Don't Doubt God's Love

The second thing I want you to see here is when the devil communicated with Eve. He says to her something which implies that God doesn't really love you as you think he does. He doesn't really have your best in mind. He's trying to withhold something from you. Notice what it says in Genesis 3 in verse 5. The next sentence he says is, God knows that in the day you eat from this, your eyes will be opened and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. And of course, he doesn't want you to be like him. What a line. It's amazing how the devil succeeded in making Eve believe that. And it's amazing to see how God, how the devil has succeeded today in making a lot of people believe a lie. As if God is trying to withhold from you something that's good for you. How can that be? Did God create man in order to withhold from him? He need not have created him at all. The whole purpose with which God created man was to bless him and to give him all that he had to make him partake of his nature and to make him rule over all of his creation. But the devil portrayed another picture of God as a hard taskmaster and one who didn't love and one who was trying to withhold something from man. And so he told man, you better fend for yourself, take care of yourself because God's not going to care for you. What a lie. When he had created man with the very purpose of blessing and providing for him, the devil convinced him that that was not true. And we find the same today. The devil is out there convincing believers that God doesn't really care for them. That's why he didn't grant them this request. He implies, why did God allow your child to die? Why did he allow that sickness to continue? That proves God doesn't love you. And there are lots of believers who believe that. And when they believe that, you know what it leads to? Depression, discouragement, anger at God, which also leads to sickness in the body, many other problems. If the devil can succeed in making you believe this lie that God doesn't love you, that he doesn't care for you, he's not going to provide all your needs. He would have succeeded in making you take the first step towards sin. The first step to a defeated life is to believe that God doesn't love you. You know, faith is really the New Testament speaks a lot about faith. Faith is to believe that God loves me. That's more important than even not falling. When Peter was about to deny Jesus three times, the Lord warned him, you're going to deny me three times, Peter. But I'm not praying that you won't deny me. That's probably needed to break your pride. But I am praying that after you've denied me and you've let me down and the devil's got a hold of you and you reach the bottom, you reach rock bottom. I want you to remember there that God still loves you. That's what I'm praying for you, that your faith will not fail. The Lord told Peter, I'm praying that your faith will not fail. Meaning that if you have come to that end of yourself, I want you to believe right there that God loves you still. He still loves you. That is faith. To believe that even though I made a mess of my life, even though I've done something wrong, God still loves me. How much more when I'm trying to please him? When we were sinners, he loved us. When we were his enemies, he loved us. How much more now that we are his children? So one of the things we learned right from the beginning of man's creation and man's fall is that the aim of the devil is to make us doubt God's word and to doubt God's love. And if he succeeds in those two areas in your life, I want to tell you right now that you're doomed because you'll definitely fall. He doesn't lead us to fall straight away. He removes our foundation and then we just fall on our own. We get discouraged. You say, if God doesn't love me, if he doesn't answer my prayer, what hope is there for me? We get discouraged. Then the devil leads us.