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Can I really believe that God loves me? I want to say today again that God does have a plan for you. And if you’re going through a particularly hard time or a heartbreak, you could say to God, Look, I’m going to hold on and wait for you, Lord, to show me your kindness. I want to see your love, no matter what happens.

It was King David in Psalm 27:14 who used to say – Wait for the Lord, be strong and take heart, wait for the Lord. And I think you’ll come out of the pain and be a much stronger person.

Job said it right? Actually, yesterday I spoke about Job who went through a difficult time in his life. People blamed him, and he said in Chapter 23:10. God knows the way that I take. And when he’s tested me, I will come forth as gold.

Believing God loves me

Do you know that sometimes our own sense of guilt prevents us from believing that God loves me? Charlie Brown – he approached Lucy to ask her why she dropped another ball that he threw to her. And Lucy explained that when she saw the ball coming, she couldn’t help but think of all the balls that she dropped in the past. So she said, the past got in her eyes. That’s why she dropped the ball.

So my question to you is, does your past keep getting in the way of personal forward momentum for yourself? Are you unable to break free from the guilt, perhaps of mistakes or lifestyle choices? Is your past holding you in bondage? I think it’s important to realise that once we accept the fact that God’s love is personal, that means it’s for us.

We can be completely free to be ourselves. You may have heard of the delightful Children’s story, The Velveteen Rabbit. It’s a beautiful story read by many children throughout the world; it tells the story of a of a stuffed rabbit in his quest to become real through the love of his owner.

And the rabbit says, what is real? Well, real isn’t how you’re made. It’s a thing that happens to you when a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with but really loves you. Then you become real. So by the time you become real, most of your hair has been loved off and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and you look very shabby.

Because once you’re real, you can’t be ugly except to the people who don’t understand. And once you’re real, you can’t become unreal again because it lasts for always. That’s from that story, the Velveteen Rabbit. So in in the same way, rejoicing in God’s love means that that we can be real people because we’ve made our peace with Him and despite what might happen, everything will eventually turn out OK.

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I do say that again. That guilt can stop us from believing that God loves us. Again I keep coming back to Job a good man from the Old Testament. And despite losing people and losing so much, he felt that he had failed because he’d lost everything that was of value in his own life. So there were a lot of questions and you can read the chapters and how gloomy and how pessimistic his life had become.

So he said to God, we read this in Job 42. I heard about you from others. Now I have seen you with my own eyes. That’s why I hate myself, he said. And I sit here in dust and ashes to show my sorrow. He was in mourning. He sat there with all the ugliness of his sores throughout his body. And he just felt that he hated himself. And I think there are people like that. In fact I know I’ve met people who feel that they are no good and I came across that Facebook page called ‘God will always love me even when I can’t love myself’. As I said yesterday, the wonderful truth is that God, with Him, his love is unconditional. So God loves us, warts and all.

Let’s Pray

Dear Lord, how true it is that sometimes we do hate ourselves. We feel that life is just not going the way we want. But, Lord, we a God that we can believe in, a God whose love is unconditional. Thank you that that’s true. Amen.

(Can I Believe God Loves Me? Pt. 2 — Morning Devotions)

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