The Vision

The hit song from the Sixties called “Alfie” had a lyric in it that asked, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” The song was a message to a self-absorbed Alfie that there was more to life than using it for his own selfish pleasures. That something was loving others. God would adjust this to say that life was about a love relationship between himself and us, and us and others. The greatest commandment is, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,” and the second greatest is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:36-39).

Imagine living in the presence of someone who is very strong, and who is head-over-heels in love with us. Imagine someone whose smile slowly melts away our fears and tensions, for “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18).Imagine someone who is always there for us, but gives us space when we need it. Imagine someone who will never reject us no matter how weak and unbelieving we are, for God says to us, “I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you” (Hebrews 13:5). Imagine someone who enjoys being with us and delights in who we really are.

Such is the love that God has for us, his children. There are no strings attached to his love. He gives us his love as a gift. It is too good to be true, yet it is true. We can do nothing to cause God to stop loving us, and we can do nothing to cause him to love us more. His love is already as high as the heavens are above the earth (Psalm 103:11).

He knows our every weakness and every sin that we have buried deep in our hearts, yet he still loves us. His love for us comes from who he is, not from our performance. He wants us to rest in his love for us, and let him satisfy our needs for worth, safety, and being acceptable. He does not want us to keep striving to earn worth, love, and safety, for it is so unnecessary and is only an illusion. Yet, we will need to be “diligent to enter that rest” (Hebrews 4:11).

God wants us to live increasingly in this reality of his intimate love for us. He wants us to soak in his love and be transformed by it. “Beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, [we] are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 Corinthians 3:18). He yearns to transform our lives from striving to be loved and valuable, to resting in the glory of being his precious children.

It Will Not Be Easy

So, why do we know so much about God’s love for us and yet often fail to experience it? One major reason is that we were born that way. We were born to live a life without experiencing his love, which comes through not depending on him.  We were born to hide from God, or, if necessary, try to earn his love by being good. “There is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God” (Romans 3:10-11).

In addition, we were trained by our parents, schools, friends, and society that there is no free lunch, and that we must jump through various hoops to get love, acceptance and worth. No matter how godly our parents were, they did not perfectly reflect God’s deep love and delight in us. So, we learned not to trust in being loved without some strings attached. For me, it was being strong, being smart, and playing by the rules.

Now, the problem does not go away just because we receive Christ and are born again. We carry this baggage of a spirit that is oriented and trained to earn love into our relationship with God. So, we will tend to relate to God the way we related to our parents and others. This would include seeking to impress him, compensating for our bad by being good, hiding our bad from him, and seeking to live our lives without his help. We fail to realize that God is greatly different from anyone else we have ever related to, and that we need to be retrained to live in a love relationship with him.

However, churches have often failed to properly support and encourage us in this lifelong development of an ever-deepening love relationship with God. Once we are stabilized in our faith, the focus often shifts to getting busy for the Lord in various ministries. We often are not properly equipped to increasingly enter into a deep experiential love relationship with God that empowers our lives and ministries supernaturally. Churches often teach to be suspicious of experiencing God in circumstances, in the still small voice, through the Body of Christ, and in nature. Some churches teach that God can only be experienced through the Scriptures.

Experiencing the Vision

We can know truth without really experiencing truth at the heart level. For example, we can know God loves us, and yet fear his rejection through being weak and unbelieving. We can know God loves us, yet try to increase his love for us through achievement. We can know God loves us, yet fear the future he controls. Our feelings and actions show we really do not fully understand or rely on his love at the heart level. So, we need truth to percolate from our heads to our hearts.

One discipline that is helpful in embracing the reality that God deeply loves us is to meditate on his Scriptures that he uses to tell us how much he does. Prayerfully meditating on Scriptures such as Psalm 23, Psalm 91, Psalm 131, and Psalm 139 help us soak in the reality of his love. I often feel my fears begin to melt away as I allow the truth of his love to sink deep within my heart.

I know from much personal experience how being in the presence of love is a great anecdote for fear. Living at my Grandma’s house at various times during my childhood, I experienced godly love and found release from my fears in the presence of this godly woman. She never looked at me like she was evaluating me, but always in admiration and love.

As the years went by, my times at Grandma’s house became less and less, for my family had moved two thousand miles away. When I was twelve, I began to experience some strong anxieties as I faced the transition from childhood to being a teenager. I became depressed and began to develop some other emotional problems. However, God rescued me and led my dad to move back to Illinois near my Grandma and other loving relatives. In the presence of their warm and loving acceptance of me, my fears melted away within a month and I became happy again.

I now use sanctified imaginative sessions (committing the time to God for his control), in which I revisit Grandma’s house with Jesus there and experience being loved by Jesus and Grandma. These times are helping to transform my heart, feelings and thoughts that mere cognitive knowing never touched. Having said this, I always check these experiences to ensure that they are consistent with the truths of Scripture.

Another discipline that can help us experience being loved by Jesus is to place ourselves in gospel scenes like Matthew 11:25-30, Mark 6:45-52, and Luke 12:22-32 through our imagination.Then, we become an eyewitness to experiencing Jesus’ love being shown to his disciples as we see, feel, taste, hear, and touch what the original participants experienced, to increase the reality of his great love for us. We need to particularly pay attention to how Jesus looks at us, and what he says to us in these imaginative sessions. I personally believe God uses these times to speak truth and reveal his deep love for me.

Another excellent discipline to experience God’s love for us is participating in a small group. God’s love is in each Christian to some extent, and he wants to use each of us to love one another. Yet, human love is always tainted with self-interest to some extent, but often gives us a taste of love that helps us to want to receive God’s perfect love.

Finally, one of the key disciplines that we need to be practicing is to “lay aside the old self, and put on the new self” (Ephesians 4:22-24) in the power of the Holy Spirit. This is critical if we are to grow in experiencing his love and fellowship, for, “If we say that we have fellowship with Him and yet walk in the darkness [in the old self], we lie and do not practice the truth” (1 John 1:6). When we are clinging to our baggage, such as respect from others determines our worth, or achievement increases our worth, then we are living in darkness in these areas. “Let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run” (Hebrews 12:1). When we do not intentionally deal with these lies we rely on, our ability to experience the joy and peace of God’s never-failing love for us will be hindered.

I am currently learning to identify satanic lies that I have trusted in for most of my life. Also, I am identifying the corresponding truths from God’s Word and asking God, through his Spirit, to enable me to put off the old and learn to rely on his truth. The lies I have relied on at the heart level include the fallacy that my weaknesses may cause God to reject me. In addition, I have relied on the lies that God will love me more if I achieve, and that I am loved if people approve of me. A corresponding truth that I am depending on the Holy Spirit to increasingly make experientially real to me is that God will never reject me no matter what. In addition, I am learning to rely more on the fact that God is head-over-heels in love with me and will never love me more. He says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). Finally, I am learning to live more in the reality that I am loved by God, no matter how people respond to me.

Excerpt from the book Experiencing God’s Transforming Love