(Note: This article was originally published as a devotional column in my local newspaper)
The marvelous message of Christianity is, quite simply, that
God cares about us. We ought to stop for a moment and consider that there’s no
inherent reason demanding that God must care about us, any more than we must
care about the millions of bacterial life-forms that live in and around us. God
is eternal, all-knowing, and sovereign over the entire universe. We are finite,
mortal, tiny specks on one vanishingly small planet among his trillions of
worlds. One can easily imagine that a God who created a universe like this
would have a good many bigger things to care about than us.
But, astonishingly, he does care about us, and we know this
for a fact because of the way that he has consistently revealed it to us. Rev.
A. J. Padelford, the longest-serving minister of Second Baptist Church
(1877-1909), put it this way: “How inspiring the thought: God thinks of me,
even me! He yearns over me. He would save me. All this we find emphasized in
his word.”
In every part of God’s outreaching activity towards
humanity, we see his tender care displayed. In his work of creation, he gave us
ourselves, as well as all the magnificent beauty that surrounds us. In the laws
and commandments he laid down for his ancient people Israel, he gave us the
knowledge of how to live well, how to avoid the pitfalls of ruination of that
would otherwise follow from our undirected acts of selfish living. And above
all else, he gave us his own Son, Jesus Christ, who existed before all worlds
in a union of eternal bliss with the Father and the Holy Spirit. God, in his
own person, joined himself to us—took on human nature, lived our life, suffered
for us on the cross, died for us, and then conquered death definitively—all for
us.
God cares about you. It doesn’t matter how far you may have
drifted away from God, how many wrong things you’ve done, or how small or
insignificant you may feel. God cares about you, enough to give everything up
so that he could be close to you. And he not only wants to draw near to us, but
to raise us up, empower us, and give us a mission and an identity that will
shatter the narrow boundaries of our everyday lives by endowing us with the
grandeur of his great mission in the world. If we are friends of God through
Christ Jesus, then we have the unspeakable honor of becoming actors in the
great story that he’s writing.
Once again, here’s how Rev. Padelford put it more than a
century ago: “What an honor it is to be workers together with God, doing that
which has given us to do, and rejoicing in the thought: We are fellow-helpers
of the truth!”