BELIEVING THE LOVE OF GOD

The Holy Spirit has been leading me to pray for a greater understanding of God’s love. After reading 1 John 4:16, I realized how very little I know about living and walking in God’s love. “We have known and believed the love God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”

I believe most Christians know about God’s love for them only theologically. They have learned the Scriptures on love and have heard them preached—and yet their understanding is limited to a line from a children’s chorus: “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

We believe God loves us, the world and the lost, but it is an abstract faith! Not many Christians can say with authority, “Yes, I know Jesus loves me—because I have an understanding of what his love is. It is the foundation of my daily walk.”

The daily walk of many Christians, however, is not one of believing in God’s love; instead they live under a cloud of guilt, fear and condemnation. God did not save you to live in condemnation. Jesus said, “Verily, very I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24).

“There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit” (Romans 8:1). All guilt and condemnation are clearly of the devil. One meaning of the word condemnation is wrath. This is saying you won’t come under his judgment—that on the Judgment Day you will be free from his wrath. But condemnation also means “the feeling of never measuring up to standards.” And the Word is teaching us that the believer shall not come under the feeling of never measuring up!

“That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19).

Rooted and grounded here means “to build under you a deep and stable foundation of knowing and understanding the love of God to you.” In other words, the knowledge of God’s love to you is the foundational truth upon which all other truths must build!

God loves you!