Speaker: Darlene Sala | Series: Encouraging Words | When Elizabeth Prentiss was a teenager back in the 1800s, she became so disgusted with her temper and lack of self-control that she was sure God could never love her. She told a minister-friend, “I am angry with myself and…angry with God. I can’t be good two minutes at a time. I do everything I do not want to do and do nothing I try and pray to do.”

The minister replied, half to himself, “Poor child…that cannot see…that its Father’s loving arms are all about it! All you say may be true. I dare say it is. But God loves you. He loves you.”

Then he told her, “Go home and say over and over to yourself, “I am a wayward, foolish child. But He loves me! I have disobeyed and grieved Him ten thousand times. But He loves me! I have lost faith…I do not love Him; I am even angry with Him! But He loves me!”

At home Elizabeth knelt down to pray. As she tells it, “all my wasted, childish, wicked life came and stared me in the face. I looked at it and said with tears of joy, ”But He loves me!”

Absolutely nothing you can do will keep God from loving you. The apostle Paul was persuaded of that. He wrote, “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 8:38-39).

I recently spent time with four different women who have endured painful abuse in their homes. One of the questions I asked each of them was, “How did you cope? What kept you from committing suicide?” Almost without exception the answer was that they came to realize the fact: “God loves me—unconditionally!”

No matter what you have done wrong, friend, don’t forget to add, “But He loves me!”