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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Handling Guilt or Shame

She had been a stripper, prostitute, drug addict and demon-possessed witch. It was hard to imagine a perversion or Satanic form of depravity she hadn't wallowed in. Two thousand years ago, Christ agonized on a Roman cross, shedding his life-blood for those very sins. She continued in her extreme degradation. Finally, she joined herself to Jesus, by faith trading her wickedness for Christ's holiness. One day Jesus appeared to her and said, ?You are a chaste virgin in my sight.'

None of us have an infallible conscience. In fact, most of our consciences are at times wildly inaccurate. If you want Scriptural proof of this, you'll find plenty.

So when facing guilt feelings, the most important thing is to establish whether your guilt is real or imaginary. Tragically, most people stand guilty before God and are hardly aware of it. They wrongly imagine that if there is a heaven, they have a good chance of going there. On the other hand, there are countless thousands whom God regards as spotlessly pure and innocent, and yet are riddled with guilt feelings.

We must clearly differentiate between deceptive feelings and spiritual reality.

You have every right to feel guilty and fearful before God if:

1. You have not asked God's forgiveness for your sin, trusting Jesus to have paid the full penalty for your sin by dying on the cross for you. Christ alone is capable of the divine miracle needed to wipe out all guilt.

2. You do not want God to take your sins from you. To refuse to be delivered from your pet sin is like a drowning man stubbornly refusing to let his rescuer drag him from the water. If you have no intention of giving up a particular sin, you'll die in that sin. The sins you love are as deadly as the sins you despise.

Everyone who is not trusting Jesus for forgiveness, or does not want a sin-free life, is guilty before the Judge of the universe, regardless of how they feel.

If, however, you have met these two conditions, God's smile is upon you. Any pangs of guilt or fear you suffer are simply an illusion like fearing there's an intruder in the house when it was only the sound of the wind. The feelings might exist, and they might be most unpleasant, but they are groundless. They have no correspondence to reality.

Just to be sure, let's briefly expound these conditions for spiritual cleansing. Then we'll move to some exciting facts.

1. You must believe the Scriptures that teach that Jesus, and only he, can remove your sin. (He alone can pay sin's penalty because he alone has no sins of his own for which he must suffer.)

2. Once you put your faith in God, trusting that he is infinitely wise and good and always has your best interest at heart, [more] the only logical thing is to resolve to follow his leading on every matter, regardless of how scary and costly it may sometimes seem. This is simply a decision. A state of mind. It means that despite some sins still seeming attractive, you decide that God's way is best and sign over to him control of your life. It means refusing to enjoy the ?benefits' of past sin. You will repay money you have stolen, not let people to continue believing a lie you have told, and so on. And it means shunning the hypocrisy of wanting God's forgiveness while refusing to forgive someone else.

Sin's full penalty is death, and the sinless Son of God died for you. Why punish yourself? He's already taken your punishment! Are you morally bankrupt? No way! Paid in full is stamped over your every account. By joining yourself to Jesus, a divine exchange takes place in which Jesus takes your sins upon himself (that's what killed him) and his perfection becomes yours. The holiness of Jesus floods your entire being, flushing out every trace of sin. That makes you spotlessly pure and perfect in God's eyes. Almighty God can embrace you and delight in you as intimately as he does his own eternal, sinless Son. Every whiff of sin is obliterated because Jesus died for your every sin. This central spiritual truth is expounded over and over in Bible. Scripture repeatedly promises this to you, but no where does it say you will feel that it has happened. The whole of Christianity is about choosing to believe spiritual reality instead of your inner feelings.

It is worth prayerfully studying, and even memorizing, the Scriptures listed in the above link, because this is a crucial area of spiritual attack. Just as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness and he overcame by believing and quoting the Scriptures, so you will be tempted over this matter and you can overcome by clinging to the dependable Word of God. Satan will disguise the true nature of the temptation, but it is actually a temptation to believe God is a liar. The Deceiver is trying to fool you into believing that God lied when he said that all your sins are forgiven, when Jesus said that all that come to him he will not cast out, etc. Don't blacken God's name by entertaining such a thought.

No one can be any more guilty than the nicest person

No matter how horrendously evil you might have been, by God's standards, you are no more guilty than anyone else. We were all dead in our sins, says Scripture. You can't get any deader, than dead! Without exception we were all a total write-off.

Relative to each other, some of us seem fairly innocent and some seem very guilty. But this is by our sinful standards. It's like someone who has murdered twenty people feeling superior to someone who killed two hundred people. Perfection is God's only standard. We get just one shot at living a perfect life and we have all blown it. We have all missed the mark. Whether we missed the mark by a millimeter or a kilometer, means nothing. We all missed, and that's all that counts.

On the other hand, when you receive divine forgiveness through Jesus, no one can be more forgiven than you. Although outside of Christ, we all stand condemned, in Christ, we each stand spotlessly pure before the Holy One.

Simple logic suggests that our spiritual enemy, whom Scripture calls the Deceiver and the Accuser, would muster all his evil cunning to distort this simple truth. If the Evil One wanted to keep people from the wonderful forgiveness that Jesus offers, he would try to convince them that they are not bad enough to need forgiveness. Or failing that, he would try persuading them that they are so bad that they cannot be forgiven. Either way, the result is the same. If he utterly lost that battle, and people became Christians, he would then try to get them to feel less sinful than others ? producing bigots, arrogant fools and hypocrites. For those resistant to this attack, he would try the opposite lie, hissing that they are too sinful to be fully blessed by God or be mightily used of God. Either way, it would render them powerless. So it's obviously to the Deceiver's advantage to make you feel that total cleansing is impossible for you. Don't let him get away with such lies.

