Lies Women Believe About God, Part 2

Series: Lies Women Believe About God

Leslie Basham: God doesn't love me. If you've have that thought lately and believed it, you've just fallen for one of the oldest lies known to mankind.

It's Tuesday, October 30. Welcome to Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss.

God loves you. It's a simple, profound statement that sometimes we have difficulty believing. All this week, Nancy Leigh DeMoss is teaching on lies women believe about God. Today she'll expose a lie that our enemy often tells us: "God doesn't really love you." Here's Nancy, teaching in front of a small group of women.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Frequently I receive notes from women like this one expressing a desperate longing to feel and know the love of God in their lives. This woman said, "I struggle with seasons of oppression and torment. I desire desperately to know the love of God for me and to be deeply satisfied in a love relationship with my Savior."

Another woman said, "Although I was a child of God, I had believed throughout my life that certain aspects of the truth applied to everyone except me. God was good to them, but not to me. God loved them, but not me. Others were of great worth to God, but not me. I knew the facts," she said, "that God is good, God loves me, and that I was of great worth to him, but there was no connection in my mind between fact and how I felt. Surely if God loved me and I meant so much to him, I would feel loved and valued."

You know, this is another one of those lies that most of us would not admit to believing. In our minds, we know we're supposed to believe that God does love us, but for so many of us as women, there is that disconnection between what we know and what we feel to be truth. Now, therein lies one of the problems, and that is that we tend to believe what we feel rather than what we know is truth.

And so, as we look at our relationships, you may be living in a loveless marriage. You may be experiencing rejection from an ex-mate or grown children who never come home to visit, never call. Perhaps you're single, approaching 40, and not a suitor in sight--no possibility for marriage. You are feeling sad, your feelings say, Nobody loves me. And the implication is, not even God. When the seed of a lie is planted in our minds, we dwell on the lie until we ultimately come to believe that it's true. And sooner or later our behavior is going to reflect what we really believe. And we will end up in bondage.

Now, it's no small matter to believe this lie that God doesn't love me. We're looking at lies women believe about God, and this particular one has enormous implications. It affects every other area of our lives and relationships. Those little seeds that we allow to come into our minds--maybe God doesn't really love me--ultimately will take roots and then grow up to produce this incredible harvest and produce great damage.

So how do we deal with that lie? As always, we counter the lie with the truth. The truth is that God does love me. God loves you. God loves us--whether or not we feel love and regardless of what we have done, where we have been, what our past is. God loves us with an infinite love.

And that's one of the wonderful things, by the way, about the love of God; His love, unlike our natural human love, His love is not based on what we have done. It's not based on our worth, it's not based on our performance, it's not based on anything we could do to please Him or to gain His favor. It's not based on our worth, but His love for us is based on the fact that He is a loving God. He doesn't love us because we're lovable, He loves us because He is love. His love is something that we do not deserve; and we could never, ever earn, no matter how hard we try.

I have a friend named Melina who has faced a long, hard battle with breast cancer. Ultimately she had to have a double mastectomy; and she wrote a letter following that surgery that shared how God used that experience to bring her to a deeper comprehension of the incredible love of God. She said as she was with her husband, "We wept and trembled when he took my bandages off for the first time after surgery. I was so ugly, scarred and bald. I was in intense grief that I could never be a whole wife to him again.

Steve held me tightly and with tears in his eyes said, "Melina, I love you because that's who I am."

Melina said in her letter "I instantly recognized Christ in my husband." As the bride of Christ, we are also eaten up with cancer--sin--and are scarred, mutilated and ugly. But He loves us because that's Who He is. "No comeliness in us draws Christ's attention," she says. "It's only His essence that draws Him to us."

