Understanding God's Love

Do we honestly find everything we have been told about God lovable? Can we in our "heart of hearts" love a God who demands service, adoration, praise, obedience, and gratitude? Can we love a God who providentially chooses to protect some on earth and not others? Can we love a God who arbitrarily heals some people on earth and not others? Can we love a God who we have to beg or plead to for help. Can we love a God who requires his son to suffer and die on a cross to repay God or satisfy God's sense of justice? Can we truly love a God who has set up laws for us to obey and punishments for the violators. Be honest! We may fear and cower under such a God, but can we wholeheartedly love and embrace such a God?

Do Christians really love God. Or do they fear, respect, and admire God's power and authority, and therefore, bow down and defer to God because they see no other choice? Again I ask, in your "heart of hearts" do you find God completely lovable? Most Christians are probably afraid to ask themselves, let alone honestly answer this question. It seems almost blasphemous to even consider the question.

Dare we be honest with God, or anyone else for that matter, about how lovable we find the God we have been taught to believe in? The Samaritan woman at the well (Jn 4:4-42) had received religious teaching about God. But she had the courage, self-awareness, and honesty to admit to Jesus that she did not find this God lovable. This allowed Jesus to lead her to the truth about God's love and lovableness. Let us look at the Samaritan woman because her story is our story. Whether we know it or not, her struggle to arrive at the truth of God's love and lovableness is our struggle also.

At Jacob's well, Jesus offers the Samaritan woman "living water." This water "shall become a fountain inside her leaping up to provide eternal life." In the Samaritan woman's time, great leaders of Israel were often noted for the wells they dug for their followers (e.g. Jacob's well). In the arid parts of Israel water literally meant life to the people, and great leaders cared about the life of their followers. The woman accepts Jesus' offer. However, there is a problem.

Jesus says, "Go, call your husband, and then come back here." The prophet Hosea described a problem in the relationship between God and Israel in terms of a loving husband (God) and an unfaithful wife (Israel). Israel, the unfaithful wife, was running after false gods. There is a different problem in the relationship between the Samaritan woman (i.e. all the Samaritan people) and God, but the problem is again described in terms of a husband and wife relationship. We, like the Samaritan people, will bring to God's well of "living water" our understanding of God (our husband) and we can't fully drink in God's life of "living water" if we don't truly understand God.

The woman replies to Jesus, "I have no husband." She is saying, I don't really love God as I understand God to be, he is not my husband. Jesus replies, "you are right in saying you have no husband." Jesus is saying, your are right not to love God as you understand God to be. Jesus now tells her why she does not understand God, "you have had five (husbands), and the man you are living with now is not your husband."

The origin of the Samaritan people and their religion started from the five groups of people who were settled in the land of Samaria by Assyria after they deported the Israelites of the northern kingdom (2 K 17:5-6, 24-41). These five groups brought with them their worship and understanding of their gods (five husbands). By the time of Jesus, however, the Samaritan understanding of God was a mixture of their understanding of their gods and the God of Israel. This diluted and polluted understanding of God is the "man" the woman is now living with. The Samaritans had developed a distorted version of the Jewish religion. They misunderstood God. That's why Jesus later tells the woman, "you people worship what you do not understand."

Similar to the Samaritan people, Christians have had their understanding of God polluted and distorted to varying degrees. How has the Christian God often been portrayed? God is omnipotent, omniscient, immutable, and impassive. God rewards and punishments. God's justice demands satisfaction for sin through the death of his son. In heaven God occupies the apex of a hierarchy of minions that praise, serve, and worship him. This is the God far too many Christians have been asked to love. Do you honestly find everything about this kind of God lovable?

In the story of the Samaritan woman, the woman sees that Jesus knows her heart and understands her struggle to love God as she understands God to be. Therefore, she says, "I can see you are a prophet." Like the Samaritan woman, we must allow Jesus to lead us to the truth about God.

Recognizing Jesus as a prophet of God, the woman asks Jesus about worship of God. The woman is confused about where true worship of God takes place. Jesus says the whole concept of temple worship is over. Authentic worship of God is not a matter of location, it is a matter of spirit and truth. Jesus is saying that authentic worship of God is a combination of understanding the truth about God (i.e. knowing what God is really like), and our personal attitude and action (i.e. spirit) in response to our true understanding of God.

In actuality, we only truly worship what we find worthy, what we reverence, admire, and treasure, or in other words, what we personally love. If we are ever going to truly worship God, we have to find God lovable. Jesus has told the Samaritan woman what she already knows in her heart, she can only truly worship a God that she finds lovable. And so it is with all of us, if we have achieved a honest level of self-awareness and the courage to admit it to ourselves. We can only truly worship a God we personally find lovable.

The usually unadmitted, unresolved, and unexamined universal fear of religious people is that if they don't find the God of this universe lovable then what are they to do? How can they admit it? What will God do to them? After all, aren't we all stuck with the God of this universe whether we like him or not.

The Samaritan woman's conversation with Jesus reveals her profound self-awareness of the universal human condition of having to find God lovable before we can truly worship him, and her courage to admit this to Jesus. This self-awareness, sincerity, and courage will allow Jesus to work in her life.

The woman now tells her Samaritan townspeople, "come and see someone who told me everything I ever did." In other words, she is saying, he saw into my heart and spoke to my heart, he knows where I have been and where I am at in my life with God. So she says to the townspeople, "Could this not be the Messiah?" The story then tells us that through Jesus' "spoken word" many Samaritans came to faith.

