An everlasting love
God's word through Jeremiah
Jeremiah is mostly a hard book — a prophet weeping over a nation marching toward judgment and exile. But in the middle of it comes a chapter of pure tenderness, where God speaks to his battered, unfaithful people not in anger but in love. And the love he describes has no beginning and no end.
I have loved you with an everlasting love, he says; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you. Notice the order. The love came first. The drawing — every nudge toward God you have ever felt, every desire for him, every return after wandering — was not the cause of his love but its result. He did not begin to love you when you began to seek him. He drew you because he already, always, had.
An everlasting love is one you cannot start by your goodness or stop by your failure, because it does not depend on you at all. It runs from everlasting, before you existed, to everlasting, after every other thing has passed away.
“Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”
— The LORD, through Jeremiah — Jeremiah 31:3 (WEB)
Rest in a love that began before you existed and cannot be switched off by your failure — it is everlasting, and aimed at you.
“It is because of the LORD's loving kindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn't fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
We believe God's love rises and falls with our performance, so we feel beloved on our good days and rejected on our bad ones. The interior work is to relocate the source of his love from your behavior to his nature — to grasp that an everlasting love neither began with your goodness nor ends with your failure — and to let that steady, unearned love hold you on the days you feel least lovable.
On a day you fail or feel distant this week, deliberately preach the everlasting love to yourself: God's love for me did not start today and will not stop today. Receive his mercy as new this morning, not earned by yesterday.
The flesh keeps tying God's love to your performance, so every failure feels like withdrawal and every good day like a bribe that buys it back. But an everlasting love began before you existed and will not switch off when you stumble — a love that never depended on you cannot be threatened by you.
We instinctively believe God's love for us rises and falls with our performance — warmer on the days we pray well and resist temptation, cooler on the days we fail. It is one of the deepest and most persistent lies about him. An everlasting love did not switch on when you got serious about God, and it will not switch off when you stumble tomorrow.
The drawing you feel toward him today is itself the evidence: you are being loved, right now, by a love that was loving you before the foundation of the world. You did not earn your way into it and you cannot fail your way out of it. It is, quite simply, everlasting — and it is aimed at you.
- Do I believe God's love for me rises and falls with my performance?
- Where am I trying to earn a love that is already everlasting?
- What would change if I knew I could not fail my way out of his love?
Lord, you have loved me with an everlasting love, before I was and after all else passes away. Steady my heart in a love I cannot earn or lose. Amen.