… ⁵ and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us. ⁶ For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. ⁷ For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. ⁸ But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Assurance of hope eternally rests in God’s love in justifying us. You see, justification does not stand alone as a dry, legal concept, but as an expression of God’s infinite love for us. Let us look at the particulars. This is the first time in the book of Romans that the word “love” is used. Paul’s laying out of the truth of justification in a logical, well-reasoned (and convincing) fashion does not mean this is arid theology of the mind to be studied in ivory towers by scholars completely devoid of emotion. God justifies because He loves! And this gets communicated to us at the heart level by the Holy Spirit—no mere esoteric thoughts to be pondered, but a relationship to be experienced—and that with the God who is love and who defines love. When God demonstrates love, He demonstrates Himself.

That’s not all. God is highly committed to loving us—He “poured out [His love] within our hearts,” like opening a fire hydrant, gushing forth without limitation. That’s what God’s love is like. Nothing can stand against it, and nothing can stop its flow into our lives. Paul comes back to this when he writes later that nothing “will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:39). Nothing can stop the flow of the Spirit. We are eternally secure in His love, and that gives hope that “does not disappoint.”

Contrasting the limitation of human love (extended to others only at the time they are deemed to be righteous or good), God’s sacrificial love in giving Christ to die for us was demonstrated at the time “while we were still helpless … ungodly.” He didn’t wait for us to improve ourselves to the point of being worthy of His love. It was “while we were yet sinners.”

Remember, this is just “the introduction … into this grace” (vs. 2). It keeps getting better. If Christ died for us while we were sinners, then what could we ever do to lose His love, to cause His love to stop short of eternity? What sin would be too great after we have been saved, that would put us outside of the description of “while we were yet sinners”? The nature of our justification is such that we could never lose our salvation because the love of God for us before we were saved is the same love He has for us after we are saved.

Lord, help me never doubt Your perfect, eternal and unending love for me.