The ultimate love goal

What we have learned from life is that love must have a cause. People will love us if and not regardless, and what we do is to project that understanding of love on to God. If we believe that God can never be satisfied, we already believe that we have to figure life out for ourselves and have concluded that there’s no reason to give Him our all. This leads us to make a partial commitment or no commitment at all to Him because we believe that we need to always reserve something for ourselves. Essentially, we believe that God can’t be trusted with everything.

Our human love is a risky business. To truly love we must choose to be very vulnerable and let people into the secret places of our lives. Some of us have done that and been severely hurt, sometimes repeatedly. We’ve learned from the world that we should never give our lives completely to anyone, to always hold back. If we do it with people, we do it with God. In this way we’re resisting God’s love, not directly, but for self preservation.

Then, if we were raised in an environment where we were not loved the way we thought we should’ve been, or those who were our parents or caregivers were harsh and unloving it just makes matters worse. In these instances, what we think love is, is a warped concept of love. We won’t even understand love, so we resist it.

As we are looking out at God through the lens of bad perception and wrong thoughts, it affects our lives and our Christian walk. Our Christian walk won’t yield the kind of results it should if we don’t get this right. When we truly believe that God loves us completely and unconditionally our faith will soar, and we can believe Him for anything. Galatians 5:6 (NCV) states “The important thing is faith — the kind of faith that works through love.” Faith works with love. Even our ability to have faith in God is hinged on our understanding of God’s love for us. Many of the struggles we have with obedience, patience, and unbelief can be traced back to a lack of understanding of God’s love. We say we understand that God loves us, for example, but then we turn around and say things like God put sickness on us because He’s trying to teach us something. This is not the right understanding of who God is.

This wrong perception of God’s love is at the root of much of the fear, worries, loneliness, and other negative emotions we carry around in our lives. It affects our faith and our ability to walk in authority. It affects everything. The solution is that we must allow God to love us.

Knowing God’s love is critical to a healthy Christian life. Paul prayed “that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, 18 may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, 19 and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Ephesians 3:17-19 (NIV)

There is a dimension of experiencing God’s love that’s beyond our intellectual understanding. Only God can reveal it to us. Paul prayed that they would move beyond the superficial into the revelatory love of God. The ultimate goal is that we be firmly rooted and established in God’s love.