Summary: Does God Care About the Big & Little Events of My Life? Do you wonder if God really knows you? If He cares enough to be personally involved in the everyday events and details of your life? The big things, the little things? He does know you, and He does care immensely! God is as real as you are. And I promise He knows you and will interact with you as if you are the only being in the universe, if you will allow Him to. He is already that near to you and intimately involved with your life. He suffered for you personally, not just for everybody else. He longs for you to know Him as you long to be known. That desire to be known can never be satisfied apart from encountering God. Does God Love Me? And God loves you—perfectly. “I know the plans I have for you,” He says in His word, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future” (Jeremiah 29:11). He knows the number of hairs on your head, the make of the mattress you sleep on, your hopes and fears, your thoughts as you first awoke this morning, your every site you’ve ever surfed and your every heartbeat and thought. He loves you. And I say this—that God knows you and loves you, whether you have felt known or loved by anyone else in your life or not. And if you’ve never felt fully loved, you may feel inclined to turn this message off. I invite you to stay for a few minutes, and try to open yourself to a new possibility. Being unloved in a fallen world is a horrible affliction to have suffered, but it does not mean you are unlovable. That’s just a lie that Satan adds on to keep you blinded from God’s love or any pure love of which he himself is jealous, of which he has rendered himself incapable on an interpersonal or divine level through his own will and hateful choices. Don’t throw out God and the possibility of real love because your own caretakers may have deprived you of the very love you craved. Three People God Loves Who Might Have Felt Forgotten, Abandoned, Insignificant I just want to share with you here three examples of God’s knowing others in the Word, who might have thought themselves forgotten, unloved, unknown, insignificant, or unimportant to God and others and in the world. I pray that the Spirit--the divine agent that sends truth to your mind and heart—will convey personally to you in a tangible way God’s awareness of and care for YOU—and that you then will continue your journey with us, nearer to Him. Nathaniel I love the story of Nathaniel in God’s word. Picture him sitting under a fig tree. Have you ever gone to sit outside to be alone with your most private thoughts, to dream, to wonder, to ask, to consider things you might never have shared with anyone in the whole world? Maybe not yet even voiced to your best friend, if you have one? I see Nathaniel there, and while I don’t know what he was thinking, I imagine it was one of those personal, under-the-tree experiences like I described. Had he already heard about the Savior and wondered about Him? Had He wondered if He really was the Son of God who would come and die for him? Did he have questions about his own predicament in life? Wonder about his purpose, his direction? Were there things personal and private in his heart and mind? We don’t have all the answers but we know he sat contemplating under the fig tree. And we know that whatever it was, Jesus knew it and no one else did. Listen to what the Bible says: “And when He [Jesus] saw Nathaniel, He said, “Before you were under the fig tree, I knew you” (John 1:48). Jesus met Nathaniel, where He will meet you-- where no one else can or could--in the realm of our hearts, minds, and most intimate thoughts. He joined the conversation with Nathaniel, and more, He let Nathaniel know He cared enough to know his thoughts and to respond to him. Jesus knew his whereabouts before, during and after he sat under the fig tree. He knew Nathaniel’s soul. He was privy to all of Nathaniel’s longings.
