Everyday Step with Jesus

God’s love is something so beautiful yet so many of us don’t grasp how real and pure His love truly is towards us, as we are His creation. Nowadays, the word “love” is thrown around so easily. We say things like, “I love your shirt”, “I love this color”, or “I love this and I love that”. I include myself as well as I do this too. It has become so easy to just throw that word around that it has lost its meaning. Because of this, we don’t really understand how profound and real God’s love for us truly is. God’s love never loses its meaning because He remains the same yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:8 NKJV). Love is vast and can be talked about in so many different forms. This post will not be focusing on what love is or how to love but rather God’s love towards us. What I’ve experienced is that I haven’t fully understood God’s love towards me and therefore have found it hard to accept God’s love. If you have found yourself struggling with this or if you don’t know God’s love keep on reading…

The first thing we need to understand about God’s love is that He is not just loving but rather He is love. 

He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4:8 NKJV

His whole essence is love, which means He can’t and won’t stop loving. He is the originator of all true love and we see His love demonstrated over and over throughout His word. The ultimate demonstration of God’s love is that He gave His one and only Son to die on the cross for our sins and give us eternal life. 

This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  1 John 4:9-10 NIV

God didn’t wait for you and I to love him first to show His love towards us. God knew us before we were even formed (Jeremiah 1:5), and when he sent his Son to die on the cross, he loved us before we knew anything about him. He knew we didn’t love him, yet he made the ultimate sacrifice for our sake. This is pure unselfish love, a love that is not dependent on our actions. This verse shows that we didn’t have to do anything to gain His love. 

When we truly think about this it demonstrates God’s love for each and everyone of us. But how do we accept and live out that love that God has for us on a daily basis? God’s love is available for all of us, but oftentimes we reject or don’t understand it. When we think about God loving us, we confuse His love for that of ours. We think that we have to do things to earn His love as if it were a reward for good behavior …and this can’t be any further from the truth. Yes, God is pleased when we obey Him and follow His word, but that is not the reason that He loves us. God’s love for us is UNCONDITIONAL. This means that no matter what we do, His love towards us will never change. I am not saying to go and do whatever you want or to go against His word because His word also says 

Whoever says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in that person. We know that we have come to know him if we keep his commands. But if anyone obeys his word, love for God is truly made complete in them. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must live as Jesus did. ‘ 1 John 2:3-6 NIV

When we obey His word it has nothing to do with God’s love towards us but rather our love towards Him. Our obedience is a sign of our relationship and fellowship with Him, not a measuring stick for how much God will love us
in return. He already loves us, there is nothing we can do that will make us more or less deserving of His love, the one thing that we need to do is accept and embrace His love and have a relationship with Him. 

Each of us has had a different experience when it comes to love and these experiences cloud our understanding of God’s love towards us. Oftentimes we look for approval from people, we try to fit in, be in style, keep up with the trends, appease others, but with God it is not necessary to do any of that. I think this is the part that takes many of us so long to understand, that He loves you for who you are…flaws and all. He doesn’t look at us with the eyes of disapproval we tend to look at ourselves with or how others may look at us. He searches us and knows us (Psalm 139:1 NKJV), and even when there are things on the inside that aren’t pleasing or that go against His word, He doesn’t give up on us or change His love towards us. Instead, He gives us the tools and weapons that we need in order to renew our mind and truly be transformed.

Ask yourself, ”What does God’s love look like to me in my own eyes?” More than likely the understanding of God’s love that we have is misunderstood from what His love truly is and we try to understand it from a human perspective. But we need to remember that “our ways are not His ways nor His thoughts our thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). This means that the love that God has for us is not the love that we understand nor the way we see love. However, the more we know God, the more we will be able to understand His love towards us. It is a love that transcends all things. A love that never changes and that is always there. His word says:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Romans 8:35 NKJV

I like that question, Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? If your mind tells you that something can separate you from His love, His word gives you the answer….don’t listen to your own thoughts but rather what His word says, which is the truth. 

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height or depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38 NKJV

The scripture is clear and the truth is that nothing can separate us from His love. No action you commit, no persons. Nothing. All thanks to Jesus. There is a difference from His love and his presence and the things we do can keep us away from his presence, but absolutely nothing can separate us from his LOVE. In the beginning of my walk with the Lord I made the mistake of assuming that his presence and love were the same thing. I assumed that his presence in my life reflected his love for me and, when I felt conviction of things that I felt were a sin, I would feel that lack of presence meant God’s love for me was diminishing. But I was wrong…His love for me remains the same. 

In this realization, I’ve come to understand that, in order to fully accept God’s love, I must know that I am valuable and that I am loved. His love is real but we are the ones that have to understand and believe just how real His love is…that despite the things we may not like about ourselves, despite how alone we may feel (it is a feeling, not the truth), despite what others may say about us, we are loved. We need to be confident in Him. Not an arrogant confidence, but a confidence in Him and through Him that allows us to see ourselves in the way that He sees us. We have to come into acceptance of who we are and who He has created us to be. Of course, there is always room for improvement in so many areas of our lives, mainly due to traumas or situations that we have gone through in our lives. But we must learn to accept who we are and love ourselves in order to receive and accept God’s love for us. I found in my walk that it was not that I didn’t believe God loved me but rather that I didn’t understand who I was in Christ and that His love truly is unconditional. In the midst of not knowing who we are, His love finds us and teaches us how to love Him, how to love ourselves, and how to love those around us. 

It is important to remember that God’s love is not something that we can earn or that we can purchase, it is something that God has given freely, it is up to you to reach out and embrace His love. Only then, will you truly understand your value. God loves you…