What was this "spoken word" of Jesus? What did the Samaritans come to believe in? Jesus knew the Samaritan woman's heart and knows our heart. Like the Samaritan woman, we have nothing to fear. All Jesus needs is our courage, sincerity, and openness to the truth. Then Jesus can work with us as he did with the Samaritan woman to reveal the truth about God. Only when we know the truth about God can we decide if we find God completely lovable. Only if we find the truth about God completely lovable will we be able to start fully worshiping God in spirit and truth.

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I Know WHOM I Believe

The Scriptures exhort us to “grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Our spiritual growth may be generally discussed as occurring in three seasons of development. Please do not use this teaching to examine where others are, but use it to examine yourself and see if you are indeed growing and maturing in the knowledge of Christ.

I will use the terms “immature” and “childish”, but not with the intention of disdaining the young. I am simply contrasting maturity with immaturity, adulthood with childhood. My children are immature, but I cannot expect them to be anything other than immature so long as they are children. I am lovingly committed to their long-term growth. In the same way, let us not despise the spiritually immature or the weak in faith. Instead, the Word tells us to receive them and watch over them. For those of you who are further along, never forget how many years of God’s dealings it took to bring you to the level of experience you take for granted today.

With those words of introduction, let us discuss the beginning season of the Christian life.

The Child Says, “I Know WHAT I Believe”

In the beginning of the Christian walk we are primarily concerned with WHAT we believe. We depend heavily upon other Christians, the pastor, or the church to tell us what we should believe. Our belief systems are established according to what we hear, see, or are taught during these formative years of spiritual development. Not being experienced in the ways of the Lord we naturally give attention to those Christians who have known the Lord longer that we may learn the essential doctrines of our faith. Whoever or whatever influences us as a spiritual child will usually shape and mold us into what we will become twenty, thirty, or fifty years hence.

Participation in Sunday School classes, Bible studies, church attendance, retreats, conferences and seminars is seen as a desirable and necessary step towards becoming a strong Christian. Memorizing a catechism, statement of fundamental truths, or doctrinal position is often a prerequisite to church membership. As the particular belief system is identified and reinforced, the young Christian may come to identify with social labels such as Fundamentalist, Evangelical, Charismatic, or Conservative. Labels are important to the spiritually immature because it allows them to sum up an entire ideology in one succinct title which provides instant recognition and camaraderie with those of the same genre. Baptists believe certain things, as do the Methodists, the Presbyterians, the Lutherans, the Catholics, the Pentecostals, and even the so-called Non-Denominationals or Independents. Identifying yourself as one or the other immediately brings you into the good company, fellowship, and relationship with others whose particular belief systems most resemble your own.

New Christians (or old Christians who remain childish) are acutely interested in WHAT they believe, seeking to have all the I’s and T’s of their personal theology dotted and crossed. In the process they usually major in the minors and strain out a gnat to swallow a camel. Doctrinal discussion and religious wranglings are the seedbed of most vain speaking, arguments, hurt feelings, biting and devouring.

Once they are settled into WHAT they believe it is nearly impossible to convince them otherwise, and any perceived threat to their belief system is met with hostility, anger, confusion, even depression. I heard of a Bible study that was devoted to a particular issue. An outsider posed the question: WHY do you believe this? The indignant answer was, “Because the Bible says so” and a chapter and verse reference was given. But how do you know the Bible is true? Because the Bible is the Word of God. How do you know the Bible is the Word of God? Because the Bible says so. And so on.

Christians at this stage of spiritual growth cannot reply, except to say that you just have to believe it by faith (even though God has never required us to believe something without offering substantial, albeit invisible, proof – but that is a topic for another discussion). The leader of this Bible study could answer to WHAT she believed, but she could not reply to WHY she believed it because her particular belief system would not allow for a frank and open discussion on the inspiration of the very Scriptures she was citing. God said it (or the pastor said God said it) , I believe it, and that settles it. End of conversation.

Children are often told to do thus-and-so, and when they invariably ask why, the answer is usually, “Because I said so.” Such an answer is sufficient for them at THAT stage, but when the child becomes a teenager a simple “Because I said so” is insulting. As an adult it is offensive. Why is this? Because it does not allow for input, feedback, or questions. What is lost? The experience of LEARNING and becoming mature.

Is the Bible the inspired Word of God? Well of course it is. But not because it says it is, and not because the pastor says so or the church says so, or I say so. Do you know WHY it is the inspired Word of God? Have you ever wondered why? “Because the Bible says so” is sufficient enough for a new Christian, but you must move beyond the elementary if you ever hope to experience or lead others into the full knowledge of Christ.

The Young Adult Says, “I Know WHY I Believe”

The one who knows WHAT they believe is always threatened by the one who knows WHY. Unfortunately some never grow to the point that they ever ask why. They see no need to ask why, and therein lies the reason for their perpetual childhood, their incessant carnal fighting and vain blabbering. To ask why is to commit the unpardonable sin! To question the church, its leaders, or its teachings is to jeopardize your eternal soul! People with faith are not supposed to ask why. People properly submitted to authority are not supposed to ask why. If you don’t know why, they say, focus on what, and don’t worry about why.

Allow me to say it as plainly as I can: to discourage the asking of WHY is to stunt the spiritual growth of yourself and others. An immature Christian is one who does not permit himself or others to question anything incorporated into their belief system.

