The graph of love
“Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.” (Jeremiah 31:3)
A wise brother once told me that it is when we are relatively young that we have so many demands placed on us. These demands include responsibilities towards each other, our children, our families, our Christian fellowship and our work. The pressures can be intense. All the time, we have to deal with small and large changes. On occasions, we can anticipate change, but at other times it comes unexpectedly. Today we are experiencing worldwide sudden change on a scale we never imagined.
For several years June and I organised a young Christian couples’ weekend to encourage them in their marriages and family life. We often started the weekend by asking each couple to individually draw a graph representing their experiences throughout married life. Then we asked them to compare the results and talk together about the joys and challenges they had faced. One year, when a couple did this exercise, the wife’s graph was, as you would expect, a history of the highs and lows of married life. The husband’s chart was a straight line!! We had the sense of his not being fully committed to the process. But it struck me that he had, unintentionally and simply, described something we should never lose sight of – the eternal and never changing love of God: “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
God is love. That was true before the world began. It is true now and will be true when this world ceases to exist. But on this tiny planet God has revealed the immensity of that love in the Lord Jesus Christ. How could we ever truly know God existed or that His nature was love? Only by His coming into the world which He made and we inhabit; by God becoming man and revealing the wonder of His love directly in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.
If you had put the two graphs of our young couples together to represent their journeys, you would still not have the full picture. There is a missing line, the constant love of God. It is the line expressed in the words of the prophet Jeremiah, “Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”
God’s eternal and constant love also traces the path of our lives. It was the love known by Jacob – “the God that shepherded me all my life long to this day” (Genesis 48:15, Darby Trans.); by David – “You are with me” (Psalm 23:4); by Paul – “The Lord stood by me” (2 Timothy 4:17, ESV); and expressed by the Lord Jesus – “I will never leave you, nor forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5).
When my daughter, Anna, was very young, we were travelling home late one night after a long weekend. She was looking through the rear window of the car, watching the moon in the clear night sky. Then she asked me, “Dad, why is the moon moving?” I replied, “The moon isn’t moving, we are!” Sometimes we are close to the Lord, and sometimes we move away from Him, at times a long way. But He never moves away from us:
“Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; Therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.” (Jeremiah 31:3).
Let that love flood our hearts today.
