How Does God Love Us?

How Does God Love Us? 

Love is patient. Love is kind. Just the first two sentences of I Corinthians 13 have me prickly. My prayer journal is filled with pleas to God: “Make me kind. Help me to be patient….” And mostly it has to do with the people in my ordinary life. Not the people who bug me I see once a week or less. Not the irritating FB trolls. I need patience and kindness for my children and my husband. My mom, sisters, and those people in the waiting room at therapy who want to talk to me when I just want to read my book.

Deep breathes.

We never pray for patience, right? But we all want it.  We all want to be that T.V. Momma with exactly 100 kids who never is seen on camera raising her voice. I want to be that mom. I’m never that mom. Maybe she is never truly that mom either. Just for the cameras. I don’t want to have to scream into my pillow after a ridiculous conversation about whether someone actually flushed the toilet or not. The brain cells will just continue to die as we discuss the reason we are nice for the 1000^th time in the car. Patience. Nope. I won’t write on patience because….well….God will give me all the opportunity to practice it.

I won’t hold my breath for kindness either. My mind keeps coming back to kindness. What is kindness and how I can get it? How can I understand this love I’m called to give? By looking at the ONE who gives true love.

How does God love us?

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Today I’d like to draw your attention to the phrase repeated over and over again. In the ESV it says: “For his steadfast love endures forever.” I adore those words to describe God’s love. Steadfast means to be fixed in direction firm in purpose, unwavering, firmly established. Doesn’t that describe God’s love? Firmly establish, fixed. Think about that. God’s love is firm. It is not wavering. Just like David, we can find comfort in God’s love never wavering. In this world we have so much trouble finding True Love. It isn’t hard when we look at Psalm 136 and just dig deep into the phrase repeated twenty-six times.

I have a simple method for digging deep into Scripture. You only need one tool (and no, its not a commentary). You just need a dictionary. Two steps. 1. Look up key words in the verse or phrase and 2. then paraphrase the verse or phrase using what you learned. Simple. I did it for Psalm 136 and the repeated phrase: “for his steadfast love endures forever.” (ESV)

(I used dictionary.com for my definitions.)

Steadfast:
Fixed in direction.
Firm in purpose.
Unwavering
Firmly established.

Endures:

To hold out against
Sustain without yielding
Continue to exist

Forever: 
Without end.
Eternally.
Always.

I took those definitions and wrote a long, detailed definition of God’s love and what it does:

God’s love is fixed and firm in purpose and direction. It is unwavering and established forever. God’s love holds out against sin, darkness, and death. His love sustains me day by day without yielding. Eternally and always God’s love will continue to exist.