Someone sent me an email yesterday. And I just have to read this passage to you, it's a wonderful passage from a sermon by Charles Haddon Spurgeon on the love of Christ. He said, "Surely there cannot be a more delightful thought that can fill the soul of a mortal than this: the Son of God loves me. Did you never sit down for half an hour and try to digest this thought? That God should pity me, I can understand, being so far inferior to Himself and so full of misery. That He should be generous to me, I can comprehend from the liberality and bounty of His nature and from my great necessities. But that He should love me? Wonderful!"

He goes on to say, "I cannot see anything lovely in myself. And there are many who see that there is much unloveliness about me. And I do not doubt that there is. But yet, He Who knows me better than I know myself and is not unmindful of my infirmities and weaknesses; He says that He loves me."

"He does not put me at arm's length and then feed me from His bounty, that would be gracious. But He opens wide His bosom and takes me into His heart. And to which of the angels did ever He say this: (I believe angels are the subjects of divine love in a certain sense, but I have never read of Christ saying to them) 'As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.' This is the special privilege of the sons of Adam who have fallen, which angels never have. How marvelous!"

Spurgeon goes on to say, "And is it not more than marvelous that God should have selected me out of the sons of Adam? Perhaps there is nothing in you which you can look upon as a reason why God should love you. Did I say perhaps? Why, there are 10,000 things about every one of us that might have won for us the Almighty's hatred.

Instead of this He says that He loves us.

I was pondering (through these last days) the matter of the love of God, and my heart kept going back to the hymn--you're familiar with it:

Hannah Whitall Smith is a beloved devotional writer who, as many of you know, experienced deep pain and rejection throughout her life. She was a woman who knew how to find refuge in the love of God. I have in my living room at home a framed piece with the words by Hannah Smith that are her attempt to express the vastness of the love of God. This is what she wrote:

Put together all the tenderest love you know,
The deepest you have ever felt,
And the strongest that has ever been poured out upon you,
And heap upon it all the love of all the loving human hearts in
the world,
And then multiply it by infinity,
And you will begin, perhaps,
To have some faint glimpse of the love God has for you!

You see, we counter lies with the truth. And our hearts are washed with the water of the Word of God. We renew our minds--when we doubt in our emotions the love of God, when we feel unlovable as we are--we go back to the Word of God, and our hearts are renewed. So let me just (as we close here) wash our hearts with the Word of God and what it has to say about the love of God.

The apostle Paul had come to experience himself the love of God there on the road to Damascus, and he never got over the wonders of what the love of God meant in his life. He says in Romans chapter five "God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:5-8)

For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38)

Leslie Basham: That's Nancy Leigh DeMoss reminding us of the riches of God's love that are revealed to us in the Bible. Nancy will be back with a concluding prayer. And if you've been given a fresh appreciation of God's amazing love today, I want to encourage you to get a copy of Nancy's book Lies Women Believe and the Truth that Sets Them Free. In it, Nancy exposes eight areas of deception most commonly believed by Christian women, including the lie, God doesn't love me.

You can get a copy of Lies Women Believe for a suggested donation of $17. It's available on our Web site ReviveOurHearts.com. And while you're there, you can also order a copy of today's program. It's part of a week-long series called "Lies Women Believe about God." The whole series is available on one cassette for a $5 suggested donation.

You can also call us to order. Our number is 1-800-569-5959.

Maybe you've had an experience that made you understand God's love in a deeper way. We'd like to hear about it. Write us at Revive Our Hearts. When you call or write us for any reason, we'd like to give you the new Quiet Rest Wall Calendar for free. The beautiful artwork and quotes from Nancy's book will remind you of God's love and peace.

Now, has the relationship you've had with your earthly father made you fearful of your Heavenly Father? Tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts, Nancy Leigh DeMoss will take a close look at the lie that God is just like my father. I hope you'll join us then. To lead us in prayer, here's Nancy:

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I'd like to pray for you the prayer that the apostle Paul prayed for the Ephesians believers:

"I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the a measure of all the fullness of God" (Ephesians 3:17-18).  

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss is a ministry partnership of Life Action Ministries.

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