Love Hurts God the Most

thank you notes for children’s ministry volunteers

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I’m hurting. You’re hurting. Everyone, it seems, is hurting.

While we remain so sensitive to our own pain, let’s pause for just a moment to consider the pain God accepts when he adopts us as sons and daughters.

God knows that answering our cries for mercy and saving our souls will cause him more suffering than ten thousand women in labor.

We will betray him. We will resist him. We will fall away on many levels. He will pursue us, he will discipline us, accept us back and forgive us.

He will ache as we bring untold misery into our lives through our disobedience because now he is watching a daughter or a son ruin their worlds. Every act of rebellion, every unkind word we utter to others, every self-sabotage is like one more dagger thrust in his side. We’re his children. He can’t stop caring.

Still, he will be patient even as we blame him for the pain we brought into our own lives by going our own way. He warned us. We pretended we didn’t hear. And then we blame him for the fallout.

Still, he loves. Still, he pursues.

Knowing how much pain one sinner saved costs him again and again (not just to save us—that was paid 2,000 years ago—but to keep us), it’s amazing our Heavenly Father doesn’t say the quota is met and he can’t take it anymore, won’t pay it anymore. Adopting sinners has become too painful, too costly, it’s overwhelming. He’s reached his end. No more adoptions. No more salvations.

But that’s not what he says; not even close. He says, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).

Though the pain and cost to him for every saved soul is beyond measure God still calls and still saves and thus…still agrees to hurt.

God hurts for you, and keeps hurting for you, like you have never hurt for anyone else.

When your spouse breaks your heart, when your kids take you for granted, when your parents disappoint you and your friends betray you, you know love hurts.

Just remember, however, that love hurts our Heavenly Father most of all.

This article originally appeared here.

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Gary Thomashttp://www.garythomas.com/
Gary Thomas is writer-in-residence (and serves on the teaching team) at Second Baptist Church, Houston, Texas and author of 18 books that have sold over a million copies worldwide and have been translated into a dozen languages. He and his wife Lisa have been married for 30 years. Please visit his amazon link.

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