Feeling the love

Doing some reading for a sermon late last week, I stumbled upon Jeremiah’s call story.
“The Lord gave me (Jeremiah) this message: ‘I knew you before I formed you in your mother’s womb. Before you were born I set you apart and appointed you as my prophet to the nations.’ “
I never noticed (isn’t it great that there is something fresh in these ancient words every time we read them?) the idea that God knew Jeremiah not in the womb, which is how I remembered it and would think it was wonderful. Instead, God knew him before he formed him in his mother’s womb.
Incredible. Amazing. Awesome. Before he formed him. Before he was a thought. Before he was a fetus. Before.
The implication is God knows it all about us before we are an us. Before life begins, God is. Before our own simple life becomes a simple life, God is there for us. He knows the outcome before there is a beginning.
It’s like we warm up at a baseball game though we know who is going to win it before the first pitch is thrown.
Er, wow.
That’s who God is to us and for us. He watches over us from before the beginning till after the end.
I reckon it could get better than that, though I don’t know how.
I can’t get over how much he cares for us. All my life I’ve felt some strange desire to please others, at least in part because I couldn’t please my own father on this ol’ heap of a planet. It’s built in there like a second heart. It caused me to work harder than most folks at that other occupation I spent a lifetime in, which isn’t all that bad. But it also caused me to never feel like I got the proper recognition.
And that is absolutely worthless.
Why?
Because I know he loves me. The Bible says in Isaiah’s writings, “See, I have written your names on My hands.”
The one who created me, loves me. Can you wrap your head, your mind, your life around that idea? I can, at times. At times, I forget. If feel worthless, sinful, broken. Still.
Most of the times that happens is when I continually mistake the scriptures for rule books.
But that’s not the purpose of those timeless writings. Love story after love story after love story are found in this thing we call the Bible. He knew you before you were born. He knew you before your mother, your father, your brother, your sister, your aunt or uncle, cousin or friends. He knew you and he wrote your name in the palm of his hand though he didn’t need the memory boost.
His love is eternal and all encompassing. We need nothing more than this.
John’s writings tell us “This is love! It is not that we loved God but that He loved us. For God sent his Son to pay for our sins with His own blood.”
He loved us.
First.
Before.
Before we made the choice to allow Him in. Before we did our big ol’ rituals, before baptism, before religion, before confirmation, before communion, before sermons and songs. Before it all.
He was. He is. I AM.
Love was before we were.
What a concept, an idea, a musing, a pondering. What a motion that flows into the ritual.
BEFORE the beginning,
He is, was, will ever be.
This morning stop, in the ever-lasting name of love.
That’s the people of the before, and that’s the people of the after. That’s whom we are loved by.
Before.
Join up and join in. That’s who He is. That’s who He will be. Ring the morning bell, friends, love has arrived.
Billy Turner is a pastor in the United Methodist Church denomination and a retired journalist.