Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong;
They are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
Yes, Jesus loves me,
The Bible tells me so.
I grew up singing this song in Sunday school, I had the words memorized but my heart did not understand what it meant to say Jesus loves me. The phrase ‘Jesus loves you’ is so overused in our culture today that most times we don’t really think what our response should be to this love. The people in our lives that we love and that loves us in return are often people that we have taken time to get to know and that we have allowed to know and see us, in this regard, building a relationship with them developed an affinity in our hearts for them.
I would sing this song in church on Sundays and go back home bottling up my anger against God. In my mind, my anger against God was justified but essentially what I had done was to assign some character traits to God that weren’t true about Him. For example, I believed Jesus couldn’t want someone like me. My view of God was warped because I didn’t have a relationship with Him, I hadn’t spent time to get to know Him, therefore, I believed all the lies that our culture says about God.
A lot of people when they paint a picture of Who God is in their minds, imagine God as a joy killer or a dictator opposed to fun or pleasure. Also, a lot of people view Christianity as a religion with a long list of dos and don’ts. These views come from a wrong perception of God. For us to walk with God, we must understand that God is who He says He is not who we think He is.
Even though I sang the Jesus loves me hymn for years, I didn’t understand its meaning in my heart until I actually started spending time with God. Basically, I went through a season of loneliness which pushed me to God, in this season I started reading my Bible for myself. For me, this was the first time I was actually spending time with God outside of church. I began to see for myself who God is, and my warped view of God slowly started fading and the right view of God was beginning to lighten up my mind.
Jesus is not calling us to a religion of rule-following, He is calling us into the sweetest deepest relationship on earth. He loves us and He wants to know us and be known by us. “Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.”-James 4:8. One of the most beautiful things about this relationship that Jesus is inviting us into is that God wants us to know Him too, it is a two way relationship, as we draw closer with a heart yearning to know Him, He draws closer to us because He also wants us to know Him.
As the veil began to fall from my eyes, I realized that I wasn’t a Christian. Yes, I had been raised in the church, but I didn’t have a relationship with God, it wasn’t something I had wanted. But as I spent time getting to know God, I realized that a relationship with God was the most beautiful thing on earth, my soul yearned to be united with its maker. Therefore, I said my vows, that is, I prayed the prayer of repentance and chose to walk with Him whom my soul had always longed for.
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