Gaylord Diaz's Blog

A lot of Christians struggle with God’s love for them. They don’t believe God loves them. Not after they’ve failed Him. Not with all the bad stuff that’s happened to them. They want so much for God love them. But they think God’s turned His back on them. In their eyes, they’re the living damned. It’s a hellish existence and my heart goes out to these tormented souls. How can I possibly help them? How can I convince them God loves them no matter what they’ve done and no matter what He’s allowed to happen to them?

Let me put God’s love for you on hold here. I’m changing scenes, but stay with me to the end because it’ll all come together. Scene 1. I honestly don’t struggle with God’s love for me. That doesn’t make me any better than you. I just found a way to get past the doubt and rest in God’s love for me. It goes back to the fundamental core beliefs that I live by. Maybe if I share these beliefs with you it’ll help make it a whole lot easier for you to accept God’s love for you.

• I believe God exists. Every one of us has to settle it at some time or another whether there is a God. And if there is a God, which ones of these gods, or which one in particular, is the true God. The world offers us a ginormous pantheon of gods to choose from. I grew up in a Christian home. But even after studying the world’s major religions in college, I chose to place my faith in the God of the Judeo-Christian faith.
• I believe the Bible is God’s inspired, infallible Word. Every one of us have had to wrestle with whether or not the Bible is wholly true, partly true and partly wrong, or wholly fable and fiction. Going to seminary, I had lots of chances to doubt the historicity and validity of the Bible. For so many Bible scholars, the Bible was nothing but a work of men—not God. And since it was written by men, without God having any say or hand in it, then, yes, it’s only inevitable that we would doubt the Bible, either in whole or in part.

Doubt is tormenting. It’s hellish. It’ll drive anyone crazy. Faith is the complete opposite. It’s a peace and rest.

I choose to take God at His Word. I believe He inspired the entire Bible, it’s true, and He’s managed to preserve it through all these generations so that we today can know what He wants us to know. I don’t doubt the Bible because I don’t doubt God. It’s as simple as that. Until you come to this point of faith you’ll always have your doubts about some things that God said in His Word.

I went through nearly a year of doubt and argumentation with God when I was a teen searching for answers to life’s most puzzling mysteries and contradictions. But when it was all said and done, God showed me He was God, not me. His thoughts weren’t my thoughts. He was so much smarter than me. And even though I didn’t know or understand everything, His Word was still true. From that day on, I chose to believe the Bible at face value simply because God said it. End of argumentation, doubt, or debate.

For some, it takes a lifetime of wrestling and seeking to come to this point of faith. Many never come to faith. But if you profess to be a Christian you owe it to yourself—and God—to believe God exists, He’s the one and only real, true God, and His Word is true in every way without any falsehood or lie. If you come to this point of faith, then everything else about the Christian life and experience becomes a lot whole easier. You won’t understand everything. I don’t. We’re finite creatures with limited brain capacity. We’ll never understand God totally. But we can believe even without understanding. That can be challenging at times. But all that God has ever asked us to do from the beginning is believe Him.

Change of scene.  Now we go to Scene 2.  There’ve been times when we’ve thought a lot about someone. Sometimes fear causes us to do that. Sometimes it’s jealousy. Lust. Or worry. But the one thing that most of us can easily relate to is love. If you’re married to the love of your life, like I am, you remember all the pre-dating, dating, and courtship time you spent dreaming, day-dreaming, visualizing, and thinking about the love of your life.  Longing for the next time you’ll be together again. The point is, a lot of your time was spent thinking about your love. It’s still the same way today, even after all these years of marriage. You think a lot about the one you love.

Change of scene again. Scene 3. Picture yourself at the beach. Just for curiosity’s sake, you make it your life’s ambition to count how many grains of sand there is on the beach. On all the beaches in the world. Impossible!, you say. You can’t possibly count each grain of sand that’s on all the beaches in the world. The point is, there’s so much sand in this world that it’s beyond numbering. And that’s just the sand on the beaches. Think of the enormity of the impossibility of counting each grain of sand in all the deserts of the world. That’s a lot of sand!

When it comes to God’s love for you, let me put these scenes altogether for you. Do you know that God spends a lot of time thinking about you? Yes, you my friend. I’m talking to you by name.  God spends an awful lot of time thinking about you! I know a lot of times we think that God’s so busy—like we are—that He can’t possibly think a whole lot about me. He’s got gobs of other people to be thinking about!

But no matter how many people there are in this world, the simple fact of Scripture is this: God is thinking about you. Remember that familiar verse in Jeremiah 29:11, For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Wow! God is actually thinking about you! You’re on His mind! He hasn’t forgotten you! He hasn’t ignored you! He’s thinking about you just the way you think about the people you love. Now why do you suppose He’s thinking about you? Because He loves you!

What really clinches it for me is this. God is not only thinking about you, but He spends an awful lot of time thinking about you! He’s always thinking about you! Like the innumerable sands in life’s beaches and deserts, God spends a ginormous amount of time thinking about you! Read it for yourself in Psalm 139:17-18a, How precious also are Your thoughts to me, O God! How great is the sum of them!  (18a)  If I should count them, they would be more in number than the sand. Wow! How awesome is that! God’s thinking so much about you that, if you were to count how many thoughts He’s thought about you, His thoughts would number more than all the sand that’s in the world! That’s an awful lot of sand! And that’s an awful lot of thoughts that God has thought—and is still thinking—about you! God must love you an awful lot to spend a lot of His time thinking about you!

Think He doesn’t care about you? Think He doesn’t know what’s going on with you? Look at what David wrote in the first four verses of Psalm 139, O Lord, You have examined my heart and know everything about me.  (2)  You know when I sit down or stand up. You know my thoughts even when I’m far away.  (3)  You see me when I travel and when I rest at home. You know everything I do.  (4)  You know what I am going to say even before I say it, Lord. Dear friend, God knows you inside and out. God sees you every moment of every day. God cares a lot about you.

That’s easy for you to say, you might say. David was a man after God’s heart. God loved him. But I’m no David. If you knew all the things I’ve done, you’d know there’s no possible way God could love me.

But you’re wrong, friend. David was a man after God’s heart. But he was deceptive with the Philistines (1 Samuel 21). He got so angry one time that he was bent on killing a man (1 Samuel 25). He committed adultery with another man’s wife and ended up murdering the man to cover up his sin (2 Samuel 11). His General warned him not to count the army, but David insisted and, as God’s punishment, 70,000 innocents died in a plague (2 Samuel 24)! 70,000! I guess you’re right after all. You’re not David. You haven’t killed 70,000 people.

God chastised David sorely for his sins. But He still loved him dearly! And that’s the same kind of love that God has for you, my dear. Your sins, your past, or your present, do not keep God from loving you. He loves you still in spite of it all! And the amazing thing of it is, God’ll never quit loving you! You can read it for yourself in Lamentations 3:22. John 13:1 is my very most favorite verse of all time. I’ll let you read it for yourself. It’ll floor you. What these Scriptures are saying is, you can’t stop God from loving you!

God loves you, dear friend. He loves you lots. And He’s spending an awful lot of time thinking about you. Don’t doubt it or question it. Don’t resist it. Just believe it! Because that’s the way it really is.