To all you timid souls, the ashamed and shamed. To you who think it is too late, what you have done is too terrible, too much, or not enough. That you have messed up, failed. That you are a mess-up, a disappointment. The mistakes you have made are unforgivable, unredeemable. God has left you in disgust. You there, feeling unlovable and unloved. You, there in the bushes. Come. I want you to hear something about this God you are hiding from:
Some of us are religiously jumpy and self-conscious because we know that God sees our every thought and is acquainted with all our ways. We need not be. God is the sum of all patience and the essence of kindly good will. We please Him most, not by frantically trying to make ourselves good, but by throwing ourselves into His arms with all our imperfections, and believing that He understands everything and loves us still. -- A.W. Tozer, The Root of Righteousness
The love of God which lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive. -- Martin Luther, The Heidelberg Disputation
Be persuaded, timid soul, that He has loved you too much to cease loving you. – François Fénelon (1651-1715)
[Christ's love] is most tenacious. It will never let go. Who can separate us from it? (Romans 8:35). Paul challenges tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and sword to do it. He knows they cannot. The coals that fuel this love have a most vehement flame, the very flame of Jehovah (Song of Solomon 8:6, Heb.). The grip of Christ's love on his own will never be relinquished. Of this we may be perfectly sure. The greatest, most fearsome enemies that have ever existed - sin, death, and the devil - have tried to make him loosen his grip, but have failed. Will some lesser earthly foe succeed where these titans failed? Never. -- Douglas Taylor, Works Worth Declaring1, November 21, 2011
Do you not realize that the love the Father bestowed on the perfect Christ he now bestows on you? -- Charles Spurgeon
The prophetic word of Jesus spoken to a thirty-four-year-old widow named Marjory Kemp almost four hundred years ago remains ever ancient, ever new: 'More pleasing to me than all your prayers, sacrifices, and good works is that you would believe that I love you.' -- Brennan Manning, The Signature of Jesus
As Christian people we must learn to appropriate by faith the fact that God is our Father. Christ taught us to pray "Our Father." This eternal everlasting God has become our Father and the moment we realize that, everything tends to change. He is our Father and He is always caring for us, He loves us with an everlasting love, He so loved us that He sent His only begotten Son into the world and to the Cross to die for our sins. That is our relationship to God and the moment we realize it, it transforms everything. -- Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Spiritual Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965
You may fear that the Lord has passed you by, but it is not so: he who counts the stars, and calls them by their names, is in no danger of forgetting his own children. He knows your case as thoroughly as if you were the only creature he ever made or the only saint he ever loved. -- Charles Spurgeon
'Jesus . . . having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end' (John 13:1) … But he loved them to the end. Not only was his love exercised towards them to the last breath of his life, but to the fullest extent possible, in the worst possible circumstances. And if he loved them to, and through, all the dreadful agonies of Calvary, can we possibly think that he is so changeable as to forget them now? Never! It is impossible. As we saw recently, he does not change (Malachi 3:6; Hebrews 13:8). He loves us for ever. He is still mindful that we are 'in the world', and he will love us to the end of our journey, and beyond, to the endless ages of eternity. -- Douglas Taylor, Works Worth Declaring, January 9, 2012
If God loved me once he will love me forever. -- Charles Spurgeon
This is all that I've known for certain, that God is love. Even if I have been mistaken on this or that point: God is nevertheless love. -- Søren Kierkegaard
… He has loved you too much to cease loving you.
1Works Worth Declaring http://worksworthdeclaring.blogspot.com/
Photo, Ashamed, by Pedro Alves https://flic.kr/p/BKRmBk
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