A Can’t Help Yourself Love
The more you understand grace the more you’ll be amazed by it.
| He will be gracious if you ask for help. He will surely respond to the sound of your cries. – Isaiah 30:19 (NLT) Our granddaughter has been getting into everything. She is like a two-legged bundle of curiosity, wrapped in a cloak of kleptomania. In other words, she opens everything and takes everything. Her autism prevents her from understanding boundaries or what’s delicate and sacred. She simply gets into these obsessions where she takes every trophy we have up, every key hanging on a key chain, every knickknack Wanda has on shelves, or anything else that catches her eye. We’ve had to make her leave her bags in the car or at home so she can’t cart any of our stuff off anymore. But she still likes to get into them. Sometimes she breaks things that are precious to us. It can be extremely frustrating and exhausting. But you know what’s funny? Even if she’s just done something that we could strangle her for, the moment she whimpers or gets sad, or stubs her toe and cries out to us, we rush to comfort her. Some people would say she has us wrapped around her little finger. And they’d be right. Does she make us want to scream sometimes? Yep. But what can we say? We love her with all our hearts. God’s like that with us. Isaiah tells us that in our passage today. The people of Israel had to make God nuts. They follow Him. They chase other gods. They worship Him. They set up idols. They pledge their undying allegiance and loyalty to Him. Then they turn around and break every law He gave them and every covenant they agreed to. Did God want to strangle them sometimes? Yep. Did He let them suffer the consequences of bad choices they made. Absolutely. But look at what Isaiah says. “He will be gracious if you ask for help. He will surely respond to the sound of your cries.” What God couldn’t do was stop loving them. What He couldn’t do was give up on them. What He wasn’t ever going to do was turn His back on them. The minute they cried out for help, He was there for them. He couldn’t help Himself. He simply loved them that much. God’s there for you today, too. You may be in a mess that you created yourself. You may be suffering the consequences of choices you made, things you said, or sins you committed. You may be beating yourself up and saying, “How stupid could I be?” You already know the answer. Pretty stupid. But God hasn’t quit on you. He hasn’t forsaken you or turned His back on you. Call on Him for grace with a broken heart, and you’ll be forgiven. Humbly ask for His help, and you’ll receive it. Though you know you don’t deserve it, God thinks you’re worth it. Your broken heart moves God. Your tears draw His Divine Empathy. Your cries for help ring loud in His Ears. Though you deserve a kick in the backside, God wants to lift you up, not beat you down. Cry out to Him, and He will respond to you with His mercy and grace. That’s because He loves you with all His Heart. |