April 27, 2020 – Daily Devotion
Some say that thou their endless love hast won
By deeds for them which I may not believe
Thou ever didst, or every willedst done;
What matter, so they love thee? They receive
Eternal more than the poor loom and wheel
of their invention ever wove and spun.
I love thee, for I must, thine all from head to heel.
–from Diary of an Old Soul by George McDonald
His Unchanging Love by Alvin Rogness
I have friends who believe that God finds them a place in the parking lot, that he recovers lost keys, or that he keeps them from flunking a course. They pray, and it is done.
God has put no limits on what we can pray for, it is true. And who am I not to bother God with such prayer– who am I to think my friends a bit naive? Maybe they are right? In any event, when they find their keys, they thank God. And that’s enough.
He is after all the giver of all good. Recovering one’s keys may not be a major good, compared with Christ dying on a cross to redeem the world. But even the so-called trivia of life are a part of his great package of blessings. If the keys are lost and never found, however hard one prays, the truly wonderful gift, the gift of forgiveness and life with him, is not lost.
We pray that our friend will arrive safely at his destination, but there is an accident and he is killed. We pray that the plant may not close, but it does, and we lose our jobs. We pray that our marriage will hold, but it falls apart and in pain we go our separate ways. These are bigger issues than the loss of keys, and prayer fails. It is then that we fall back on the one unchanging guarantee of God’s love, the cross of Christ. He does love us, no matter what happens in the variables of life, because he died for us. We love him, not because of recovered keys, but because in the cross he has reclaimed us as his own. This is the measure of his love.
“See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children
of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).
Alvin Rogness (1906-1992) was president of Luther Seminary, St. Paul, MN, from 1955-1974.