  When the Apostle Paul experienced this revelation and personally received God’s love, he prayed for the Ephesian Church, plus every disciple that would follow—that’s US: “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that YOU, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God (which is LOVE) (Eph. 3:17–19).”

The Biblical writers described the nature of God’s amazing love in a variety of ways using powerful metaphors.  They spoke of the care a mother hen has for her chicks (Mt. 23:37), the inability of a mother to forget her children (Is. 49:15), and the passion of a groom for his bride (Is. 62:5).  Sometimes the image of God’s love for us is felt in the delight of someone finding the treasure of a lost coin (Lk. 15:8–10).

I’d like to tell the story of another treasure.  This tale illustrates the difference between God’s perfect love and the inferior love we tend to see in our world: God loves ME not because I am beautiful; He loves ME with a love that makes ME beautiful!

Her name was Sandy.  She had lost a good deal of her hair, one of her arms was missing, and generally speaking, she had the stuffing knocked out of her.  She was a young girl named Mandy’s favorite doll.

Sandy hadn’t always looked like this.  Years before, she had been personally selected as a Christmas gift by a loving father.  Sandy’s face and hands were a kind of rubbery plastic that looked real.  Her body was stuffed with rags that were soft and delightfully squeezable.  When the father saw Sandy, he knew he had found something very good (Gen. 1:31).

When Sandy was young—and beautiful, Mandy loved her.  When Mandy went to bed, Sandy lay next to her.  When Mandy had lunch, Sandy sat beside her.  When Mandy could get away with it, Sandy even took baths with her.  Mandy’s love for Sandy made them inseparable.

After a few years, Sandy was no longer attractive.  To tell the truth, she was a mess.  But for reasons that no one could figure out, Mandy still loved that little rag doll.  She loved her as strongly in the days of her raggedness as she ever had in the early days of beauty.  Other dolls came and went, but Sandy was family!  Mandy’s love for Sandy was unmovable.

Ragged but NEVER WORTHLESS!

Loving someone is never done simply out of duty or obligation.  When we truly love someone, the mere sight of them causes our eyes to light up.  This was beautifully expressed at the burning bush when God told Moses that his brother Aaron was coming: "He is already on his way to meet you, and his heart will be glad when he sees you (Ex. 4:14).”  When you see one you genuinely love, it makes your heart glad.

It is of utmost importance to remember that God loves us in this way.  He deeply delights in each of His children.  The prophet Zephaniah wrote: “The Lord your God in your midst (WITH YOU and inside YOU!), The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing (Zeph. 3:17).

God doesn’t love you because He has to—as though it were an unavoidable obligation.  Instead, Scripture describes God’s love for us as something He chooses and wants to do.  God loves you because He delights in you.  The fact that you exist—you are very good in God’s eyes.  He loves to love you.

Of course, that doesn’t mean God delights in everything you do (Your mother didn’t, either).  But raggedness is not the whole story about us.  It may be a very bad thing that I needed God to die for me.  But it is a wonderful thing that God thinks I’m worth dying for.  God’s love insists that we must be loved.  We may be ragged, but we must never confuse our raggedness with worthlessness.

The Gift of Chosenness

I think many of us give mental assent to the notion that God is love.  We can even affirm that God loves people.  But what’s harder is living "rooted and established" in the truth that God doesn’t simply love people in general; He loves ME in particular—ME—in all my raggedness.  And He loves YOU that way, too!

We must comprehend this aspect of God’s love: He has chosen each one of us.  Chosenness is one of the very best gifts that love bestows on the beloved.  It means someone has seen ME as a unique person, that someone desires to come closer to ME, to be WITH ME.  It means someone believes I am important, and I have a significant contribution to make.

On the other hand, there is no pain quite like the pain of NOT being chosen.  A 10-year-old wrote Dear Abby about the pain of life on the playground: “All my life I have been chosen last . . . Why don’t they just hang a sign on me that says, ‘Reject—Last one to pick gets me.‘“

There is no gift like chosenness, no pain like rejection.  But when a reject is chosen, a life changes.  When Love whispers, "I choose you.  I want to be WITH YOU!”  This is LIFE for ragged people with wounded spirits, hurting hearts, and bruised souls.  Of course, in our world, some people seem more chosen than others.  So, God often has to remind us that He does not intend any race or nation or people to be more chosen than another (Acts 10:34–35).  God speaks to each of His chosen ones: “Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by your name; You are Mine (Isaiah 43:1).”

Transforming Love

The years passed, and eventually Mandy outgrew Sandy, trading in her cherished doll for a boyfriend named Andy.  By now the only logical thing left to do was to toss Sandy out.  But instead, she held Sandy lovingly one last time, wrapped her with tissue and stored her in the attic for the next 20 years.

Eventually Mandy married and had a daughter.  The time came when she wanted a doll.  Mandy remembered Sandy and wanted to share her with her daughter.  She retrieved Sandy from storage and sent her to a doll restoration center where she was reconstructed and gave her new to her daughter.

Mandy did not love Sandy simply because Sandy was beautiful.  She loved her with a kind of love that made Sandy beautiful.

God’s love for us carries with it the hope of similar transformation.  He has loved us from the beginning.  But the full extent of God’s love was shown not as much when He created us, but rather in the midst of our sinfulness and unloveliness.  Paul put it this way: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.  For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6–8).”

God is fully aware that we are like rag dolls.  Isaiah described our ragged condition thousands of years ago: "All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags (Is. 64:6).  It might seem that a race so damaged by sin should be discarded.  The logical response would be to toss us and start over.  But God would not.  Instead, He too, proposed reconstructive surgery.

The Apostle John, who received the revelation that “God is LOVE,” would later write: “Behold what manner of LOVE the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!  Therefore, the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.  Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.  And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure (1 John 3:1–3).”