Yes, it is true that many who grow up in the church and begin asking WHY often appear to backslide or end up leaving the church altogether. This healthy questioning, searching, and seeking for truth Jesus called “hungering and thirsting after righteousness.” The promise is, “They shall be filled.” They are The Blessed, not The Backslidden. Jesus is simply leading them elsewhere because He cannot fill them where they are. The quest for Truth, and the subsequent filling, almost never takes place WHERE YOU ARE, but WHERE GOD WANTS TO BRING YOU. If you are hungry and thirsty for what is right, for what is true, then you will be filled. It did not say where or how, only THAT. I cannot presume to say where or how He may lead you, only that He will.

You see, knowing WHAT you believe brings a certain aura of satisfaction and security which is akin to nursing at your mothers breast. It is an important first step in the Christian life, but that is all a first step, a means to an end, not THE end. We are not suggesting that you do not have to know WHAT you believe. We are saying that real progress begins when you begin to get an inkling as to WHY you believe it. This is the middle stage of spiritual growth. Like knowing what, knowing why is an important step, but it is not the end either. It is merely a rite of passage between childishness and maturity. It is the literal enlargement of one’s capacity for Truth, and of course, for Christ Who is Truth. It is the spiritual equivalent of puberty, a time of great change, rapid growth, and of great turmoil, emotionally and spiritually.

An exciting thing begins to happen in the spiritual life of the Christian who desires to grow and mature. It is hoped that after some progress in spiritual things, once the new Christian has experienced a few defeats or disappointments, that he or she will ask, “Is there more to the Christian life than what I am experiencing?” Oh, blessed question! How God has worked long and hard to bring the Christian to this point! And the Answer which God so desires to give us is, “Yes! There is more to this Life! You have but scratched the surface!” The Question often comes to us in the middle of a church service, when everyone else seems to be worshiping the Lord and having a good time. We try to join in but the Question continues to bother us week after week until we resolve to do something about it.

But what usually happens? The church will often reassure the babes that all is well as long as they ignore how they feel, keep attending church, reading their Bibles, saying their prayers, etc. Nevertheless, the One asking the Question will not go away, and it indeed is the bidding of the Spirit of Truth Himself which ignites and fans into flame the holy desire to launch out into the Deep, the very Depths of Christ. WHAT they believe is no longer good enough, and they want to know WHY. Instead of discouraging these questions, we should welcome and invite them. We even ought to take the initiative and begin asking them of others.

What emerges after this period of soul searching, asking, seeking, and knocking is a core set of values and beliefs that are refined in the fiery furnace of real-life experience, not taught or learned out of a textbook or Sunday school class. It is the difference between singing, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” because we know the words to the song or because we have truly experienced the great faithfulness of Jesus Christ. We know WHAT we are singing, but more importantly, we know WHY we are singing. And WHY we desire fellowship with other believers. And WHY the Bible is the inspired Word of God. And so on.

Most importantly, Christians at this stage of growth are liberated from the limiting beliefs imposed upon them by other people, even other good people. The younger children are full of argument, opinion, defense, and either/or thinking. For them, the less they think they know the more distressed they become. Pose a question to them that is not in their catechism (literal or figurative) and they will be off to look up the answer so they can impress you with the solution the next time you meet. They haven’t yet learned that there will always be someone in the world who is smarter and can come up with a more brilliant argument, right or wrong. It seems their whole goal is to confound the world with WHAT they believe.

Not so the Christians with some maturity. The Christians at this stage realize they don’t know as much as they thought they did, but they know what matters. They are no longer straining out the gnat while swallowing the camel. They do not have as many answers, but neither do they have as many questions. Their spiritual life follows a steady, even course.

The Mature Adult Says, I Know WHOM I Believe

There is a certain downside to the intermediate stage of growth, and that is a danger to lean upon our own understanding. Now that we know WHY we believe we are apt to begin teaching the younger ones. People will look to us for answers. We tend to tell them all we know, even more than we know. We are in danger of falling prey to an intellectual faith instead of a Spirit walk. Naturally speaking, teenagers and college students have a lot of knowledge. In fact, according to their own mind, they are smarter and more enlightened than anyone over the age of thirty. Once they reach thirty they will realize how little they really knew about life. Academic learning is no substitute for experience, and experience takes time. In spiritual things we will always be growing. Even the spiritually mature will continue to grow and learn.

We must see the process of maturity through to completion. To illustrate, let us imagine that we here on earth desire to reach the moon. That is a definitive goal which we can see. We can measure the distance and make plans to reach the moon. To us here on earth that is the ultimate in space exploration. Now let us imagine that one day we reach the moon. Just as we become acclimated to this enormous triumph, our eyes turn upward yet again and we see the vast expanse of space, the innumerable stars, planets, and galaxies, stretched out before us for more than 15,000,000,000 light years, and enlarging its borders faster than we could ever hope to keep up. We will never get to the end of it.

Suddenly, we realize all that we have accomplished in reaching the moon is but a drop in the bucket. In the grand scheme of the universe it is so small as to be infinitesimal. Of course you had no idea that the universe was this large while confined to the atmosphere of Earth, but now, having journeyed a bit beyond, you see just how large it is.

This, in a nutshell, is what it is to find ourselves lost in the depths of Christ. The edge of the universe is beyond our reach, but even it is finite in terms of size. This vast universe is summed up into Christ. The Creator is larger than the creation. So it follows that the more we know of Him, the less we realize we know. All the learning and spiritual experience of all the saints since the foundation of the world hardly makes a dent into the richness of Christ.

