Always loved, always valued

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? — Romans 8:35

We serve a God who loves us more than our work.

Oh, it’s true that God wants us to work to feed our families and to responsibly take care of the world He created. And He expects us to serve the weak, hungry, naked, thirsty, and broken people around us even as we remain alert to those who have not yet responded to the Holy Spirit’s tug on their lives.

And yet we serve a God who loves us more than our work.

We must never forget this because there may come a time when our ability to “do for God” is torn from us by health or failure or unforeseen catastrophe. It is in those hours that God wants us to remember that He loves us not for what we do for Him but because of who we are: His children! Once we call on the name of Christ for salvation, nothing — “trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword” — will ever again separate us “from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35, 39).

When all we can do or all we have is taken from us, then all He wants us to do is rest in our identity in Him. — Randy Kilgore

Father, help us never lose sight of the unconditional love You have for us, and let us hold on to that hope when our labor — and the fruit of our labor — are gone.

Read: Romans 8:31-39

The reason we exist is to be in fellowship with God.

Bible in a Year: Exodus 19-20 and Matthew 18:21-35