What Can Separate Us?

One of the truths that has radically changed my life is that in Jesus, nothing can separate us from the love of God. There are hundreds of stories all around us. Every person here has a story. You might not know any stories in this room or maybe you know quite a few. But God knows every story of every person in here.

One of the themes emerging from Exodus is that God, the God that we worship, the God of the Scriptures, is the God who comes down to us and sees us. He is with us even in our affliction and even when hard circumstances fall on us and even when we don’t know why things are happening to us in our different trials God is there. He sees us there in those circumstances and he is even using it for our good.

So I once got one of those old little box T.V.s with the VHS player right there on it. And the reason was I wanted to wanted to buy old VHS tapes at the thrift store for like a dollar and watch the movies I grew up with with my kids. And so I had gotten the first Toy Story and I put the tape in and my 3 year old son Nahshon was hyped, but the thing was the tape was towards the end of the movie and I had to rewind it. And that’s a concept that kids nowadays don’t really have a grasp of. And so you can either just rewind it which still shows the picture but its going backwards really fast which works well if you’re just trying to rewind it a little bit but if you’re trying to go to the start of the movie you press stop and then rewind. And so I stopped it and pressed the rewind button and the screen goes in this wired black and white fuzzy type of stuff like there was no signal or something but you can hear it rewinding fast but the thing is it still takes like a couple of minutes. But as soon as I pressed stop and rewind Nahshon starts freaking out and he’s crying uncontrollably. In his mind, all he knows is that we were watching the movie and then Dad pressed a button and made the movie go away and he thinks not only that I stopped the movie but that I’m just sitting there not doing anything about it. I see him crying and I’m trying to explain to him that we have to rewind it so that we can see the whole movie. In my mind, for a second I thought I should just play it and then he’ll stop. But I knew that he would enjoy the movie more if he saw it from the beginning and not just the last 10 minutes of it.

And we can be like Nahshon. You see there are circumstances and situations in our life where because we are finite, limited human beings, we cannot see why we are going through different circumstances and trials. And you have to see the spiritual aspect of this. The enemy of our soul, will lie to us and say look at what you’re going through what kind of Father does that to his children. Our own minds will lie to us saying that, there’s no way God can love me if I’m going through this. Or God can’t be real if he would allow me to go through this. Like my son Nahshon we cannot understand how or why stuff is happening to us. It might be years before we might understand why something happened or maybe in this life we might never know why something happened and we wont know until we are face to face with Jesus.

And it’s hard because God didn’t create us to be robots he created us to have and experience real emotions. Often even our joy and hope is mixed with our sorrow and grief. God created us to experience emotion but we can easily let our emotions dictate to us how were going to live. But this is the main thing. Nahshon would have been wrong if he thought I was putting him through that trial of rewinding the movie for those brief minutes because I didn’t love him or because I didn’t care about him or that it was a random pointless trial. I am a weak limited Father that is just a frail human. Unlike me and any other human father God the Father is a perfect Father who has unlimited wisdom and love for his children. And his love is shown for us in that God the Son representing the Father, united himself to humanity as a real person and chose to identify with the pain and suffering of humanity and suffered with us and for us even to the point of death on a cross.

The Apostle Paul, writing to Christians about God’s love asks, what can separate us from the love of Christ? Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or danger or maybe death? And he lists all these possible things that people imagine would mean that they are separated from God’s love. And he answers his question by saying “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.