Articles
Earn This
One of my favorite movies of all time has got to be Saving Private Ryan. This movie was set in World War II, where a platoon of soldiers worked their way inland on D-Day to try and save one soldier because his other three brothers had all been killed in combat and he was the only son left. The military, on behalf of their Mother, had set out to find and save him. In the final few moments of the movie, as most of the platoon sent to save Private Ryan had been killed, the captain who had been mortally wounded reached up and grabbed Private Ryan and whispered to him. He tells the Private something that will make him work his entire life to try and live up to. He simply whispered, “Earn this”.
Many times we can do the same with God can’t we? We often find ourselves trying to work hard to earn or win His love. We often believe that if we do certain things or accomplish tasks for him, that God will love us more than what he already does. There are those moments when we believe that we are just not good enough for Him. The great thing is, God loves us and he has loved us from the beginning! We don’t need to earn His love. Love is His nature and he extended it to us way before we ever knew it. Paul says in Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.” God is so deeply in love with those he created, that he wants us to know him and he wants us to know the depth of his love for us. So much so, that even before we were in Christ, he showed us his love through the sacrifice of his Son. Can we ever really do enough to earn that kind of love? There is no amount of work that we can do that will make God love us more. On the flip side of that, there is also nothing that we can do that will make God love us less either. There are times that we will sin, but that doesn’t stop God from expressing his love to us. To truly know God, we must embrace the fact that he loves us deeply and has provided for us an everlasting salvation through Jesus Christ. God is love and he loves you!