Job was left speechless after his encounter with God. He entered into a dialogue with the Creator thinking he knew what he was talking about. Thoroughly confounded and reduced to nothing, Job regretted having spoken of things that he knew nothing about. His idea of God was totally shattered. Before he had heard about God, but having seen God, he realized he didn’t know anything. Ironically, his confessed ignorance was higher and more noble than the wisdom of his counselors who claimed to know God, but had never seen Him.

This is the difference between revelation and head-knowledge, between seeing for yourself and merely hearing about. The man who says, “I don’t know” is finally beginning to know. Once he can see, he can say, “I know whom I have believed” and be accurate, even though he doesn’t know anything in and of himself. It is a case of owning nothing, but possessing everything. The Christian is poor in spirit, yet blessed with every spiritual blessing.

Christianity is a spiritual paradox designed to confound man’s wisdom and reduce him to Christ. If it were only a teaching or a philosophy, it would be easy to follow. But Christianity is not a teaching or a philosophy, it is a Man. Take away the Man and there is no Christianity. It is all about giving up your own life in order to receive the Life of Another.

The more I write, the more I realize I don’t know anything. A million words cannot convey HIM. Everything of me is filthy rags; who am I? Who am I, really? What do I know? Nothing, not one thing. Oh, I’ve seen a little fragment, and I can hardly express THAT, much less anything beyond that. I am a man of unclean lips, in a generation of people with unclean lips, and like Job there is not much else to do but sit in the ashes and loathe myself. There have been times when I laid down my pen or shut off my computer and said I would never write again. All that I thought I knew I realized I did not know. What I did know I could not find words to describe.

We don’t know this Jesus we think we know. He is Wholly Other, totally, supremely, magnificently GOD. Only God can remain silent while we speak blasphemies and heresies in His name. He allows mankind to distort and misrepresent and bring people to a place of despair, just so He can then step in and reveal Himself for Who He really is. And He is never, ever, ever, ever what you thought. Nothing is as you have been told. And then, once you meet Him, you cannot describe Him, except to say He is nothing like what you had been told. Beyond description.

When we realize we don’t know, then Christ becomes our Wisdom so we CAN know. When we are children we are apt to say, I know WHAT I believe. As we grow out of infancy and begin to wrestle with the deeper questions and issues of the Christian faith we will learn to say, I know WHY I believe. The ultimate experience, however, is to be brought to a place where we can say with confidence, I know WHOM I believe.

Knowing WHAT is a beginning. Knowing WHY is progress. Knowing WHO is maturity.

There is a time in our life when we penetrate the veil and from henceforth we KNOW Whom we have believed. It is no longer a question of belief, reason, argument, or opinion. We simply know.

Wait a minute, someone will say. First you say we cannot know Him, then you say that we can know Him. Which is it? All I can say is, it is both.

The child is preoccupied by WHAT, the young adult is consumed by WHY, and the mature believer is obsessed with WHO.

A brother wanted to know what holiness was. So, he found over 200 Scriptures on the subject, arranged them in order, and committed them to memory. Yet, he still didn’t know what holiness was. He felt empty inside. Finally he met an elderly sister who was holy. He finally saw Holiness, and it struck him to the ground. He then knew, because he saw. What he saw was not a concept or a teaching, but Holiness living through the elderly saint. It was not a virtue or a code of conduct, but a Person, Who was expressing His holiness through a yielded vessel.

Another brother was in a similar situation. He was emphatic about what he believed until someone with equal or greater argument confronted him. This occurred one day and someone pointed out several supposed “errors” in the Bible. This caused the brother to be very alarmed. He went to the same elderly lady and informed her of these alleged errors and wanted to know her opinion. She simply stated that the knowledge of God did not depend upon the answering of these questions. He thought, perhaps not to you, but to me it is important! So he spent the next year investigating what this other person had told him and found it to be untrue. But, had he simply known God He would not have found it necessary to study the whole thing and reason it out. The elderly sister was right, the knowledge of God did not depend upon the answering of those questions. If you know Who, knowing what and why become less significant.

No one illustrates this better than Paul the apostle. As the final hours were upon him, what was his testimony? He did not say, “I know what I believe.” A man of extraordinary intellect and education, he had forgotten more about Judaism and Christianity than most people will ever know.

He did not say, “I know why I believe”. Of course he knew why he believed. He didn’t have to say it. The years of persecution and prison had made him better, not bitter. For the first time in his life he knew what real joy was. But even knowing what and why would not be enough to carry him through this much suffering.

What was his secret? “I know WHOM I have believed, and I am confident that He is able to keep that which I have committed to Him.”

You can start out with WHAT, sort through it with WHY, but it ultimately leads to WHO.

Who else? Christ as all in all. Everything leads to Him. All the questions, all the answers. Everything is reduced to Him, for He is the sum of all spiritual things. When we are reduced to Him, then we will be satisfied. Let us lose our life that we may gain our Life and know Whom we have believed. Amen.

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Feeling God's Love For You

Feelings Versus Reality

Surprisingly many celebrities feel unattractive despite being envied for their beauty. Countless students have felt sure they have failed their exams when they actually did well. Hypochondriacs are healthy people who feel sure they are ill or even dying. A whole range of phobias cause people who are quite safe to feel frightened.