If, after God has forgiven us, we won't forgive ourselves, we are implying we have a higher sense of justice than the Holy One. Anyone having the impertinence to make such an accusation is on dangerous ground. We are also implying that Jesus is inadequate - that he didn't suffer enough for our sins, or that his sinlessness cannot swallow up our sinfulness. There is no shame in a forgiven person feeling guilty. That is simply the Deceiver at work. For a forgiven person to believe he or she is guilty, however, is a concern.

Enjoy!

Some dear people are so aware of the seriousness of sin that they don't feel it's right that God should let them off scot-free and so they try to punish themselves! The most common self-imposed punishment is to deliberately feel miserable and deny oneself certain legitimate pleasures for a period of time. (This generally includes not allowing themselves the right to enjoy their relationship with God.)

On the surface, it seems a noble thing to punish oneself for sin and it indicates a strong desire to please God. However, it is important to realize that your life is not your own (1 Corinthians 6:19). You're God's child (John 1:12) and you belong to him. The way a parent disciplines his child is solely the parent's concern. Just as it would be wrong for you to interfere and punish someone else's child, so it's wrong for you to play God and try to punish yourself for your own failings.

Some people even punish themselves in the vain hope that it may help to secure their Lord's approval. But this only insults Jesus by implying that his death wasn't sufficient to gain your full forgiveness. Furthermore, believing you can help gain the Lord's approval by punishing yourself, puts yourself in a spiritually dangerous situation. It is vital to your forgiveness that you place your complete faith in Jesus alone. Only Jesus is able to obtain God's approval of you, and so you must place no faith in your own futile attempts to please God.

Unforgiven sin separates us from our Holy God (Isaiah 59:1-2). The sooner this rift is healed, the better. So if you happen to sin, return to God straight away, sincerely ask his forgiveness and trust him for the strength to overcome that sin, so that you will not commit it again. Once God has forgiven you, you are obligated to forgive yourself, because you should have God's attitude towards all things. To refuse to forgive ourselves is to imply we have holier standards than God!

Exciting facts

Let's explore some of the many wonderful word pictures the Bible uses to describe forgiveness. It could prove the most thrilling experience of your life.

Some of these word pictures are from the Old Testament, penned because in God's sight Christ was ?slain before the foundation of the earth' (Revelation 13:8). They were written under the inspiration of Almighty God, who knew how all sin, throughout all human history, would be finally dealt with by his eternal Son.

our sins have been removed / taken away [Scriptures]

If you had a limb surgically removed you might still suffer pain that seems to come from the missing limb. Phantom limb pain is the medical term. You could remember having that limb, but it is gone forever. It could still cause you pain, and yet it is no longer a part of you.

You can also remember your sins. Their presence can seem so real as to actually cause you pain. But despite what you feel, those sins are no longer part of you. They are gone forever. This is an important concept to grasp. Let it soak into the deepest part of you by taking time out to think about it.

In contrast to the removal of a limb, Jesus' removal of your sin does not leave you crippled. On the contrary, it heals you, like the removal of a tumor.

If you had a cancerous tumor, you would be alarmed. But if a surgeon said it had all been removed, you could have peace. You could not personally verify that every trace of cancer had been removed. You would have to take the surgeon's word. Your sins, more deadly than a tumor, have all been removed. The only way you can know this for sure is to take your Savior's word, and that makes it not just more certain than any surgeon's word, but more certain than anything in the universe. Jesus' word has more authority than that of any other being in any world. It is his word that spoke the galaxies into existence. He is truth. He, like no other, is utterly trustworthy. If he says your sins are removed, they are removed!

Your sins have been removed as far as the east is from the west

(Psalm 103:12)

To the Hebrew mind, you could travel east forever and never touch west. You were once in your sin. It was once part of you. But now, God has placed an infinite distance between you and your sins. The memory might still be with you, but the sin itself is no where to be found.

. . . search will be made for Israel's guilt,
but there will be none,
and for the sins of Judah,
but none will be found,
for I will forgive . . .(Jeremiah 50:20)

Your sins have been thrown into the depths of the sea

(Micah 7:18-19)

Almighty God trampled your sins under his feet, thus destroying them, then banished them forever by hurling them into the ocean depths. The Israelites' technology was such that anything below a few meters of water was utterly inaccessible. Anything dropped into the ocean depths was lost forever. No one would ever see it again. That's like what has happened to your sin. It's gone forever.

The Holy Lord has given his word to never remember your sins [Scriptures]

You no longer need try to justify your past, or apportion blame, because it is totally erased from heaven's data banks.

Retaining the blessing

The screams of a tormented conscience can be transformed into contented sighs. I've prepared more for you to ensure this becomes your experience. If your troubled mind is already so soothed that you feel no inclination to read further, that's wonderful. I beg you, however, to copy or print off this page and those listed below, in readiness for when the attack resumes.

The Evil One does not give up easily. No matter how much you feel the matter has been resolved, I assure you, the truths you have just read will gradually fade from your mind and a new round will commence in the fight for your spiritual peace and enjoyment of God.

I also suggest having in readiness many Scriptures on this subject. Mark them in your Bible. You might choose a chain reference system whereby you write next to one verse the Scripture reference to another related verse and keep adding cross references until you are back to the first one. That way, once you find one verse you can find your way to all the rest. I also suggest writing the references in the back of your Bible, displaying some on your wall, and also memorizing some.

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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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