God loves us

While I was at Soul Survivor this year, I bought a set of Four Points badges (which I've already told you ended up on my Christian soldier bag). I was really pleased that I got them, but when I was looking at them in my tent later on, I discovered that there was something wrong with them - I had been given two x's, and no cross. I got it remedied, but it made me think about them in greater detail - these Four Points, designed to sum up the entire Christian faith in a simple way, have to be together as four, otherwise they wouldn't work.

For those who don't know what the Four Points are, they are these four symbols:

• A heart (God loves me)
• An x (I have sinned)
• A cross (Jesus died for me)
• A question mark (I need to decide to live for God)

So while I was staring at these badges, I started to think of what they would mean, or what would change, if one of them were to be missing.

If God didn't love us, He wouldn't care that we sinned and He wouldn't have sent Jesus to die for us.

If we didn't sin, Jesus wouldn't have had to die for us.

If Jesus hadn't died for us, we wouldn't have the 'Christ' in Christian and we'd all need to change our names to Ian.

And if we don't decide to live for God, we're simply not Christians.

Therefore, the Four Points need to work together. You can't have one missing, because it just wouldn't be Christianity anymore. I could go on for ages talking about each one of the Four Points, but I'm just going to talk about the first one: God loves me.

We're not unfamiliar with the concept of a God that loves us. It's in Scripture, it's in hymns and songs, it's in sermons and other preachings. But the Four Points don't say 'God loves us', they say 'God loves me'. This is a different concept. We spend too long focusing on the collective - God loves us - that we seem to forget that God loves each one of us individually, and we all receive His love equally.

For me, at least, this can be a rather uncomfortable concept. We can almost develop an insecurity complex. "Why does God give me so much love, when there are people in other parts of the world that need His love more; those who are victims of persecution, war, famine, injustice?"

The way I look at it is this: God created us as much as He created the victims of persecution, war, famine and injustice. Just because our problems are - in our eyes - nothing compared to what others are going through, that doesn't mean that God doesn't love us just as much.

We can see when reading about the Creation. God creates the world in steps; one bit after another. Six times during the Creation we read that God looked at His creation and said that "it was good". One of those times was when He created us. God created us, looked at us, and said that we are good. And that's why He loves us. He created us, and He loves us all the same, no matter what we go through.

And that's why we can look at the first of the Four Points and declare what it means with confidence. "Yes, God loves us as a whole, but He also loves me. Individually. Just as I am."