In total, billions of dollars have been lost by people who felt sure their business would succeed. Feeling lucky has plunged not just gamblers, but multitudes of other people into all sorts of disasters, and feeling inadequate has kept countless others from the success they could have enjoyed.
Trainee pilots have it drilled into them how critical it is to trust solely the plane's instrumentation and completely disregard their feelings about their orientation. What magnifies the danger of drink driving is that intoxicated drivers feel better at driving than they really are. Countless millions of people have felt perfectly safe minutes before they died.
Though notoriously unreliable, and often dangerously deceptive, feelings give the powerful illusion of reality. Never is this more so than when it comes to feeling unloved. We are about to uncover numerous and distinct reasons why being loved by God and feeling loved by God, are often a world apart. The same is true of God's presence and feeling his presence.
Negative Expectations
Suppose a teenage girl is convinced she is too fat for any guy to possibly like her. She has a secret crush on one young man and he actually likes her. She is so terrified of him telling her something negative about herself, however, that she keeps avoiding him. Even worse, she is so certain that she is unlovable that she keeps misinterpreting his every attempt to convey his affection. This frustratingly tragic situation is similar to what plagues the relationship many of us have with God.

Rejection or apparent indifference from certain people has convinced many of us that we are unlovable. From an early age, others of us grew to expect our father to be cold and indifferent and - deep down - we think God must be the same. Some of us have actually had it drummed into us since childhood that we are evil or incapable of gaining the approval of anyone who matters.
It is hardly surprising that most Christians who have suffered such a background, half expect God to reject them, or at least frown on them or be aloof. This mistaken expectation strongly pressures them to interpret every feeling or event, not in the light of the truth that God is incurably loving and forgiving, but according to their negative expectations about God. This can easily produce a vicious circle, with one's mind producing feelings in line with one's expectations.

We instinctively shrink from anyone we fear is angry with us. So if we fear that God is displeased with us, we are most unlikely to receive inner confirmation of his love, simply because we are too scared or apprehensive to draw close enough to him to know his heart. Even if we know we are forgiven but suspect that God has a low opinion of us, we will similarly be reluctant to spend long enough listening to whispers to hear him tell us how he really feels about us. Moreover, we will be strongly biased to dismiss or misinterpret according to our preconceptions his every attempt to convey to us the depth of his love for us. What a bind!

Let's consider some reasons for us expecting God to think negatively about us and see how they stand in the light of biblical reality.

Unforgivably Guilty?
First, the bad news: the most exciting Person in the universe is terrifyingly holy. Not even the most saintly person can relate to the Holy One until his or her sins are supernaturally removed through spiritual union with Jesus, the spotlessly pure, eternal Son of God. This supernatural transformation is the most critical factor in having a thrillingly genuine encounter with the Living God.

If Jesus has forgiven you, you are cleansed of all sin and have no guilt in God's eyes. Despite this, there is a good chance that you will continue to feel guilty. This is to be expected, since, as we have already seen, there is a vast difference between reality and feelings.

God has a supernatural enemy who is fiercely determined to minimize the impact of his greatest defeat. He attempts this by mustering all his evil cunning to afflict us with deceptive feelings of guilt and hopelessness. It is a cruel, deadly serious, supernaturally powerful attempt to fool us into rejecting the all-forgiving power of Christ's sacrifice. In reality, it is no harder for God to accept the vilest devil worshipper or reprobate former Christian than for him to accept humanity's most saintly person. Let me explain.

A single sin - even the most minor possible offense - plunges us so far below the perfection of God that the holy Lord could draw close to us no more than a sterilized surgeon performing open heart surgery could let himself touch a sewer rat. The "tiniest" one-off sin is all it takes to keep anyone eternally cut off from the fearsomely holy God. Like trying to unmurder someone, once defiled by the slightest imperfection, there is no way any of us can scramble back to the perfection required to relate to the Holy One.

Every one of us, whether good-goody or as debased as anyone can get, is in the same impossible situation. All possibility of being able to say we have lived a perfect life is shattered at the moment of our first sin. Once contaminated by a single sin, devoting the rest of our lives to pure things could remove our contamination no more than dripping drops of pure water into a bucket of already contaminated water. The wages of one sin is death. When someone dies of a smoking-related disease, he does not spring back to life when the corpse quits cigarette smoking. Neither could quitting sin bring us back from spiritual death.

So that's it. After one sin, relating to God becomes so impossible that even a billion more murders and blasphemies could not make it any more hopeless.
Defiled and unable to reach God, the whole of humanity - no exceptions - was in the clutches of the Evil One. Then God intervened by sending Jesus to swap places with us, thus making it possible for everyone - no exceptions - to be granted the righteousness of God's holy Son and thus have full access to God.

Jesus undid the devil's evil by dying for the sins of the entire world, thus making possible the full forgiveness of every sin, no matter how gross and deliberate and repeated, or whether committed before or after becoming a Christian. Nothing could rob us of God's yearning to pour out his love and forgiveness upon us, unless we do not want Jesus to deliver us from our sins, or we mistakenly believe that Jesus' costly sacrifice is too inadequate to forgive the grossest of sins.

