Devotional | Jennifer Ayotte | Apr 7, 2020

ENCOUNTERING CHRIST

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ENCOUNTERING CHRIST

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins … We love because he first loved us. - I John 4:10, 19

DEVOTION

While going through 40 Days of Prayer together as a church family, I have been pondering my wilderness journey and my encounter with Christ. For some reason, I am saddened by the thought that I don’t know the day of my very first encounter with Jesus.

I didn’t grow up in a family that attended church, but when I was a child, some men from a church in town knocked on our door and asked my dad if he’d want to let his kids go to church on the bus. He was thrilled to get rid of us for a few hours each weekend, so he happily agreed. I don’t remember the day or age, but I do remember asking Jesus into my heart in a Sunday School class in that church as a child.

My parents never did attend church and through some difficult family circumstances and moves, I did not get to go to church through most of my teen years. When I was a senior in high school—dealing with more difficult family issues—I asked a friend of mine who I knew went to church if I could go with her sometime.

From that point on, her family picked me up and took me to church with them every Wednesday and Sunday. That church is where I fully committed my life to Christ. I know I was a senior in high school, but again, I don’t know the actual date. In thinking about all of this, I’ve realized that I have had more than one encounter with Jesus throughout my life, and each one has been eye-opening and life-altering in different ways.

Recently, I was listening to a podcast that quoted a prayer, and I was very moved by it. I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I think without realizing it, I had become somehow callused to the knowledge that God loves me. When I would hear those words, the Sunday School song lyrics, “Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so” would fill my mind; they seemed somewhat commonplace and almost meaningless.

In the podcast, the speaker quoted this prayer from Soren Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher and theologian:

You have loved us first, O God, alas!

We speak of it in terms of history

as if You loved us first but a single time,

rather than that without ceasing.


You have loved us first many times

and everyday and our whole life through.

When we wake up in the morning

and turn our soul toward You –

You were there first – You have loved us first;

if I rise at dawn and at that same second

turn my soul toward You in prayer,

You are there ahead of me, You have loved me first.


When I withdraw from the distractions

of the day and turn my soul toward You,

You are there first and thus forever.

And we speak ungratefully as if

You have loved us first only once.


I had to rewind it and listen to it several times. What?!? Wow! My spirit was moved and a warm, deep affection for God filled me. How had I never realized this before? God did not only love me first once, but has and always will love me first, every single time. What an amazing and glorious thought. Even now I can barely write about it.

There is no moment in which I can turn my affection toward God when he is not there before me, loving me first…and always. These moments of realization were yet another encounter with Jesus—a mind-blowing, soul consuming recognition of the already too-good-to-be true news that God loves ME.

PRAYER

Heavenly Father,

Thank you that throughout our lives, we encounter you many times. From the moment we first hear about you to the moment we turn our lives over to you to the moments we come to comprehend new truths about you and our relationship with you. Thank you for this new understanding that you did and always do love me first. Help me not to grow callous to the love that you have for me…that it will not become, again, only words, but that it will always fill my heart and soul the way it does now.

Amen.

Jennifer Ayotte

Director of Communications Operations
jayotte@crossings.church
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