Live.Awake

The Nature of the Love of God

// July 9th, 2007 // Christian Living, Sunday Recap

We’re human. We tend to forget the important things like taking time with our kids, rest, grace, and God’s love for us. I think this happens because we allow other more aggressive things like work, finances, busyness, etc to impose wrong priorities on us. So this week I endeavored to remind us all (including myself) how much God loves us.

If you’re a John Piper fan, some of this will be familiar. I’ve been reading a lot of him lately. His stuff really gets in your blood…

Here are the highlights:

Romans 5:5-8 is good place to start. In verse 5 we see the love of Christ being poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. For some reason, many of us have been taught that God doesn’t like emotions. That emotions make us weak, unpredictable and more sinful. This is not so! When our emotions are submitted to the power and control of the Holy Spirit, they become assets. Didn’t Jesus weep, laugh, rejoice, etc? We should be experiencing His love emotionally!

The problem is that we let our hearts harden. We allow callouses to form emotionally in areas where we have been hurt and therefore feel we need protection. That becomes a dead spot where we feel nothing. Those who have been through severe trauma in their pasts (ie sexual abuse, death of loved ones early in life, etc) know this phenomenon all too well.

As we allow the Holy Spirit to strengthen the inner man (Ephesians 3:14-19) we gain a greater capacity to experience more of the fullness of Christs’ love for us. This is not a patronizing platitude. This is the truth. Jesus can heal anything.

In verse 8 we also see that the way God demonstrates (present tense, ongoing action) His love for us is through the past event of Jesus’ death on the cross. This is information. Historical fact. We weren’t there. Yet this is how God, in the here and now, shows us He loves us. Amazing! This is not just raw, wild emotion. This is emotion that is connected to factual truth. We can feel emotionally connected to an event that happened over 2,000 years ago.

But does His love guarantee that we will not go through hardships? Anyone who has lived long at all can answer that one. Of course not! In Romans 8:34-39 we see Paul actually listing all kinds of things that could happen to us. Death, famine, sickness, hardship, and on and on. But then he says that none of these things can separate us from the love of God. Verse 34 tells us that Jesus is interceding for us continually. Moment to moment. Every breath we take. Every moment of every day, He is there loving us. Looking after us. Knowing us. Not even the worst tragedy can change that. He is Emmanuel — God with us.

Among other things, this means that we cannot hold our hardship up before God as evidence that He does not love us. It is illegitimate to act like lawyers presenting a case of evidence to God as though He is the one that must prove His love to us. NOTHING can separate us! This doesn’t mean that we don’t appeal to God or tell Him our woes. But questioning His love for us or His goodness is another matter. Just read God’s response to Job in Job 38.

I closed with this video from Amena Brown, a poet that I have come across several times. She captures well the dynamic of being loved so deeply by God, being afraid of it, finally giving into it and then being compelled to worship Him in response. This is how God gets glorified as He loves us.

Questions and additional thoughts welcome in the comments!

Technorati Tags: youtube, amena brown, Jesus, Christ, love, gospel, salvation, emotional healing, Holy Spirit, sermon