³⁵ Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? ³⁶ Just as it is written, “For Your sake we are being put to death all day long; We were considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”

God’s love goes so against the grain of human religions. For most people on this planet, religion is all about finding a way to appease God, to somehow get Him to accept us. Fear is the motivator, and the best we can hope for is the reluctant acceptance of a demanding God. Even those who adopt a wishy-washy view of God’s love think of it as an over-covering blanket of emotional good-feel. Such a view really has nothing to do with God, but serves more to give license to people living any way they want, for God would never impose, much less, enforce a standard of morality on everyone.

But genuine Christianity has everything to do with God’s absolute, unrelenting love for His creatures, made in His image. This love does not minimize or neutralize objective morality. He is a righteous God who loves righteously and perfectly, without contravening His expectations for us.

The key is grace. He has justified us, not based on our presumed acts of righteousness, for we have all sinned, and He has shown Himself to be just by justifying sinners. This is possible because of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, which satisfied God’s righteous demands for our sins. Why? Because He loves us. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8).

Fear of losing God’s love no longer motivates us (or at least it shouldn’t), because if He loved us before He justified us, when we were still rebellious sinners, how could His love be somehow limited now that we are justified believers, even when we sin now and fall short? That makes no sense.

But we confuse the fact of love with a feeling of love. Sometimes we don’t feel God’s love, and yes, sometimes He chastises us as erring believers. But His love continues, and our faith requires that fact must take precedence over feeling. We Christians always fail when we rely on feelings. To feel God’s love is a flighty foundation for spiritual growth. Rather we take God at His Word. Nothing can separate us from His love, and we believe that even in the worst of life’s experiences, when our feelings are assaulted by pain, suffering and difficulties of all sorts. God loves us. God loves me. And I believe it. That will never change. He will never divorce me from His love!

Love, help me move beyond seeking the loving feeling, to growing in my faith.