God’s love.
how can we measure it. how can we sense it. how can we know its real. how can we believe in it. how can we acknowledge it, grasp it, hold on to it, run towards it.
how can we love Him back with the same love that He extended towards us.
I really feel like I’m sort of getting a hold of how God really feels towards us.
I recently experienced a heart ache, a heart break, and a pain that I have never in my life felt before. it was this pain that I really can’t describe. if you’ve experienced a heart break then you know what I’m trying to say. but when I experienced this pain...trying to get through it brought me to this realization that this must be similar to how God feels towards us.
I describe it as this…you love someone so much, you care about them with such a deep place in your heart and deep inside the innermost part of you all that you want is what truly is best for that person. and you get to share in their life, which is amazing and you get to spend time with them, laugh with them, cry with them, grow with them, share memories with them…and then you can’t anymore. its during this separation that your heart aches, that you have a pain that is really indescribable. its because you love them, and in loving them you have to stand back and hope and pray that things go well for them. but this pain you feel is because you want to be near to them, close to them, share in everything you used to. but you can’t.
and so I relate that to God’s love towards us. whether or not you claim to be a believer in Christ, no matter what your background, how good you think you are, how messed up you think you are, how steady you are, how shaky you are – God loves you. three simple words. but getting a hold of that will change your life.
I once heard someone say that if we really knew, if we really grasped how immense God’s love was, and how much God loved us, how much He longed to be close to us then we would live our life differently. if we knew how deep God’s love was towards us we wouldn’t run away from it, we would run towards it.
God loves me. you say God loves me? don’t love me God. don’t love me. you don’t know me, you don’t know who I am. I could hurt you, I could betray you, I could forget you. God please, don’t love me like that, how can you? why would you? don’t you know me? I don’t have it all together, I’m not ready. give me time.
But God says, I love you. No matter what you do, no matter if you love me now, or if you never love me, I LOVE YOU. Regardless of what you do, where you go, the mistakes you make, the awesome things you do, how many people you influence for my name, if you walk towards me or away from me, I love you the same. Nothing, nothing you can do can change that. I have seen your past, I see your present and I know your future, and yet, I love you. I have chosen you, I have given my heart to you.
I just keep thinking back to experiencing that pain of heart break. So me, a human, feels pain so strong in my heart like that. I long for restoration in that relationship with someone because I love them and miss them and have shared things with them. and yet again I come back to God. who sent His son [Romans 5:8; 1 John 4:10]….His son….to live, die, and rise up to take away our sins and heal us, THE WORLD…and He did that because God has emotions too. People seem to think that God is emotionless, that he doesn’t have feelings because he’s God….but God does feel emotion. God is love, and Jesus is love, if you want to see the Father look at the Son. Jesus was a human and felt the same pain we did, and just think of how intense that was for him to bear all the sin of the entire world on the cross, to love people so much that you would literally die for them. But he did it because of God’s love…”for God so loved the world…” It was because God loved the world, God loved me, God loved you. He went through all this because He loves you.
and it breaks God’s heart to see his children, the sons and daughter’s of the most High living outside and away from His love. no matter where you are or where you’d point to on the scale of God’s love in your life…you can’t escape it. you can ignore it, but remember, you can’t get rid of it.
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. *1 John 4:16
Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands. *Deuteronomy 7:9
