Today, I want to encourage you with the way that God sees you. I don’t know if any of you are in this position right now, but I currently have a toddler. I have a two-year-old little girl who loves to be defiant sometimes, I will say, and if you had a toddler, if you have one, you know that they sometimes don’t listen when you tell them things. They don’t always do what you want them to do. They can be a little willful. However, and you probably know this even if you don’t have a toddler, but you’ve been to Target in the middle of the day and you’ve seen someone wrestling with one. Well, you know, it’s actually been really great perspective in my relationship with the Lord, because it’s really shown me that God, no matter what I do, or you know, when I’m disobedient to exactly what He wants me to do–I’m not encouraging disobedience–but He loves me the same. When I mess up, He loves me exactly the same.
You know, He may be frustrated with me. I mean, it’s biblical that God does get frustrated, right? Like He has emotions. However, He doesn’t stop loving me over those things, and I have opportunities to get back in right relationship with Him. You know, it doesn’t make me immune to consequences for sure. Just like with my toddler, I have to put her in timeout. Or sometimes we have to, you know, miss something fun that we wanted to do because she didn’t take her nap or, you know, whatever. But it doesn’t mean that I want her banned from my house forever, right? It just means that there’s a temporary consequence.
And so, I just want you to look at your life and if there’s something that you’ve been beating yourself up about, please stop. The Lord is running towards us like that father in the story of the prodigal son with open arms, right? And we get to be received by Him. And so I just want to encourage you with that today, that you are so loved. And also, you know, in the same concept, be encouraged that the Lord loves to spoil you. Like He actually likes it when you’re happy. Think about it. If you do know anyone who is a parent, like how much are they buying their kids toys, right? Or like, how much do you love buying toys for, you know, friends’ kids, right? It’s actually fun. It’s fun to see them enjoying things. It’s fun to see them enjoying simple things.
And just like toddlers, we are all walking around with limited understanding of the heavenly realms and all the things that He has created. We have really small understanding of something that’s very, very, very big, right? But God has so much grace with us and He actually likes it when we enjoy the good things that He has placed in our lives.
So I want to encourage you there as well. Feel free to cast off condemnation. Jesus didn’t come to condemn the world at all, but to bring you into right relationship with the Father. So I want to encourage you to press in on that today.