The sight of the healthy or successful prompts us to conclude, God must really love him. He’s so blessed with health, money, good looks, and skill. Or we gravitate to the other extreme. Lonely and frail in the hospital bed, we deduce, God does not love me. How could he? Look at me.
Rebuff such thoughts! Success signals God’s love no more than struggles indicate the lack of it. The definitive, God-sanctioned gauge is not a good day or a bad break but the dying hours of his Son. Consider them often. Let the gap between trips to the cross diminish daily.
Discover what David Brainerd, the eighteenth-century missionary to American Indians, meant when he said, “My heart was swallowed up in God most of the day.” Accept this invitation of Jesus from John 15:9, “Abide in My love.”
