Breathe.

This is the hardest truth I’ve ever had to accept.

For someone who has spent her whole life feeling like she has to earn everything in it, love was no exception.

My story of entering into the faith isn’t your typical “I fell on hard times and found Jesus” story. I was five years old when Jesus came to me in a dream and asked me if I wanted to be saved. Naturally, I said yes, I mean it’s Jesus Himself, who wouldn’t?

Yet, thirty years later, that dream can sometimes feel heavy instead of freeing.

I often wonder what life would be like if Jesus hadn’t come to find me at five. Would I have found Him later? At a church camp? On the floor after too many bottles of alcohol, so beat down by my traumas that I fell to my knees in desperation?

I know salvation is a gift, priceless and undeserved.

But sometimes I still wonder, did I choose God, or did God choose me?

Truth is, the answer is always this, God chose me. God chooses us. But human understanding loves to believe in the power of our choice.

Which brings me back to the truth I’ve wrestled with my whole life,

I don’t have to work to receive God’s love.

For so long in my life I felt I needed to prove to God I loved Him.

I worked so hard at trying to accomplish everything because I feared if I let up, God would abandon me.  

I guess you could say I learned this behavior from my human experiences. My whole life I felt I had to prove myself to people just to be accepted by them. Everyone loved me when I was doing what they wanted or being an asset to them. The moment they felt I wasn’t holding up to par, they dropped me like a bad habit. Somewhere along the way, my God lines and human lines got blurred.

I knew I couldn’t earn salvation by my works. But His love? That was a different thing. I figured if I worked hard enough, I could gain it.

But His love can’t be bought.

It can’t be earned.

It would take me 35 years to finally learn that.

God’s love is freely given to us.

The Bible says that nothing can separate us from the love of God when we are in Christ Jesus. But when you’ve experienced abandonment or heartbreak, the idea that love won’t leave you, feels foreign.

The idea that God could love us despite how flawed we are was hard for me to comprehend. The problem was I was looking at God through the lens of my trauma instead of the lens of His truth.

God’s word is eternal, a promise that will never be broken.

When He says we can never lose His love, He means it.

His love is ours forever. (Romans 8:38-39)

To believe that, I must believe that His promises don’t return void. (Isaiah 55:11)

I must believe He is truly who He says He is.

Otherwise, I’ll spend my life trying to prove something to God I never could to begin with.

No one can prove themselves worthy of God’s love.
What could we possibly offer the Sovereign God that equals the pricelessness of His love?

That’s why Jesus had to die for us.

If I am justified today before God, it’s not because I did enough works to deserve it. It’s because Jesus was willing to sacrifice His life in exchange for my freedom from bondage, sin, and death.

His death and resurrection saved me from eternal separation, bringing me into right standing with the Father.

All this to show us how much He loved us. (John 3:16)

The key to salvation is accepting what Jesus did.

Ironically, it’s also the key to receiving His love.

You have to be willing to accept it.

Acceptance.

How does one accept a gift they don’t think they are worthy of?

How do you know it’s really for you?

These are the questions that ran through my mind for years. And in that time I thought, “sure God loves me” but not like others. I convinced myself He had it out for me.

Was my suffering punishment?

 Were my failures proof He had turned away?

Was I too broken to be chosen? Too flawed to be loved?

For so long, the God I knew was a hodgepodge of Pastors, YouTube videos, and theologians I had listened to. He became a collection of ideas that pulled me down rabbit holes, leaving me with more confusion than answers.

Tired of being lost, I decided to get to know God for myself.

What I discovered opened me up in ways I didn’t think possible.

The gaping hole in my heart, that never-ending void, began to fill up each day as I got to know Him.

My thirst started to be quenched.

And the hunger for something more, something I didn’t even know I was searching for was being satisfied.  

God isn’t some powerful being playing with our lives for His amusement. He is a Father, fiercely intent on saving His children and bringing them into the fullness of His love.

His words are powerful because they are true.

No fluff.

No deception.

He was the Almighty God who loved us enough to die to be near us.

They say we are just a speck on this earth, meaningless creatures with no purpose.

Yet, God chose to die for us.

I don’t know about you, but who dies for something meaningless?

The very stamp of His death proves that we have value.

And that value is only found in Him.

As our creator, He is the only one who knows our worth.

He valued us at the cost of His priceless blood.

Put a dollar sign to that if you can.

You won’t be able to.

Because who could buy the blood of Jesus?

Who could make His sacrifice worth less by doing something greater?

The impossibility of one dying and resurrecting in and of itself is a miracle that can’t truly be defined by human measures.

The mere value of God’s words is so final, and life giving, that one couldn’t even hold the weight of them if they wanted to.

So why then, do we take the precious words of God that broke the planes of Heaven to land on earth, and discard them for counterfeit words filled with lies and deception?

Held to the fire, the words of God will last eternally. (Isaiah 40:8)

The lies of Satan, will burn with him.

Yet, we choose to accept his worthless lies over God’s priceless truth.

One gives us meaning and purpose.
The other steals them away.

Yet, here I was believing in a lie that shaped my entire life and identity because I couldn’t accept the truth, I don’t have to work to receive God’s love.

The moment I chose to become a follower of Jesus, my life was changed.

God took me by the hand and through the power of His Holy Spirit, started leading me to His promised land.

The problem is, along the journey, I found myself in moments forgetting that God was with me. The arrogance of my heart to think that at any moment in time, I could ever do anything without God. (John 15:5)

He is the one who orders our steps.

The lie was thinking God had abandoned me.

I just had to accept it.

I had to accept that I was never going to be worthy of His love.

That’s why I needed Jesus.

It is His righteousness I bear that allows me to be counted worthy by God.

Marked by His Holy Spirit, I am a child of God.

Therefore, His love isn’t something I have to work in hopes of gaining.

His love is what I bask in, what I put my hope in, and how I know Him to be true.

For God Himself is love.

When I accept His son, I accept Him, and when I accept Him, I accept His love.

Purely because of Jesus.

He did all the work.

He deserves all the glory.

Gone are the days when I am trying to prove to God through countless works that I love Him. The hardest part of this new journey of accepting God’s love, is sitting in the peace of the wait and not striving or trying to do things on my own merit. (Psalm 46:10)

This is foreign territory for me.

To believe God will still love me if all I do today is read my Bible and get to know Him, is a hard pill to swallow. However, the greatest gift one could receive, is to know and be known by God. Which means we must accept being patient in the wait. Letting God give us direction instead of always trying to direct ourselves, is the far greater path towards wisdom.

God isn’t like the humans I’ve encountered in my life.

He doesn’t only love me when I’m doing for Him.

He doesn’t need me.

He just wants me.

Just me.

#ruthnyej

Blog Verses

• Romans 8:38-39: And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. ³⁹ No power in the sky above or in the earth below—indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.
• Isaiah 55:11: It is the same with my word. I send it out, and it always produces fruit. It will accomplish all I want it to, and it will prosper everywhere I send it.
• John 3:16: For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
• Isaiah 40:8: The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of our God stands forever.
• John 15:5: “Yes, I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who remain in me, and I in them, will produce much fruit. For apart from me you can do nothing.
• Psalm 46:10: Be still, and know that I am God! I will be honored by every nation. I will be honored throughout the world.

• Where do you find your peace?
• Stop and Smell the Roses
• You Can’t Earn God’s Love?