Satan's defeat means that the only place where he can hold humanity captive is in a slave camp where all the prison bars, walls and fierce-looking guards are nothing but an illusion. At any moment anyone can walk out, free. The only people staying there are those who fear freedom from sin and so choose to remain captives, or those who refuse to believe that because of Jesus' victory, the prison's security measures are an illusion.
Powerfully intimidating, deceptive feelings of rejection by God, and feelings of guilt, hopelessness and condemnation are simply part of the Evil One's ploy to try to fool people into acting like his slaves when, because of Jesus, every one of those who act like captives can walk free at any moment.
It pains our loving Lord when we make unwise choices. Nevertheless, he honors our wishes by leaving it up to each of us whether we choose to believe in the power of the Deceiver or in the power of Jesus. In blanket statement after blanket statement, God promises over and over in his Word that he forgives whoever believes in Jesus. There are no exceptions. People who consider themselves unforgivable insult the crucified Lord, the Savior of the world, by choosing to believe in the power of their sin, rather than the power of their Forgiver.

Yes, Jesus spoke of an unforgivable sin, but whatever he meant by that cannot negate the Bible's repeated insistence that forgiveness is freely available to everyone who believes in what Jesus achieved by giving his holy life as payment for the death penalty our sins deserve. The context of Jesus' reference to an unpardonable sin makes it clear that he was referring to rejecting God's offer of forgiveness by choosing to believe that Jesus, God's Savior, is of the devil, not of God. No one believing that Jesus is anti-God would look to Jesus for God's forgiveness. So it turns out that the only sin that cannot be forgiven is one for which forgiveness through Jesus is never sought.

Since Satan is powerless to stop anyone who by faith accepts God's forgiveness through Jesus, we could expect faith in the power of Jesus' forgiveness to be the area of greatest satanic attack. God's spiritual foe, who the Bible calls the deceiver, is determined to flood us with exceedingly convincing feelings of guilt, hopelessness and rejection, in an attempt to get us to insult Christ by denying the unlimited forgiving power of his sacrifice. The choice is ours whether we break God's heart and dishonor him by choosing to believe deceptive feelings, or whether we refuse that cowardly path and cling to the integrity of God's love and promises, and to the power of Christ's forgiveness.

This area of satanic attack is so critical and affects so many Christians that I have devoted incalculable hours to writing webpage after webpage specifically for people who feel riddled with guilt or feel unforgivable.

Unworthy of God's Love?

What commonly sabotages our feelings and enjoyment of God's love for us is being unable to think of a single reason why God would love us. We think if we, who are biased towards ourselves and presumably have above average tolerance of our own failings, find ourselves unlovable, how could anyone else truly love us - especially the God of perfection? In fact, for many of us, the notion of God loving us - as distinct from him loving someone else - seems quite impossible. We forget, however, that the Lord is very different from fickle humanity. With the God for whom nothing is impossible, no one is unlovable.
I cannot figure out how my computer works, but I don't let that stop me from enjoying it. Neither do I have to figure out why God loves me before I can enjoy his love. Nevertheless, our inability to understand God's love can gnaw away at our belief that God genuinely loves us. So let's look deeper into this.
To intellectually know the nature of God is not enough; we must take it to heart and let the truth transform us. The God of the impossible is not only perfect in his holiness; he is perfect in love. Not only is his miracle-working power without human limits, his love is also without human limits. The Creator of not just galaxies, but sub-atomic particles, has a mind so powerful that he is intensely interested not only in constellations but in every hair on your head. So far beyond human limitations are his powers of concentration that he could not be more aware of your every thought if you were the only person in an empty universe. The Creator's love is as unlimited and as extreme as his physical power.

God is not a machine. He is not merely rational; he is passionate. To glimpse a shadow of his love, picture the world's most selfless, devoted and proud parent of a tiny baby that can do little but cry, soil itself and wriggle. Multiply that love by infinity and you are approaching God's love.

Let's examine parental love to see just how mysterious genuine love is.

You know what it's like when a married couple hit on the idea of starting a family. They are having breakfast together when the man suddenly exclaims, "I'm sick of gardening, looking after the car, maintaining the house, and all my other chores!" His wife looks up from her cereal. "I've got this cool idea," he continues, "Let's have children so they can do all the work."

"Brilliant!" exclaims the wife, excitedly grasping the possibilities, "I'll teach them to do all the washing and ironing. They'll keep our house tidy and do the cooking. We'll have breakfast in bed every morning. They'll answer the phone so we can have long, undisturbed sleeps."

"Yes!" chimes in her husband, "Life is too hectic. We need some children to give us some peace and quiet."

"And think of all the decisions they could make for us," adds the wife. "I'm sick of having to choose what I watch on TV."

"Come to think of it," says her husband, "I've been missing Sesame Street. And my accountant says children are a goldmine. Pouring money into kids is the best investment we could ever make. We'll be millionaires! We'll be retired at 35. And think of later. What are we going to lie awake at night worrying about if we don't have teenagers? And when we're older who else would throw us into a nursing home?"
"I don't think a woman looks truly beautiful without stretch marks," muses the wife. "Dirty diapers and vomit, screaming kids, snotty noses, and temper tantrums are just the spark our marriage needs."
From a coldly rational perspective, having children seems almost an act of insanity, and yet billions of us yearn for it. Selfless parental love is a compelling desire placed within us by God himself - the God whose love doesn't make worldly sense. When he loves, nothing could be further from his heart than a profit and loss analysis. Divine love - pure love, undefiled by selfishness - is based on giving, not getting.

Even the most starry eyed would-be parents know ahead of time that their offspring will sometimes be naughty, self-centered and have disgusting habits. Billions of us willingly sacrifice much to have children anyway. Children inevitably embarrass and disappoint their parents but, despite having only a speck of God's love, good parents can't stop loving their offspring.
If there are parents, powered by only inferior imitations of God's love, who keep on loving when it does not seem profitable, how much more will the infinite love of God explode the confines of coldly rational, human thought.

