Her dark brown eyes stared up at me from her bed, just above the bright floral comforter pulled up to her chin. She tried to sound casual as she asked her pressing bedtime questions: “Mom, which one of us do you love the most? Do you love Will more than me?” 

I tell my daughter I love her and prove it with my actions every day. And yet, when she watched me stop to comfort her hurting brother on my way to tuck her in, my daughter began to doubt my love for her. She questioned a basic truth that has been proven to her every day for her entire life. 

Her doubts sound a little too familiar.  

My heavenly Father has proven His love for me every day of my life. But when God delays in giving me something I think I need, I start to doubt. I question His timing, His provision, even His goodness. And the undercurrent of these doubts is this: “Does God still love me?” 

We might not say it out loud, but as we look at our struggles, we wonder: “Does God still love me?” We cried out to Him for healing, peace, deliverance, or strength, but it feels like He’s stopped in the hallway to care for someone else. 

And yet we see in Isaiah that God never forgets His children: 

“Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Behold, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands; your walls are continually before me.” (Isaiah 49:15–16)

God has not forgotten you, His beloved child. He has engraved your name on His hands. Our Savior stretched out those hands on the cross and felt the nails drive through them to demonstrate the extent of His unfailing love for us (Rom. 5:8). 

When it seems like God is letting us down—when we don’t understand why He hasn’t swooped in and saved the day—let’s cling to the truth. We can have confidence in His unfailing kindness and love. His love for us is everlasting (Jer. 31:3).  

No matter what you face this week, your loving heavenly Father has not forgotten you, and He never will. 

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For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been studying John’s description of Jesus in John 1. We’ve seen that God’s Son is eternal and all things were created through Him and for Him. Today we see that He brings light and life to a world in bondage to darkness and death:

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it . . . The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.” (John 1:4-5, 9)

Again, John wants us to make a connection to the creation story in Genesis 1. God created light and separated light from darkness (Genesis 1:3-4). He made the sun and the stars to give us light (Genesis 1:14-18). He created man and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Genesis 2:7). God is the giver of light and life.

Because of sin, the world God made was lost in darkness and destined for death. God sent His Son to bring the light of life:

“Again Jesus spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.’” (John 8:12)

Now light and life can be heard, seen, and touched in the Messiah, Jesus Christ. As an eyewitness to Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, John testifies about the “word of life”—that “which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands” (1 John 1:1).

God is the giver of light and life. In Jesus Christ, God shines the light in our darkness, that we may see our sin and confess our need for the Savior who died to give us eternal life. The darkness cannot overcome the light Christ brings. He has met our greatest need—our need to be saved from sin and death—so we can trust Him with every other need we have.

No matter what you face this week, Jesus brings you the light of life. 

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Last week we started studying John 1 and its evidence for why we can trust the eternal, divine Son of God, Jesus Christ. Today we learn more about what the Word was doing in the beginning of time: 

“He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:2-3)

The Word wasn’t a passive observer of creation—all things were made through Him. We read the words “God said” over and over in Genesis 1. With each act of creation, God spoke something into existence by the power of His Word. (See Genesis 1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 20, 24, 26, 29.) John wants us to make the connection that this Word is the Son who “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). 

What difference does this truth make in our daily lives when we struggle to trust Christ through difficult circumstances? Elsewhere in Scripture, we see the Word’s creative work tied closely with His sustaining reign over all things. Paul writes in Colossians that all things were created by, through, and for the Son: 

“For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17) 

In Hebrews, we see this strong statement about the sustaining power of the Word: 

“He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.” (Hebrews 1:3a) 

God the Son was there in the beginning. All things were made through Him and for Him. Nothing He has made can spin out of His control—He upholds it all by His power. This same Word is your Savior who gave His life for you. He is your good Shepherd, and He cares for you. 

No matter what you face this week, you can trust God’s Son because all things were made through Him and for Him. 

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The animated version of Disney’s Aladdin has always been one of my favorite movies. (Probably because I saw it with my husband on our second date in 1992!) There are two scenes early in the story when Aladdin asks Jasmine to do something scary, like jumping out a window or hopping on a flying carpet. He holds out his hand and says, “Do you trust me?” Because it’s a movie, she says yes—even though she has very little knowledge on which to base her trust. 

If you are a Christian, you’ve put your trust in Jesus Christ for your salvation. But when you face scary, overwhelming, or difficult situations, you may wonder if you can continue to trust Him. God’s Word gives us evidence so we know He is worthy of our trust. 

In John 1, we find many of those reasons, and we’ll look at several over the next few weeks. John introduces us to God’s Son this way: 

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1)

The Word is eternal. Genesis 1:1 tells us, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” And here John tells us that in the beginning, before creation began, the Word was there. John goes on to explain that this “Word became flesh and dwelt among us”—God’s Son, Jesus Christ (John 1:14). 

The Word is divine. It’s not just that the Word was there or that the Word with with God—John makes the Word’s divinity clear with the simple statement, “and the Word was God.” All that’s true of God the Father—His holiness, love, faithfulness, sovereignty, power, wisdom, and so on—is also true of the Son. 

And the divine Word wasn’t just there in the beginning—He will be there in the end. In Revelation 1:17-18, Jesus says: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one. I died, and behold I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades.” 

No matter what you face this week, you can trust the eternal Son of God. 

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