In Lisa McCourt’s sweet children’s book, I Love You, Stinky Face, a mother tells her little boy she loves him. But he has questions.
What if he was an ape?
She assures him that if he was an ape, she’d make a birthday cake out of bananas and tell him she loved him.
The boy has more questions. What if he were a stinky skunk? A sharp-toothed alligator? A dinosaur? A swamp monster? An alien?
Over and over, her gentle answer is the same: she’d love him completely and always take care of him.
Most of us can relate to that little boy. We’ve heard that God loves us, but we have questions. Could God really love us, even with all our faults?
In Romans 5, the apostle Paul emphasizes that God’s love reached out to save us “while we were still sinners” (V. 8). This is truly unconditional love we struggle to fathom. The greatest human love we see is when “someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good” (V. 7).
God doesn’t love us less in our imperfections; instead, when we were furthest away from Him, Jesus loved us enough to die for us. Because of that sacrifice, He’s given us the Spirit to “fill our hearts with his love” (V. 5)—a love we can trust completely.
