In our last post we discussed what or rather who love is.
We drew from Bible scripture which paints a beautiful picture of the character of love found in God our Father. However, there can be a huge gap between knowing, “God is love” and knowing, “God is loving me”. That gap leaves us vulnerable to devastating lies which breakdown our spiritual, emotional and even physical well-being.
Here’s why: we were created for love and relationship and deep down we still know it. We still long for it. But the world around us is so broken it can only piece together a shattered view of what love is meant to be. For must of us we feel we tried love and it didn’t work – or didn’t turn out to be what we thought it would be at least a time or two in life … and that hurts.
Unfortunately, our unhealed “hurts” become what informs our identity and the lens through which we view life. You see we’ve never met anyone like God. We see fragments of His personality everywhere but God – love itself – is a being to be discovered and encountered.
Love is inviting us into relationship with Himself in order to give us an experience of what love really is.
Love wants to love us.
But we block and fight this gift for many reasons or remain completely unaware of it. A major block to receiving love can come from the lies we believe about our failures and brokenness. Maybe we learned from childhood that love only came as a result of keeping our parents or primary caretaker happy. Or maybe we learned from our peers that “love” was only given to us if we looked a certain way, had certain things and/or performed in a certain way. We learned, “love is fickle””and “it has to be earned”.
Because of this, when we encounter real love we often don’t know what to do with it.
In our world love is so connected to performance we automatically assume God operates the same way. I recently had an experience where I was struggling to love a particular individual. After a day of battling and losing I felt pretty defeated and disappointed with myself. The self-accusation, “I should have been more loving” resonated inside my soul. I felt like the apostle Paul did when he reveals his internal frustration with doing what he didn’t want to do and not doing what he wanted to do recorded in Romans chapter 7 in the Bible. But at the end of him recounting his struggle he states a life changing shift of perception,
“Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord…” (Rom.7:25)
That statement is a huge paradigm shift in our fundamental approach to ourselves and life in God. God has made us all an amazing offer – “come be loved by Me and love will become the place you live from”. In this portion of scripture (Romans 7 and 8) Paul contrasts trying to live a good Christian life (living by the law) and letting God live His life in and through us (life in the Spirit). The first way is incredibly arduos and yields minuscule results. The second way is full of power and life flowing from God to us. Going back to my personal struggle the truth is if I want to be more loving I must first experience being loved.
To be able to love implies you have been loved.
You love because you have love to give.
Our identity must become rooted in a real experience of being loved by God. Receiving God’s love begins to expose and heal a plethora of wounds and issues currently operating inside of us.
How do we receive Gods love? This continues to be a journey for me as well. Time … lots of time. 🙂
I know it starts with belief – believing He does love us and asking Him to show us on a personal level. I know it involves knowing Him and the truth of His love becoming a priority for us. It’s learning to bring every accusation and uncomfortable or painful feeling of shame straight to Him instead of hiding. It’s about encountering Him and staying with Him as He encounters us.
The journey is unique to each one of us and can’t be packaged into 5 easy steps (sorry :/). But I know this: He wants you to know He loves you more than you’ve ever realized or expected. He will get to you – He won’t give up!
Let the reality of His love and His loving you be more and more tangible in your life and walk today.
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