Daily Devotional
For the next several weeks we will be embarking on a journey to discover how we can make love our ultimate goal in life. Join us as we jump into a devotional written by Rick Warren titled, “40 Days of Love – A 28 Day Devotional” provided by YouVersion.
Your Struggle, God’s Love and Mercy Continue
When your world is falling apart, it’s so easy to focus on the pain, the problems, the pressure, and the difficulties. It’s the natural response. But the biblical response is to turn your focus to God’s love.
Even though you’re mad at God, you need to remind yourself how much he loves you. Focus on his unconditional love. Remember that you can’t make God stop loving you. You can complain, yell at him, and scream at him, but he will still love you forever.
You can see this biblical approach in Jeremiah’s life in Lamentations 3:19-24. Jeremiah starts out focused on his pain: “The thought of my pain, my homelessness, is bitter poison. I think of it constantly, and my spirit is depressed” (TEV). Jeremiah was consumed by the devastation around him; it filled his thoughts and made him bitter and depressed.
If you want to change your life, you have to change your thoughts. So that’s what Jeremiah did. We see the mental switch in the next verse: “Yet hope returns when I remember this one thing: The LORD’s unfailing love and mercy still continue, fresh as the morning, as sure as the sunrise. The LORD is all I have, and so in him I put my hope.”
God loves you. He is not the strict parent that you couldn’t please. He is not the imperfect parent with weaknesses and faults who messed up. He is God — the eternal, all knowing, infallible God who created you to love you and will never leave you.
So when you feel like you’ve lost everything, stop focusing on what’s lost and start focusing on what’s left: God and his love for you.
This devotional © 2015 by Rick Warren.
