The Certainty of Love

The following video transcript has been lightly edited

  Hi. There's a great line in a Will Hogue song that says, "this world has a way of wearing you down a little day by day." If you scanned your life, you would probably be like, oh yeah, I can resonate with that. And the reason you can resonate with it is that there's some form of trouble, some form of challenge that I'm sure you are presently dealing with.

Maybe it's a long term struggle that you've adjusted to, but each of us has different challenges in this life- financial challenge, relational challenge, challenges at work relating to our promotion, the injustice and war in the world and all of these things at times leaves us feeling uncertain because we live in an uncertain world.

The powerful message that Paul has for everyone in the book of Romans is this, is that the certainty of God's love empowers hope and presence in an uncertain world. See, what Paul says is that because of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, God has forever bound himself to humanity. Therefore, nothing, nothing - not hardship, not hunger, not peril, not powers, nothing can separate us from the love of Christ and the love of God. And this is great news. So I want to give a couple thoughts to you to help you engage and live that out in your life.

The first, God's love is bound to you because God is bound to Jesus. In Jesus life, death, and resurrection, the historic church would believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human. And what that is, is that's God binding God's self to humanity. There's no way to separate it. Think about it like this. If you were to brew a cup of coffee, after the water passes through the grounds, you have this pot of coffee. The oils in the coffee have bound itself to the water molecules. And apart from doing some sort of challenging evaporation and distillation process, you cannot separate the coffee from the water.

You could pour it through any filter you wanted and it would still be bound together. And so the good news from Paul is that that's true about us. All the challenges we face, the trouble we face in this world, the relational difficulties, the physical loss, even death, even death, can't separate us from the love of God.

And so that fills us with hope because it is a certain thing. It's a certain thing that has been accomplished in the life, death, resurrection of Jesus. And so whether we know it or not, whether we're living out of it or not, that is our reality. We are tied to God's love.

And that is an empowering thing. It's empowering because it offers us hope. As we get worn down, you and I have a tendency to feel hopeless. As we face the uncertainty of this world, hopelessness sets in. But, if we remember that God's love cannot be taken away from us, and what God promises in God's love is that God will restore this world, will restore this creation, that God has come to save God's creation from the things that shatter living souls. That a future sits out there in which God's love will evaporate death and destroy it forever. If we remember those things, that even, even in those moments of hopelessness, when we think that there's no way forward, we can experience hope, because ultimately we are anchored to God's love that is not gained, that it's not lost, but it's something that is just true about who we are and the reality that we live in.

Finally, as Paul is writing to the church, he's writing to encourage them, but he's also trying to encourage them to live their identity. And as the people who understand the certainty of God's love, that God's love is bound to us in the person of Christ. That we have been empowered with this hope that we too are to be a people that live with a sense of presence.

We are to live alongside people, to walk alongside the challenges that come in this life. Now that's going to be hard for us because we can't fix it and so it pushes up against our own sense of inadequacy. There'll be times where it steals energy from us, sort of wear us down, and we'll have to make sure that we make choices to build ourselves back up.

But what we can do, though we can't fix anything, is that we can walk alongside people to let them know that they aren't alone. And ultimately, that's the call of the church. The church is to create a community that helps people know that they are not alone. And that's our hope here at Grace Community. We want to be a community of people that travel through the messiness of life together.

We want to be a people who choose hope, and we want a people that love our world. And we can do that because of the certainty of God's love, and the way that that empowers hope and presence in an uncertain world.

Whatever it is you're facing, Whatever that challenge is, whether it's a broken relationship, whether it's financial hardship, whether it's job loss, whether it's anxiety, whether it's a mental health challenge, know that no matter what happens, those things cannot separate you from the love of God and that there is hope and that God is going to journey alongside you and that we would love to journey alongside you.

Have a great week. Take care. Go with grace and peace.