Who do you love more than any other? What have you done to show that love to them? What have you sacrificed? What struggles have you endured to love them? What joys have you experienced in loving them?
Now, what do you feel when they betray you? Normally, it’s searing pain.
But if you really, really love them, your love doesn’t go away despite the pain. Instead, you are torn at a heart level. You love them, yet they’ve really hurt you.
God is infinitely more holy than we are. He loves infinitely more than we do. He has sacrificed infinitely more than we have. He continues to provide, protect, and preserve us. He is passionate about us. He doesn’t quit. He doesn’t stop. He is our Dad. He is the perfect Father we’ve longed to have.
How can His heart not hurt when we sin? Scriptures show that our sin grieves Him:
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Genesis 6:5-6 says, “Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that He made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart.”
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Psalm 78:40 says, “How often they provoked Him in the wilderness and grieved Him in the desert.”
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Mark 3:5 says, “And when He had looked around at them with anger, being grieved by the hardness of their heart, He said to the man, “Stretch out your hand” And he stretched it out, and his hand was restored as whole as the other.
Even as I write this my heart is not breaking like I think it should. it is not as real as it needs to be. How does it become more real? I need to be willing to empathize with God. That is, I need to be willing to face that I’ve hurt Him to a degree of grief. I need to allow myself to feel it. I need to be connected to that pain. It is like the moment when Peter saw Jesus looking at him after the rooster crowed three times, and Peter wept bitterly.
This kind of connection comes from connecting to His pain.
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Dig into the meaning of the words used in Scripture to describe the pain God feels when we sin.
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Journal about times when you’ve felt similar emotions and describe in detail what you felt.
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Allow yourself to think through what it would have been like to suffer greater than what you experience and know that it is even worse for God.
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Humble yourself let yourself know that you sinned.
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Now look at all He did to pay for that sin.
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Allow repentance to come in.
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Express gratitude for His sacrifice.
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Enjoy that He is the Father who loves you counter-conditionally.
Chew On This:
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What has your sin cost Christ?
1st Principle Leadership’s mission is to equip, empower, and encourage business leaders to be convinced that Christ loves them with He has and is, so that they return His love with all they are and have. In so doing, every area of their lives including their businesses will be in congruence with Christ.
*This blog is an amalgamation of a few different clients. No client is being singled out.
