“But God proves his own love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
‭‭(CSB – Read the chapter)

How do you know when someone else loves you? That’s perhaps a tougher question to answer than we think at first glance. I mean, the other person’s telling you is a good clue, but words can be dishonest. So then, which things that they do for you confirm the suspicion? It’s almost certainly not any one, single thing. It’s a combination of words and actions with a generous splash of one other key ingredient. Let’s talk about how we can be confident of God’s love and what this other key ingredient is.

I fell in love with my wife the first time I laid eyes on her. She was standing with some of the other members of the camp staff in the entrance to the dorm at Spalding University where we met. The van had just returned from picking another member of the team and me from the airport and they were there waiting to greet us as we arrived. Everyone was excited and energetic and welcoming, but something was different about her. I’m not sure that I had wedding bells ringing in my head in that moment, but I knew that I had to get to know her more.

We spent the next several weeks slowly getting to know each other, especially over breakfast. I ate breakfast early in the school’s cafeteria as I am a naturally early riser. After the first couple of weeks or so, she started making sure she was there eating breakfast with me about every morning. I later learned this was her taking some initial steps in my direction too as she is not naturally an early riser.

By the end of the summer we were both very interested in each other, but we hadn’t said a thing to the other yet because of strict camp policies against relationships between staff members. It was obvious enough, though, that on a short weekend retreat for the staff at my aunt and uncle’s lake house when my parents came down to meet us, my mom later told me that she saw the connection between us almost immediately. By that time I did have wedding bells ringing in my head. I knew I loved her, and I was pretty sure the feeling was mutual.

How did I know? Well…because I knew. I knew how I felt, and I observed how she behaved. Did this give me some kind of empirical certainty? Of course not. That’s not how love works. Love like that isn’t something you could somehow test in a lab, whether that was a formal lab in a science building somewhere or just a makeshift field lab out in the wild. So much of what we think of when we talk about love today is an emotional response to another person. You can’t measure emotions. In a biblical sense, love is an intentional decision to see someone else become more fully who God designed them in Christ to be. You can’t measure that either, especially when we are talking about the kind of romantic love that leads to a marriage relationship.

So again, how do we know? How do we know when someone else loves us as I did with my bride? What’s this other key ingredient? It’s faith. We are willing to place our trust in something we cannot see, and by that trust operate on the basis that we are correct. We do this because of the evidence we have observed, but this evidence could easily be interpreted by someone else as not for sure pointing in the direction we are taking it at all. After all, love can be faked. Convincingly. This willingness to extend faith to the proposition that this other person loves us necessarily opens us up to being wrong and devastatingly so on an emotional level. But we extend the faith because of the potential payoff. Experiencing genuine and growing love with another person over the span of a lifetime is an awfully good thing. But it is a thing fundamentally rooted in faith; a reasonable faith, and one made all the more so over time, but faith nonetheless.

This same kind of reasoning helps us to know and have confidence in God’s love for us. At the very end of the day, our confidence in His love is rooted in faith. But it is a faith that is deeply informed by His actions toward us. Most notably, we know it because of His actions in sending His Son to die in our place so that we can have the relationship with Him He made us for. That’s what Paul is talking about here in his letter to the Romans. God proved His love for us by sending His Son for us.

This is a powerful idea that has been explored nearly endlessly. I just want to remark on two different ideas here. The first is this: God did this for us, He demonstrated His love by sending His Son for us, while we were His enemies. As a general rule, we do good things for our friends. Not so much for our enemies. With them, while we may not actively seek to do bad things (although we might depending on how much of an enemy they are), we certainly aren’t going to go out of our way to do them any favors.

As Paul points out a couple of verses later, though, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son while we were still actively His enemies. We were actively working against His purposes in furtherance of our own which were often diametrically opposed to His. We were fully committed to living in a delusional state of affairs in which we are fully autonomous beings with no higher sovereignty or authority over our lives than what we are willing to grant for ourselves…and we weren’t willing to grant Him that position. We were willfully blind to reality even though, as Paul wrote at the beginning of the letter, what can be known about God in terms of His nature and power has been clearly seen since the creation of the world through what He has made. In other words, and again, we were His enemies. And His demonstrated His incredible, sacrificial love for us anyway.

When someone goes way out of their way to do something of unrivaled goodness for us when they don’t have to do it, and at great personal expense, we can have a pretty high degree of confidence that they aren’t faking it. And when the stated reason for their doing whatever it was is because of their love for us, we can put quite a lot of faith in the truthfulness of the proposition.

All of this leads to the second thing. In the Sermon on the Mount (and likely many other places as that particular sermon was undoubtedly a collection of Jesus’ greatest hits that He preached everywhere He went), Jesus said that the ethic of the kingdom of God is to love our enemies. We are to pray for those who persecute us. We are to do good to those who hate us. To do anything else is inconsistent with the ethic of the kingdom of God and an indication that on at least that point, we are following someone other than Jesus. And if we are following someone other than Jesus, the label “Christian” really isn’t a very accurate or honest one to apply to our lives.

For Jesus to say that, though, while shocking and utterly at odds with how everyone had ever understood the world to work, could have just been His blowing righteous smoke at us. Until He put His money where His mouth was and laid down His life for us. By His sacrifice, Jesus demonstrated that He wasn’t just talk. He was committed to practicing what He preached. He was describing something about God’s kingdom that was actually true. God is love. He loves even His enemies, including us when we were there. His is a love we can count on and trust in. As Paul wrote a couple of chapters later in this same letter, “What, then, are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not even spare his own Son but gave him up for us all. How will he not also with him grant us everything?”

Indeed. With a love like this, what wouldn’t He do for us? Put your faith in this love and live in light of it. You will unquestionably be glad that you did.