What do you think about a person who constantly says, “Tell me you love me”? Doesn’t it sound like someone in an insecure relationship, craving reassurance? (Personally, it strikes me as the kind of thing a parrot owner might train his bird to blurt out to amuse friends.) How can such a request, oft-repeated, be healthy or admirable? It seems a desperate kind of begging.
Yet God looks favorably on such desperate begging, addressed to him. He even encourages it. David—man after God’s heart, under the gun and on the run from his enemies—asks for just this kind of reassurance: “Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love.” David is following in the path of Moses in Psalm 90:14, asking God to tell him, in words and ways that leave no doubt, of His true and irrevocable love.
Clearly God invites us to ask this way too: “Tell me again today you love me, Jesus!” But is this healthy and admirable? It is, because it’s the expression of our redeemed heart’s deepest need (in a sense, our heart’s only need) in an environment—life in this world—where our confidence in His love at the cross is under constant attack.
To paraphrase Puritan theologian John Owen, our greatest difficulty in the Christian life is believing the Father loves us. Fight for this faith! Be like a parrot greeting his master in the morning with the predictable refrain: “Tell me you love me!” It will not try our Master’s patience, nor simply amuse Him. It will move His heart to a strengthening, soul-satisfying reply.