For God So Loved the World

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard, “No one will love you until you learn to love yourself.” This is simply not true.

Before you ever learned to love yourself, there was someone who loved you enough to die for you. He laid down His life for you while you were still a broken, messy, unrepentant, self-indulgent sinner. Even when you hated yourself, He loved you, and that love has never wavered or trembled.

1 John 4:19 says, “We love because He first loved us,” which means the world is not capable of this kind of love outside of Him. We can’t truly learn to love—ourselves or others—until we recognize and receive the love of God. Until He pours His own love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

I wish I could tell my children that they live in a world where open wounds are always met with open hearts and cries for help never fall on deaf ears, but that’s not a promise I can make. So many people are hurting right now because they are living in a world that won’t fight for them.But God has always fought for you. No matter where you are in your life and walk, God SO LOVED you that He gave His only Son—because He couldn’t let you continue living in a world that couldn’t save you.

His love is the kind that heals the brokenhearted, declares freedom to the captives, and delivers the oppressed. His love is the kind that brings the dead to life. And that’s the only kind of love that will change the world.