Replacing the Lies Part 2: You Are Loved
Read the previous post in this series here.
It’s easy to be reminded of our flaws, isn’t it? Call them whatever you want--sin,
weaknesses, imperfections, baggage--these are the things we discover when we compare ourselves to others and come up wanting.
They are our secret failures and disappointments with our own selves, our big mistakes and hurts
that we have nursed for years. They are the things that have pushed people away from us or the
things that have caused us to withdraw from others. The things that have made us feel like less of
a friend, less of a Christian, less of a person. They may be small—or not. But we all have them.
It’s the natural result of living in a world that breaks us. Of living with the cancer of sin.
Underneath all our doubts is the big question: “Can I be loved for who I am?” Can any
love cover me and my flaws and my mistakes and my sin and my baggage?
The answer is “yes.”
This post is not meant to be a spiritual Band-Aid to slap on our old wounds. Everything is
not magically okay once we remember the love of God. We still hurt. We still sin. We still fail in
our human relationships.
"Jesus loves me" is not just a children's song. It is a powerful truth. Jesus communicated this love to us in many ways, and one of them was through the power of story.
You may know it as the parable of “The Prodigal Son” from Luke 15, but don’t be misled
by the title. This is the father’s story.
In this familiar parable, a wealthy man’s younger son asks
for his share of the estate early—a request which his father grants—and then departs for a distant
country, where he squanders his wealth on wild living. Eventually, a famine comes to the land,
and the son, with not a cent to his name, scrapes out a living feeding pigs.
He is starving. But then he remembers his father’s house, where even the servants are
well-fed and secure. He decides to go back, beg his father’s forgiveness, and ask to be treated as
a servant.
He is still far from home when his father spots him. According to David Jeremiah, the original Greek stresses the
phrase “a great way off,” implying that the young man’s father was not at home but rather
ventured out every day to watch for his son’s return1. As soon as the father sees his son returning, he “had compassion, and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him” (v. 20). The son asks
forgiveness and relinquishes his claim to the title of “son.” The father does not stand for that.
Instead, he clothes his son with the best robe and sandals and adorns him with a ring, all symbols
of the young man’s restored status as son and heir. Yet if anyone was unworthy, it was he.
Living in this world, I wonder if sometimes we feel that we have to conform to a certain standard to
deserve love from God or from others. Too often—yes, even in Christian
circles—perhaps we feel that we have to hide our struggles. We nod and smile, say, “God is good” and “I
am blessed” along with the rest, but inside we’re prodigal sons, struggling with sin and weakness
and asking God, “Do you love me? Do I matter?” We want to think that
if we try hard enough, someone—God, a stranger, anybody—will look twice and really see us,
past all our baggage and weakness, and look on us with love.
This post has been hard for me to write, because, friend, I get it. The constant striving.
The measuring myself up to a perfect standard of my own creation. The discouragement when I
fail, when my sin and weakness becomes glaringly obvious not just to me but to others.
The love of the prodigal’s father reached down to the very depths. It didn’t matter what
the son had done. It didn’t matter whether his confession was sincere or not, whether he came
back to his father for the right reasons. The father who loved the prodigal son is the same Father
who loves us. There is nothing about us that we can hide from Him. There is no distance we can
flee that He will not seek us. And there is no depth we can fall, no blemish so great, that can
make Him turn His face away and withdraw His love.
[originally published on the website for PURSUE Magazine in December 2016]
1
Jeremiah, David. The Jeremiah Study Bible. Worthy, 2013. 1417. Print.↩
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