If passion were cold and calculating, it would make sense to consider ourselves unwanted if we can't think of anything God could gain from loving us. Many of us choose to love adults only because of what they can do for us - kill loneliness, boost our status or egos or some such thing. We are so used to fake love that we are suspicious if ever we stumble upon the real thing. If real love were selfish, then loving not for gain, but simply for the sake of loving, would be insane. Because even humans know a little about the "insanity" of love, we have such expressions as "madly in love." But beyond that, genuine love does not hold back until there are obvious benefits, because real love is unselfish. And God is brimming with it.

God loves you because he loves you. He loves you because that's his very nature. It's who he is. He takes delight in you, not for what you can do for him, but for what he can do for you. His love singles you out as if there were only you and him. His love makes you special, irreplaceable, and of infinite value.
The story is a told of a boy who labored with his grandfather for hours and hours to design, build and paint a model sailing boat. When at last it was finished, he took his precious boat to the lake to try it out. It sailed beautifully. Suddenly a gust of wind swept the boat out of reach. It drifted further and further into the deep until the boy lost sight of it. Eventually, he trudged home, heart broken.
The boy's grandfather suggested making another boat, but the boy was inconsolable. Nothing could replace that boat.

Weeks later, the boy glanced in the shop window of a second-hand dealer and saw his boat. It was weathered and beaten but it was definitely his. Excitedly, he rushed into the shop to claim his boat, only to find he was not believed. He was told the only way he could get that battered boat was to buy it. He had to find work to earn enough to buy it. When at last the transaction was completed, he hugged his beloved boat and whispered to it, "You're mine! You're twice mine! You're mine because I made you and you're mine because I bought you. And I don't care how battered you are, I'll make you beautiful again."

That's how God feels about you.

God loves you because you are his. He loves you because he made you and because he bought you and because the All-powerful One sees the astounding person he can make you, if only you let him.

With God, you are lovable. To think anything else is to insult not you, but the God of love. The One for whom nothing is impossible is so passionately in love with you that there is no length to which he will not go to pour his love on you for all eternity. God's eternal Son went to the extreme of being tortured to death so that you could be as cherished by God as Christ himself is.

I beg you not to gloss over what the Holy Son of God did for you. The great temptation is to perversely under-rate God's personal love for you and malign the Lord of Glory by supposing Jesus died only for people in general, as if you were just one of millions, not the personal focus of the greatest expression of love in the universe. In our imagination we can cultivate twisted ideas about God's love, but in reality, divine love cannot be diluted or depersonalized. God loves you as if you were his only child.

The truth is that, with his Son's full agreement, God traded his Son's life for you. No matter what your analysis of your worth, no one is more important to God than you.

Mysterious Depression
As strange as it may seem, vast numbers of people suffer from clinical depression long before realizing they have depression. One such person is a missionary I know. Eventually she was diagnosed and then began to learn that a common characteristic of this affliction is an inability to feel loved by God. She writes:

When I was first going through serious depression, I had not the slightest idea that it was depression. I knew I was keeping a close guard on my spiritual life, but in spite of that, it truly felt like God simply was not listening or responding to me, even though I prayed and prayed. And it was that way for months.

I also felt sure I was a failure in my missionary work, and that my teaching was futile. I now look back and see that the truth was very different to my feelings. People enjoyed my classes, and were eager to learn, and the papers they turned in proved they were learning.

I was also sure that my co-worker - another missionary, whom I got along well with and saw constantly - was displeased with me. That frustrated me, because I didn't know why she was displeased.

It turned out that I had simply projected onto those around me, and even onto God, the negative way my depression caused me to feel about myself.
I now know that one of the symptoms of depression is not being able to feel love, even by those who are close to you. In depression, most of our feelings are blunted. We feel useless, unworthy, hopeless, and that no one cares about us. Not feeling God's love was simply a symptom of the disease. It had nothing to do with God not being there, or me being "off" spiritually.

I have undergone much spiritual dryness simply because of depression. Now that my clinical depression has been diagnosed and I understand the implications, I'm no longer shaken by the spiritual symptoms.

Pain Avoidance Techniques
So you could be unable to feel God's love because a chemical imbalance - clinical depression - is deadening your emotions and distorting your perception of earthly and heavenly reality. There are other possibilities, however. We could be unconsciously shutting down our emotions because lurking in the shadows of our mind is a fear of getting hurt.

Part of us - often subconsciously - actively resists feeling love, because to love someone is to make ourselves highly vulnerable. Loving someone gives that person the terrifying power to hurt us deeply. To really feel someone's love requires us to open our hearts to that person. It gives a person the power to lift us to the clouds but also the power to smash our hearts like a dropped egg.

Not surprisingly, the fear of getting hurt causes many of us to close off emotionally, as a form of self-protection. Tragically, the very attempt to seal off our emotions from the possibility of getting hurt, also seals off the possibility of us feeling loved. This is yet another instance when it is through giving that we receive.

In theory, for us to release our white-knuckled grip on our emotions, it should be sufficient to know that God is faithful and will keep his promise never to leave or forsake us. In practice, however, fear is seldom overcome quickly. For anyone terrified of spiders, to stop fearing a huge spider will take more than just becoming intellectually convinced that it is harmless. We can expect it to take a long while for us to trust God so completely that we relax enough to be able to feel loved. So, as back to front as it seems, the first but significant step towards realizing that we are loved is to not expect to feel loved.

