The Love for Which Your Soul Longs

The LORD is...abounding in steadfast love.

Psalm 103:8 (ESV)

Have you ever felt that regardless how much you do to please that significant person, it will never be enough? No matter how hard you try, you’ll never measure up to his expectations? Has the dream of love from your younger years been shattered?

Unfortunately, shattered dreams of fulfilling love are plentiful. Yet, there is a love unlike any human love you’ve experienced. It’s not based upon what you do, who you are, or how you measure up. It’s a love that far exceeds, infinitely outlasts, and more fully satisfies than any other love known to mankind—the love of the Lord Jesus Christ.

In God’s most repeated description of Himself (Exodus 34:6-7), He describes His love as abounding and maintaining. God wants you and me to know His love never runs out, never goes away, never fades. (Jeremiah 31:3) In fact, nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. (Romans 8:35-39)

We can be prone at times to misinterpret our trials and disappointments as a lack of God’s love. Yet, it is His love that takes each difficulty and makes us more than conquerors. When we walk through trials clinging to the Lord, He victoriously uses those trials to build faith and strength and to refine our character.

God is the initiator of love. He loved you and me first. (1 John 4:19) He didn’t love us because we were lovely. When we were wretched in His sight, He poured out His love upon us through Jesus, His Son, who died for us. (Romans 5:8) You didn’t earn God’s love, so you can’t lose it!

Do you know this love of God made available through belief in Jesus Christ? His is a love that will never disappoint!

I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ...may have power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge... (Ephesians 3:17-19).

Jan Burkhart