Good news for 2019, dear reader: God loves you.

If you’re like me (maybe a little jaded), this statement probably feels like Sunday school 101. But for the world’s most vulnerable people, understanding that God is love, and that God loves them, can be life changing.

Many people experiencing poverty and injustice truly believe that God is punishing them, that God is angry, or that God is simply unconcerned and distant while they struggle to survive each day. They imagine those verses about God’s love only apply to the prosperous and powerful, but they themselves are forgotten, abandoned, rejected.

Why pray about daily needs when God is so distant?

Why try to change things, if God opposes you?

Why hope?

Why attempt new things?

Why bother?

The belief that God is unloving helps to lock people in poverty, because transformation often takes radical acts of obedience…

One rural pastor believed that God was calling him to buy a plot of land where nothing had grown for years, ever since a witch doctor had cursed it.

Another church felt that they were supposed to show love to a violent gang leader who they were terrified to go near.

After a drought killed all the tapioca for miles around, some Christian farmers prayed about it and decided they should go to all the work of harvesting the shriveled fields anyway.

To take any of these leaps of faith, it sure helps to know that God is for you, that He wants you to flourish, that He has good plans for you…that He is love. As it happens, in all three of these cases, they did obey. The pastor bought the cursed land—and God caused it to grow more than all the land around it. The church found ways to serve the gang leader—and he ended up not only becoming a Christian, but a passionate evangelist. The farmers harvested the tapioca and found a miraculously abundant crop hidden beneath the parched earth.

Jesus’ whole life on earth—from His birth in a barn to His radical teaching, from the misfits He befriended to His criminal’s death—declared that our loving God identifies Himself with the poorest and most hurting people. That same God is still faithful to the many promises in Scripture to those who suffer. Please pray with us this month that Christians around the world, especially those experiencing vulnerability, would know the truth of God’s love, and that the truth would set us free.

(Aside: For anyone who struggles to reconcile “God is love” with the realities of our broken world, I highly recommend The Skeletons in God’s Closet: the Mercy of Hell, the Surprise of Judgement, the Hope of Holy War by Joshua Ryan Butler).