Abandoned to Love

Intimacy with Christ sets us free from worrying what will happen if we follow through on doing what Christ asks us to do.

When my granddaughter Nicole was in the third grade, Susie and I were invited to Grandparents’ Day at her school. We were delighted for the opportunity to see her work and meet her teachers. At one point, a teacher had all of us gather in front of a bulletin board. The kids had cut out silhouettes of themselves and written something about their family underneath their silhouettes. The grandparents had to guess which silhouette matched their grandchild. We found this to be easy because underneath Nicole’s silhouette she had written, “I obey my parents because I know they love and I trust them.”

Bingo! Confidence in a parent’s love results in trust, and trust results in obedience. If Christians today could ever embrace this kind of simple, childlike faith in our relationship with our Heavenly Father, God’s glory would fall upon us, and His joy would dance like a flag over our hearts!

Remarkably, Jesus said it’s not difficult to have such faith. His disciples asked Him to increase their faith, but Jesus replied that it wasn’t the size of their faith that mattered. It was the presence of faith, period (Luke 17:5-6). It’s a simple, childlike trust that Nicole expressed—a confidence in her parents’ love. I obey. Why? Because I trust God’s love, and love must seek the highest and best of what God allows.

George Muller, the 19th century director of the Ashley Down Orphanage in Bristol, England, noted that 90% of understanding the will of God for your life is not really caring what the will of God is. In other words, trust means we come to the point where we say, “Lord, I don’t really care what Your will is, just that I’m in Your will.” Whatever the outcome may be, it will only result in God’s glory and our highest good.

So once again we are brought back to our premise:

The depth of our willingness to surrender our hearts to Jesus is directly related to the depth of our belief that God really loves us with perfect love. Never forget that God cannot love you any more than He loves you in this moment because He loves you perfectly.

“If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.” -1 John 4:15-16

What Jesus surrendered to was the cross with my sins and the sins of the world—unjust rejection as the Creator and Lord of all. He took our judgment so we could have God’s forgiveness, and become “a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17).”

But my friends, never forget that “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father (Philippians 2:10-11, ESV).”

What a Savior. Thank You, Father, for so great a salvation!