Your emotional Fingerprint
Part of the uniqueness that makes us special is that we each have a distinctive emotional reaction to identical situations.
We all know that some of us are far more emotional than others. Some people seem to laugh at anything; some laugh at nothing. Some would cry if their cat sneezed. Others would not shed a tear if hit by the worst personal disaster known to humanity. The one who cries the least might have the softest heart. Lack of tears has nothing to do with how much people are hurting or how devoted they are.

How emotional you are, flows from your personality and past experiences, not from how godly you are. 

The same is true of all feelings.
To adapt what I've said elsewhere:

Never confuse devotion with emotion. The Bible measures love, not in tingles per second, but in putting one's life on the line (1 John 3:16-18). It's pain endured in the valley, not gooey feelings in the afterglow of mountaintop ecstasy, that validates love. Never assume that emotional deadness - a normal phase of anyone's spiritual life - implies spiritual deadness. We march by faith, not by warm fuzzies.

Suppose someone is beaten up and sustains a spinal injury that allows him to walk but he is left with some loss of feeling in his legs. That does not make him any less lovable. Many of us have been beaten up emotionally and have been left with a loss of feeling in our emotions. That's unfortunate, but we should not let it have any effect on our relationship with God.
If a devout woman of God broke her neck and lost all physical feeling, it would be a challenge, but we would expect it not to hinder her relationship with God. Likewise, we should not allow not being able to feel emotionally hinder us spiritually.

A Wrong Emphasis on Feelings

It is astonishingly easy for us Christians to slip into unbiblical thinking. A quick statistical check of biblical word usage gives a crude indication of how we have strayed from the Bible's perspective on the significance of feelings. In the New International Version of the Bible, for every variant of the word "feel" (feeling, felt, feels, etc) there are over thirteen occurrences of variants of the word "faith" or "believe." In the King James Version, the figure balloons to thirty-seven times more references to faith/believe than to variants of "feel." For details and further relevant word analyses, see Word Stats.
"Now faith is . . . the evidence of things not seen," declares the Word of God (Hebrews 11:1, KJV). Most of us know the verse. The problem is that we tend to reject it and think that feelings are the evidence. The Jerusalem Bible renders the verse: "Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen." Our temptation is to dethrone faith and try to make feelings, not faith, the guarantee or proof of spiritual reality. To do so is to stray from biblical Christianity. To cling to faith is to show oneself an authentic Christian.

Expecting a Sign from God that He Loves You

How do you think the Almighty would feel if you said, "God, I want you to prove to me that you're not a liar when you declare over and over in your Word that you love me." We'd never put it so bluntly, but regardless of whether we seek a feeling or supernatural skywriting, this is really what is going on when we seek some sort of indication beyond the Bible and Christ's sacrifice that God loves us.
Hoping for such a sign plunges us into a no-win situation. To explain, permit me to draw upon something I wrote elsewhere:

I've suffered times when I was convinced I desperately needed personal indications of God's presence, and I felt badly treated by God when he left me to stagger though life devoid of any tangible proof that I was important to him, even though he gave people all around me the signs I craved. Eventually I remembered Thomas, who was granted perhaps the greatest of all such experiences - the opportunity to physically handle the risen Lord. How blessed he was! And yet the astounding thing is that Jesus told Thomas that the person who is really blessed is the one who is not granted an experience like him. The best is reserved for the person compelled to hold on by faith alone (John 20:29).

Finally I understood how I had forced my Lord into the position where he either had to deny me the experience I was hankering for, or deny me the greater blessing he had planned for me - the chance to gain glory by finding faith without experiencing anything dramatic and, by doing so, grow in faith, that exquisite commodity more valuable than gold. The Lord had lovingly risked my wrath so that he could give me the greater blessing. And instead of being grateful, I was annoyed at him.

How often we must unknowingly put God in such a situation. Seeing only one possible solution, we demand it of God, convinced that he must either act the only way we can figure, or God cannot be loving. We force God into either denying us what is best, or acting in a manner that we have fooled ourselves into thinking is unloving.

Mysterious "Memory Loss"
Slightly edited, here's an email I received:

I was just beginning to read on your website about how much God is head over heals in love with us, when the Lord said to me, "Fifty First Dates." This is a movie of a guy that falls in love with a brain-injured girl who suffers from memory loss. Every day the guy tries to win her heart and sweep her off her feet, only to find out that the next day she can't even remember who he is. Every day he tries to win her over, even though she can't remember who he is the next day.
That's how it is with us sometimes. He is crazy in love with us. We look for spiritual highs but even if occasionally we get them, almost as soon as the high is over we assume the fading of the high means God has denied us in some way and we revert to feeling as down about our relationship with him as before the experience.

Reminding me of the movie, God said, "Just because she couldn't remember the guy the next day didn't stop him from trying to love her and win her over. He just kept on loving her and helping her to remember who she was and who he is."
That is so much like the relationship many of us have with God.

There is another side to the parable of the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45). Jesus found us, and we were so precious to him that he sold all he had, relinquishing all his kingly status and wealth, just to buy us back to the Father at the cost of his own tortured death. This blows me away! His love is so far beyond our love. No wonder we have such a hard time understanding it!

Our emphasis on signs and feelings instead of faith, and us thinking divine love is like fickle human love, does indeed cause us to act as if we suffer from continual memory loss, and yet God keeps tirelessly trying to open our eyes to the magnitude and constancy of his love for us.
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