Tag Archives: God doesn’t love me

You’re Broken, Not Defective

You might be broken, but you’re not defective. They’re not the same thing, not at all.

You could think of it like this. You make a clay pot and put it in the kiln. When you take it out, the handle falls off, and the bottom crumbles. That’s defective. It wasn’t made well. It’s junk. You make another clay pot and it turns out beautiful. Then someone drops it on the floor. Now it’s broken. It was made perfectly, but later it got damaged.

That is me, and maybe you, too. Most importantly, it’s Jesus. Brokenness is something he, you, and I all have in common. He was perfect, but he got thrown on the floor and broken. He was abused, taken advantage of, and violated in the worst possible way. (See also
https://freespiritseedcompany.com/2022/01/22/2/)

He was broken — all the way broken — maybe just like you.

Your heavenly Father defines who you are, not your brokenness.

He was forsaken by his friends, beaten repeatedly, tortured.

But that is very different from being defective.

Your heavenly Father defines who you are, not your brokenness. Not other people. And not even you. He made you wonderful, the Bible says (Psalm 139:14). He is The Highest Artisan, and he personally handcrafted you, right there in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13).

Maybe someone lied and said you’re a mistake, an accident, should never have been born. I’m gonna be honest and say your Creator drew the detailed blueprints for you way before you were ever conceived. Before time began, to tell the truth. So no, you’re no accident. You have purpose. You should ask him to reveal that to you. It might be as simple as, “He put me here to praise him.”

A defective pot is worthless and useless. But a handsome, beautiful pot that has been shattered only needs to be put back together. He can do that with you, just like happened with Jesus. It’s his specialty.

“I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.” ‭‭Joel‬ ‭2‬:‭25‬ ‭ESV‬‬

That is an agricultural image. Picture endless miles of crops. Millions of insects descend on it, devour, and leave it in shreds. Maybe that is like many of the years in your life. It is mine. Somehow, he is slowly restoring to me ‘the years the locust has eaten,’ piece by piece. He’s putting my broken pieces back in place. It’s mysterious, but he can repay to you everything you lost, as he promised. Just keep following him, and don’t give up.

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”
‭‭2 Corinthians‬ ‭5‬:‭17‬ ‭ESV‬‬
If he can make us from the dust, can’t he remake us, too?

“But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.”
‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭64‬:‭8‬ ‭ESV‬‬

More Important than Loving God?

First off, you probably already know how Jesus summarized the most important commands for humans. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Matthew 22:37-40

So love God and love each other. What could possibly be more fundamental? Maybe: whatever empowers and motivates us to obey those commands. That, I think, is God’s love toward us.

“We love because he first loved us.”
1 John 4:19

You can be nice to anyone out of sheer will power, at least for a few minutes. But that is not why we treat our good friends well. We’re kind to our closest friends because it just flows out of us naturally. We don’t have to ‘try.’ In fact, we may even be nicer to other people when we’re around that friend because that’s just the effect they have on us.

Similarly, the more time you spend meditating or thinking about the love of God for you personally, the more you will find love spontaneously coming out of you toward God and others. Knowing he loves us makes love flow out of us naturally.

The only thing more important than receiving God’s love for us is Who He Is in himself. He, of course, is Love. “God is love,” I John 4:8.

This is good news for those of us who feel undeserving, because it recalibrates everything. Do you see it? Where is the focus when we think, “How could God love me? I don’t deserve it. I’ve done all these bad things?” Yeah, that’s what we say we are looking at ourselves. Which is why this verse is so great. When we look away from self to Father, we go, “Oh, now I get it. He doesn’t love me because of me. He loves me because of him.” Like when people say, “Well, that’s just the way I am.” And God is saying, “I am loving because that’s just the way I am.”

The very most important thing is Who God Is.

So, the more time and effort we invest into finding out what his personality is like, what makes him tick, the better we’ll understand why he has so much affection for us.

And the more we realize how deeply we are loved, the more it naturally transforms us into loving people. It takes less and less effort (although it still takes effort) and becomes more second nature. And that makes it a zillion times easier to love God and others.

Forty Ways Jesus is Like Me, and Maybe You, #9

He got soaking wet in a river.

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the Spirit descending on him like a dove. ‘Mark 1:9-10

Picture it. You’ve seen rivers. Most of them are a little murky. Maybe the water was high from rains upstream, with leaves and muddy twigs in eddies swirling beside the bank.

Up he comes out of the water, the same way we do. Wet hair sticks to his face. He’s drenched. Water dribbles off his sopping clothes, the drip, drip, dripping of clear beads from his beard back onto the river.

Stepping ashore, he leaves a soaked, muddy trail in the dry dirt, which fades after twenty minutes in the sun.

Maybe he went swimming afterwards. Why not? He was human.

Non-religious, Non-cliché Thoughts About The Unconditional Love That We All Crave

If someone gives you $100 it might be because you loaned them money and they owe you. But it may be that that person is super generous and at Christmas time they always give away $100 bills to strangers. In that case, goodness came to you, but not because you were good first. It’s just because the other person is kind hearted.

If waiters in tuxedos serve you the finest wines with expensive steaks and exotic foods, it might be because you are important and you deserve it. Or it might be because you went to a fancy wedding and you benefited from someone else’s extravagant generosity which they honestly didn’t owe to you.

And if you wreck into someone and they forgive you, it could be because that’s your mom and today’s your birthday. But maybe not. It might be that you crashed into someone who wrecked into a Ferrari last month, and the Ferrari driver happened to be a wealthy philanthropist. They had simply smiled and said, “Don’t worry about it. Just pay it forward.” And now it’s being paid forward — to you. That’s why you’re forgiven, not because of your warm personality, but because of the lavish goodness of someone else’s heart.

And if God says he loves you no matter what, it could be because you’ve never done anything wrong. But it might be that he sees each of your warts and all your skeletons, knows every terrible thing you’ve ever done or even thought about, and Unconditional Love is just Who He Is. Maybe it’s because He has a good heart, not because you do.