Why do I sometimes struggle with obedience and surrender to the Lord?
Why don’t I love others like I should, like I want to, specifically people who aren’t my family or close friends, i.e., those people who already love me?
Why don’t I always have a genuine heart for the lost or the poor? Why don’t I hate evil the way I know I should, instead of humoring it or playing around with it? Why don’t I reject it outright, every time, the way God’s Word tells me to?
Do you ever find yourself asking these questions in the inner recesses of your heart? Are these challenges you face with your faith? By now, you probably know you’re certainly not alone. But you may not have diagnosed the real problem. It’s not that you aren’t trying hard enough or that you aren’t holy enough. Chances are, you have a love problem or an identity problem. You have not fully realized, understood, or internalized how completely, deeply, and truly God loves you.
I just finished Francis Chan’s new book, Beloved, and I can’t recommend it highly enough, along with others like David Benner’s Surrender to Love, Brennan Manning’s Abba’s Child, Gentle and Lowly by Dane Ortlund, and many works by Henri Nouwen. But all of these great works stand for one critical idea, a game-changer for our faith in Jesus: When we are saved, we don’t primarily get Jesus’ “stuff”—we get Jesus himself. Realizing the depths and fullness of God’s love for you is the key to spiritual transformation.
I can’t emphasize this point enough. You may have strong theology, powerful knowledge, an understanding of how God works, and be committed to serving Jesus well. Yet, you won’t be fully transformed into the person you were meant to be until you experience your true identity as the Beloved, one who is loved by God, and the true fullness of that love.
In Romans 8, my favorite chapter in the Bible, Paul says that, in Christ, “you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” “Abba” is a term of endearment, like “Daddy,” and that’s how God sees us, even more beloved than your children are to you. Paul tells us that “neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God loves you, not because you’ve earned it, not even because you’re particularly lovable, but because He’s chosen you. He decided to love you before you were in your mother’s womb, before your mother was in her mother’s womb, before the foundations of the earth. The only reason God created us was as a people to love, a people to shower His love upon.
Tim Keller notes that God reveals Himself to us in Scripture as the bridegroom of His people. First Israel and now the Church is his bride. We are terrible marriage partners. Like Gomer to Hosea, we have repeatedly been unfaithful, choosing not to love him first but to love our idols of work, other relationships, other activities, shopping, buying, scrolling, and everything else. Yet God has never abandoned us, rescuing us and buying us back by His son’s sacrifice on the cross.
Whenever I perform a wedding, I always watch the groom. When those doors open and the bride comes walking down the aisle with her dad, looking as good as she will ever look again, he’s completely enamored; he’s transfixed. Most of the time, he is either beaming with joy or shedding tears. I remember my own wedding day, thinking, “I cannot believe this woman is coming down this aisle to be with me for the rest of our lives. How could I be this lucky?”
And that’s the way God looks at you: a beloved child, a coveted bride.
I get that’s hard to believe. You might have grown up in a family where parental love was in short supply, or where your perception of a father’s love was either conditional or characterized by mild to major disapproval of you and how you were living. These experiences may make it challenging for you to see God as a loving Father. You may be grappling with current or long-term sins that have strained your relationship with God, causing you to feel disconnected and struggling to find your way back. Or you’ve been hurt in other ways, and cynicism has set in. The notion of overwhelming, unconditional love sounds appealing, but past pain has built callouses on your soul.
Henri Nouwen articulated this feeling well:
“I know that the words spoken to Jesus when he was baptized are words spoken also to me and to all who are brothers and sisters of Jesus. My tendencies toward self-rejection and self-deprecation make it hard to hear these words truly and let them descend into the center of my heart. But once I have received these words fully, I am set free from my compulsion to prove myself to the world and can live in it without belonging to it. Once I have accepted the truth that I am God’s beloved child, unconditionally loved, I can be sent into the world to speak and act as Jesus did.”
The ironic thing is that, while many of us struggle to understand the Fatherheart of God as it pertains to His love for us, very few of us struggle with it when we consider how much we love our own children. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that your children will never love you as much as you love them. And, that’s a gift from the Lord, given to you as His image-bearer to demonstrate for you how much He loves you. As Jesus said, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
How do we come to terms with and truly understand how much God loves us? It comes by asking Him to reveal the fullness of His love for us. Paul, praying on behalf of the believers at Ephesus, says, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father…that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” It doesn’t come from doing anything, but from abiding in God’s love.
This is why silence and solitude with the Lord, talking to Him, and meditating on His Word are so important. This is one of the greatest reasons for practicing God’s presence. God wants to reveal His love for you through spending time with Him and focusing on passages like Zephaniah 3:17, Romans 8:37-39, 2 Thessalonians 3:5, and 1 John 4:9-11. Peter Greer calls it “wasting time with God,” because we westerners don’t deem it “productive.” Committed to self-improvement by our own efforts, we feel like we should be “doing” something when God wants us to sit, be still, and wait upon Him. David Benner said, “Grace is totally alien to human psychology. We want to get our house in order and then let God love and accept us. The psychology of works-righteousness and self-certification is foundational to the human psyche and totally at odds with grace.”
Instead, God created us for love. Brennan Manning tells us that “God created us for union with Himself. This is the original purpose of our lives…being the beloved is our identity, the core of our existence. It is not merely a lofty thought, an inspiring idea, or one name among many. It is the name by which God knows us and the way He relates to us.”
You’ll never love as God calls you to love without understanding and fully internalizing His love for you, because that love will transform you to be capable of loving like He calls you to love. That’s supernatural love; gospel love. It’s not possible in our flesh. If you’re frustrated because you want to love more but can’t, open your heart and let God’s love transform you into someone who loves with God-capacity.
The beautiful thing is God wants this for you; He wants you to live in the richness of His love, now and forever. So, ask God for it, then wait on it. It will come, and it will change you forever.
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