God Cannot Love Me Less

When my daughter does something that she knows she should not have done, she always cries and asks me if I still love her.  It is human nature for us to feel unlovable when we sin.  Because of my upbringing, I have always had to fight the mind-set of equating God’s love with my actions. In the back of my mind, I always feel that if I am "good", then God will love me more. On the other hand, when I am bad, which seems to happen with great regularity, then I feel unlovable. I grew up in a very legalistic denomination and there were so many rules that I couldn’t begin to name them. I knew what was acceptable and unacceptable, but it was an unwritten list. I will always be shaped by my earlier experiences, but there are some habits I have had to break. I do not believe that I am saved based on my actions, but for some reason I still fight the feeling that God will somehow love me less if I mess up.

This week in class we studied 1 Samuel 12. The children of Israel wanted to be like all the other nations and have a King, and despite the many warnings that Samuel gave them against this, they kept demanding a King; therefore, God delivered to them their desire. In 1 Samuel 12, Samuel is telling the children of Israel how God has always taken care of them and it is made abundantly clear to them that they have turned away from their God, they have sinned, and they began to be fearful and to feel unloved. In verse 20 Samuel says "Do not be afraid; you have done all this evil, Yet do not turn aside from following the LORD, but serve the LORD with all your heart. For the LORD will not forsake his people.. . ." To me the word forsake means to leave, and the dictionary defines it as "to quit, leave entirely, or abandon." The Hebrew word in this passage actually has a slightly different definition. It means to beat a mass until it is flat or to devalue something. For some reason this clicked with me.  I realized God does not love me less because of my sin. I do not lose value in His sight because of my screw-ups. I have always said that I disappoint God, but He still loves me. I now am beginning to wonder, "Can God be disappointed when He knew I was going to mess up anyway?" God loves me. There is nothing else I can add to that. It makes no sense in my finite human mind. I can’t understand it or fathom how massive His love is. I just know that God loves me with all of His being, and He cannot love me any less!