Learning about Love

There is a hymn that starts with this line: "O Love that will not let me go.." I was singing it the other day and had a perspective change. God's love towards his children is relentless, ferocious and irresistible. He will not let me go. In fact, he is willing to pull out everything from us that we think will bring us happiness and joy apart from him. If he is Life, and Joy, and Love, and Goodness than he will not let me be content with second-hand pleasures and false hopes that will only deceive me and crush me. He would be cruel to let me dabble and delight in things that would never give me life, and joy, and love, and goodness. He would be merciless if he never gave me himself. 


He is willing, at any cost to us, to devour both unsafe and seemingly good things in our life in order that we might take refuge in him alone. He is like a hungry and ferocious lion casting away, ripping apart anything and everything so that we might hope in him alone. 


In our pains we tend to only see things through our narrow lens instead of God's wider lens. Our pains remind us of the cross. In fact, we sometimes think of them as our crosses. But if our view is narrow we will find ourselves sitting in despair. There we are at the foot of the cross looking up at Jesus, our example. We see the pain, the blood, the sweat, the anguish. We are enveloped by the suffering and the agony. It's only until we can look at the cross with the wider lens and see that while there is pain and suffering, this was also God's greatest act of love. At the cross he was purchasing redemption for a rebellious people. He was reconciling enemies, granting them forgiveness, and making them his friends. He was redeeming his bride. He was making a new covenant secure. This was an act of immeasurable love. 


If your view in the midst of pain, suffering and trials is narrow and small, you will doubt God's love for you. But if God, by his grace, opens your eyes and gives you a new perspective you can hope that one day you will be able to say, "Though this discipline is painful it is proof that I am God's child and he loves me. He has not left me alone." You will nod your head in agreement with William Cowper: "Behind a frowning providence, he hides a smiling face." And you may even rejoice because your faith is being made genuine (1 Peter 1). 


If you are God's child, one thing is certain: He will not let you go. We can rest in that. 


"O Love, that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee."