Serving Rascals, Clumsy Disciples, and Physically and Mentally Ill Believers with the Unconditional Love of Jesus Christ
–Charles Spurgeon
“The conflict will always be beyond your strength. The enemy always pushes us beyond our personal, inbred, preset limits concerning how far we will go for God. The test kills the limits of our humanity, until we are like Christ in everything. We are left with a choice: Become Christlike or gradually shrivel into superficial hypocrites: angry people who have stopped walking with God, who blame others for our bitterness.”–Francis Frangipane
Hebrews 13:5
1 “O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?
How long will you look the other way?
2 How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul,
with sorrow in my heart every day?
How long will my enemy have the upper hand?”
Nothing is as stretching and painful as the belief that God has given up on you. I have personally experienced this misbelief. It was like my entire nervous system was ripped out of my body. Suicide seemed a logical thing to do.
Sometimes, the struggle to remain a believer is difficult. It is a war, often accentuated by depression and sadness. It’s relentless and its arena of conflict is in our hearts. David asks five questions. They are the questions of the besieged heart when our abandonment seems possible.
3 “Turn and answer me, O Lord my God!
Restore the sparkle to my eyes, or I will die.
4 Don’t let my enemies gloat, saying, “We have defeated him!”
Don’t let them rejoice at my downfall.”
David recognizes that he needs God’s answer. He also needs meaning to be restored to him. The “sparkle”, or that joy of having a purpose is what gives life meaning. Once you taste it, nothing else will satisfy. Verse 3 tells us that David saw this as a “life or death” matter.
Furthermore, David could see that the enemies of his soul had gathered. They spoke with a common voice, reflecting a unified purpose, “We have defeated him!” We must be cognizant of the reality of evil around us. God has a will for your life, but so does Satan. It involves your corruption and destruction.
5 “But I trust in your unfailing love.
I will rejoice because you have rescued me.
6 I will sing to the Lord
because he is good to me.” ~~New Living Translation
We fast-forward ahead to David’s deliverance. He has an uncommon confidence in the character of God. David’s declaration, He rescued me and He is good to me! Both verses 5-6 illustrate that worship finds its root in times of personal emancipation.
9 “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?”
Jeremiah 17:9
7 For the sinful nature is always hostile to God. It never did obey God’s laws, and it never will. 8 That’s why those who are still under the control of their sinful nature can never please God.”
Romans 8:7-8
The reality is that we are in a real fix. The grim news isn’t changed simply because we graduated from a ‘charm school’ or become Eagle Scouts. We are fundamentally flawed, our hearts throughly contaminated. Any good we try to do is a ‘freak of nature,’ and astronomically beyond our ability. The race of men has failed. (Maybe that’s why history keeps repeating itself.) Without the presence of God, we would destroy ourselves. And each other.
The word “hostile” is used. That sort of sums it all up, doesn’t it?
8 “But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners.”
Romans 5:8
Although we’re in active rebellion, “God so loved the world…” His love for us is called ‘agape,’ it is a word used in the New Testament, and it’s a love marked by consistency and selflessness. God loves without any conditions or merit on our part. Agape is love undeserved. The word is full of mercy, a concept very hard for us to grasp.
God’s love for us the way the universe is run. Love is what empowers Him to save us from our sins. It is the Lord’s love that draws us to Himself. Love is like a magnet that pulls us out of darkness into the light. His love for you is infinite.
“In math, if you divide an infinite number by any number, no matter how large, you still have an infinite quotient. So Jesus’ love, being infinite, even though it is divided up for every person on earth, is still infinitely poured out on each one of us!”
Charles Spurgeon
You can trust the Lord to be fully loving you right this minute. It is a full and constant love— there is scarcely a human parallel. The ‘prophets’ exhaust language seeking a metaphor to explain God’s love to a doubting and disobedient people. I imagine they are frustrated; they can’t explain what they’ve seen. They try, and end up explaining God’s love by type: marriage, and motherhood.
Over and over, these two metaphors are used extensively. And over and over you can see the love of God for people (flesh and blood, like you and I) for us. He loves us like a husband loves his straying wife. He loves us like a father loves his struggling child. We stray and struggle, and we will find no peace apart from His love. After all we are His, and we really can’t ‘work right” apart from His guiding presence.
They both bear us witness of a supreme love. He loves you right now— wrecked and ravaged by your sin. I don’t know where you are at this very moment, but I do know He loves you intensely. Sin may have destroyed you, but His love never, ever vacillates. God is passionate about you— He won’t let you go. But you must risk being loved.
“See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are! But the people who belong to this world don’t recognize that we are God’s children because they don’t know him.”
1 John 3:1
Broken Believers 