A Love to the End

God loves us simply because we are “His own.” In our human condition, it is unlikely that we can attain a satisfactory understanding of God’s love. What we can be sure of is that He loves us to the end. What a comfort it is to know this! God has told us that although we are in the world, we are not of this world. The prophet Isaiah speaks to us of His love in an incredible way: “Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of My hands.” (Isa. 49:16). Can you imagine yourself in the palm of God’s hand?

The driving force behind all our activity as Christians should be God’s love, our relationship with Him, but unfortunately we usually live on the defensive, scattering attempts—almost always unsuccessful—to please Him, to seek His love.

The truth is that love already “lives” within us, and we forget it. Does the Bible not say that God is love? Does it not also say that when we come to Christ, the Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us? Then why do we go about as though this were not so? Why do we view the Christian life as a host of precepts for “earning” God’s love? In the letter to the Romans, Paul declares: “For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 8:38–39). My sisters and brothers, have you meditated on the depth and certainty of this incredible declaration? It says that nothing God Himself has created can separate us from His love. A couple of verses earlier, the Word also says that neither tribulation, nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, nor nakedness, nor peril, nor sword (Rom. 8:35) could cause us to be snatched from the Lord’s hand.

We Christians are in the world, and no matter how hard we try to avoid it or how much holiness we reflect, its contamination sometimes touches us and can even knock us down. When Jesus asked Peter three times, “Do you love Me?” the Lord already knew that Peter would also deny Him three times, despite the answers the disciple gave. He knows our weaknesses, our empty pockets of purity and our lack of love. Nevertheless, He loves us to the end. Although the assertion may seem ridiculous and exaggerated, the Son of God lives within us; all His holiness, His deity, His fullness were poured out on the Cross so that from each one of us a new man, a new creature, “His workmanship,” might emerge, made of a new spiritual clay kneaded with stardust. We cannot take lightly the fact that we are children of God. This is still a cruel world, inhabited by generations of vipers worse than those of the first century. But the Spirit of the Most High dwells within us; even though we deny it through our attitudes, we are repositories of God’s love. Our old self, our former nature, was crucified together with Christ and is definitively dead. We are new workmanship, a new creation, a new creature, and our past is now on the Cross that set us free 2,000 years ago.

Jesus loves us to the end (John 13:1) because He knows that we dwell in this world and need Him, and also because not all Christians have learned to “abide in Him” and that apart from Him we can accomplish nothing. Living and abiding in Christ means allowing Him to work within us so that this relationship transforms us, gives us life, and encourages us to produce spiritual fruit for the benefit of others, as well as the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22) within our being. By being in Christ and abiding in Him, our inner being should overflow with love. At a certain moment of spiritual crisis, I sought refuge in the Word and found this immense revelation: And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love; and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. (1 John 4:16). I hope it impacts you as it did me and gives you today the confirmation of the love to the end that the Lord has promised us.

God bless you!