If you don't know and experience that God loves you then you will never be able to begin the kind of satisfying process of change in your life. If the motivation is not because you know He loves you then the means will carry a constant sense of trying to measure up...often followed by a disconcerting sense of failure leading to apathy or frustration.
I can know God is God, that He is good, but to know that He loves me is every bit personal as it is to know I am loved by my mother who sees me take advantage of her time, money and even of her love for me. I think it's always more out of obedience and fear of punishment that I try to change myself, but I'm always left miserably unable to meet my own standards, let alone the perfect standards of God.
So then what does it mean or how does it look like to be sure of God's love for myself? How can I begin a relationship with an invisible God without texting him on my iPhone, taking selfies with Him for my Instagram or playing with his hair as we sit down listening to music or a podcast together? This is the way in which I relate most with people, this is how I connect and cultivate relationships. So perhaps there is something to be said of how I do my "quiet time" with the Lord. What does it mean to get to know God. What does it mean to spend time cultivating a relationship with Him?
What does it mean in my personal life to have a personal relationship?
First off, I'll admit I'm not so experienced in the realm of romantic relationships. Lots of fear of vulnerability, disappointment, so on and so forth, but I can attest to cultivating meaningful relationships with friends. And a relationship with God is a combination of the two, He is both our husband and our friend. And married people are friends first! The best married couples only grow in friendship, in other words, they become bestfriends and lovers. This seems glorious, but also it speaks volumes into my reality. I want so badly to love God, and at times my feelings feel stronger than at others, but this love thing is not unrequited. It begins with knowing for myself that God loves me, but more importantly that he loves me despite my being me in all the ugly areas I know are me. In other words while I am still in my sin God loves me. I can snuggle up to God and rest in that perfect love, the love that takes my bad and says "I see that mess, but come here because I love you unconditionally". Unconditionally. Without conditions. I ask "so I'm sinning and I don't want to do what You, God, are telling me to....you still love me with the same degree of passionate love as when I do love you back and do all that you command through the power of the Spirit?" If God's love is without conditions, then the answer can only be a clear, crisp "Yes".
All the bible verses in the world won't help me have an assurance of His love, just as all the nice messages and texts I read from an online dater will not make me confident that I can start trusting this person with my bank account or anything of substantial security on my part. So reading the bible is good, indeed it is the very words of God, our foundational information guide to who He is, but it is not God Himself.
We can know God and begin readying ourselves to experience Him by faith in what we know from His Word.
Ready yourself.
God's love is without conditions, and the only way we can begin to live life fully and for that very purpose to which we were made is to enter into a genuine relationship with God, talking to Him, resting with Him in our moments of sorrow and bleak pain, and laughing with him in our times of joy, always drawing more and more near to Him like two people dating that get closer and closer until that destined day when a heartfelt proposal is made. God is someone we are to know relationally, not just factually or religiously or theologically. We may facebook stalk someone to know more about them, but we can never consider that person a close friend without sharing deep conversations, laughs, and secrets with them. God does not want you to facebook stalk him by just reading the bible, combing through the text for golden nuggets. Those are all the means to get to the goal of falling in love with Him. Knowing Him experientially.
But first we must understand that God loves us. God loves me, not only because I might think I do a good job at life, but He equally and passionately loves the me that does poorly at life. He loves me when I sin! He loves me when I win! He loves me when I'm good! And he loves me when I'm bad.
I may not feel lovable most of the time when I am so self aware of my inadaquacies, but that's me. That is not how God feels. Don't ever make God's love for you to be like your love for Him. My love for Him is pathetic and weak, narcissistic and very conditional. Thank God He loves me without conditions! Otherwise I'd be screwed!
But believing and experiencing His love begins with being vulnerable. Be ready to break into a million jagged pieces while He remains all powerful and perfect, and rather than try to be a little more put together, just humbly and vulnerably show your worst to Him. Then let Him take your heart and make it beat like a thousand wild drums despite its frail condition, because with God all things are possible, but with man all things break down and decay.
So be sure of His love through personal experiences of vulnerability.
It is only when we are sure that He loves us that we will begin to find delight in doing what he wants. Because in the end, we will find that He only wants us. Not our good deeds or our sacrifices. He wants you for Himself to be in perfect love with Him. Every single person can attest to this deep desire of wanting to love and be loved.
This is our reason for living! To be loved and to love. So let go and go to the perfect love of God, let it bring rest to your weary souls after having searched and searched in other broken loves. God's love is perfect, and His love is that which can never break. Experience His love, not by who you are, but entirely by who He is.
This is really freeing for me. Someone who is constantly trying to measure up to my own standards or by the standards I think others have of me, and then constantly failing! I can be good for a while, and the more isolated I am the more "good" I appear to be, but that is not life! That's isolation! That's pretending. That's....miserable. Life is meant to be had drinking in love daily, and drinking in perfect love that satisfies the deepest and most thirsty parts of your heart, and overflowing love to others!
I pray you (as well as I) drink in the perfect love of God today by bringing all of me, my good and my bad, and cuddling up to God's perfect love and resting there without a doubt in it at all. Yep, God loves you, and yes you're not that great of a person, and He knows full well exactly what makes you not that great....so be amazed at His passionate love for you...stop thinking too hard about how this can be!
Just relax.
Breathe.
And rest in perfect Love. Begin going steady with the Lord to have and accumulate first hand moments with Him. One date at a time.
You are loved. Experience it right now.
Jmegrey.
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