About a week ago, a friend from church asked me the question:

"How do you know that God loves you?"

Now, my friend is a Christian, so the question was not theological, but more of a personal question. I didn't have an answer for her on the spot, so I spent last week trying to think of what my answer would be. To be honest, each answer that I came up with sounded cheesy and contrived. Obviously, I know that God loves me because He sent Jesus as a ransom for my sins. But my friend was looking for more than just a Sunday school answer.

Today I think I scratched the surface in coming to an answer. In ECHO Matt preached on Matthew 6:25-34 regarding not worrying about our life. In his sermon, he described different philosophical views regarding how God (or gods) interacts with the world. He described one as a closed system where the laws of physics hold and God is bound by these laws. In this view, God is more of a force or aura that is present in the atoms and nature around us. The other was a closed system with the laws of physics and this world, but God was outside of this system, overlooking and maintaining order. This was the view that we should have regarding how God works in the world. What does this have to do with not worrying? Matthew 6 says that God provides for everything and everyone. While the passage says "do not worry" multiple times, the focus is not on us not caring about the future, but it's about God's power in knowing and providing for everything.

So back to the first question: how do I know that God loves me? When I look back at the last couple of years, I see good and bad things that have happened to me. Yet for every bad thing that has happened, I have eventually seen God's hand at work and bringing blessing to me. When I got laid off, God provided me a means to go back to school. When God took away a relationship, He increased His grace on me and so that I would appreciate the Cross way more. When I left my old church, and felt so alone in having to visit churches for several months, He provided me EVFree where He has poured out blessing after blessing on me through people there. God didn't have to do any of these good things for me, but He did because He is love.

Maybe that still sounds cheesy, but I don't care.