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“Jesus Loves Me”
Devotional- Chris Tomlin

Jonah couldn’t do it. Nor could Moses nor David nor Paul. They couldn’t escape God’s call. Jonah literally jumped ship and still wound up in the will of God in Nineveh. Moses protested when God called him to deliver His people from slavery yet became one of the greatest leaders in Israel’s history. David was initially overlooked by everyone to be the next king, everyone but the Lord. And Paul killed and convicted the ones he eventually became like after an encounter with God on a road.

I couldn’t run, couldn’t run from His presence
I couldn’t run, couldn’t run from His arms

These biblical stories point to one truth: when God pursues us, there is nothing we can do to escape Him. The gospel of Matthew explains why this is in the parable of the lost sheep. “If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray?... So it is not the will of my Father who is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish” (Matt. 18:12-14). God does not want us to perish, not a one of us.

Jesus, He loves me, He loves me, He is for me
Jesus, how can it be, He loves me, He is for me

And because of Jesus, we won’t perish. His sacrifice made the way for us.

We aren’t made to run forever. The farther we go, the deeper into the dark we get and the harder it is to decipher the voices in the forest. Are they God’s? Are they our own? We can feel hopeless, like we have lost the way.

I stepped out of the dark
And into the light
When He called my name

But belonging to God means we are a chosen people. I Peter says, “you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9). God’s voice illuminates the darkness; Jesus’ sacrifice lights the path back home. You can never be in too deep. The world can never be too dark. For it is in the dark that He meets us.

My heart was a stone
I was covered in shame
When He came for me

Paul promises in Romans that “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus came to heal the sick, not the healthy. He wants you in your mess, not after you’re out of it. That’s the twist. We think we have to clean up for Christ when actually, he came to cleanse us because we can’t do it ourselves. When we come to see him this way, for the truth of who he is, we realize that Jesus really is our only hope. He really is our everything.

By Andrea Lucado