As I was crying out to God these last couple of days, my main question was why do I love someone so much when they keep breaking my heart over and over?! I just didn’t know if I could do this anymore! And God didn’t answer until tonight when He said, Jenni, why do I keep loving you so much when you keep breaking my heart over and over? It’s the unconditional love of our Savior, that’s why! What a clear answer to such a human question! And I know that, yes, I can keep doing this…
It was a great human based example of unconditional love to me. I decided a great way to have compassion for someone who has sinned against us, is to start making a list of our offenses against God, to help us realize what He has loved us through. For me anyway, I don’t have to go any further than any 2 minute chunk of time pre-Christ (or even post Christ at times!!) to see how much pain I have caused Him. But no matter how terrible, unloving, disrespectful, and awful I was to Him He didn’t stop loving me, or stop showing me that love. That is the unconditional love He loves us with, and the love that, through His power, He calls us to give to others.
If we say I can’t love this certain person because of the way they treat me, we are essentially saying we are better or more worthy than God. He loves us when we treat him terribly, but we say, no, so and so doesn’t deserve MY love when they treat ME that way, yet we know we have God’s love when we treat Him that way (even if the treatment is in different ways – our sin is always easier for us to brush off). We are saying, that to love, we must be treated in a certain way, but God, He’ll just love us no matter how we treat Him. How does that match up, when He is so much more worthy of good treatment than we are, and He disregards the bad treatment we give Him, and fills the space with love. Yet we as humans count ourselves too good to do that, to stoop to that level of being mistreated and still loving. But if our Jesus in the flesh (just look at the cross for one example, but of course there are MANY more!), and now in the Spirit, does that and more, and in turn gives us the power to do it also, how can we honestly look at that scenario and say, nope I won’t do it. You did it for me, but I will not do it for them, they don‘t deserve it. But do we even come close to deserving or earning His love ourselves? NO! If we say that to Him (no matter our excuses for not loving, and no matter who the person is), we just start all over breaking His heart.
Something to ponder anyway…
Tags: God, heartbreak, Jesus, love, unconditional
