The Journey of Understanding God's love.. it's a you thing.

Welcome back, guys! I'm going to be real with you, I was so ready to move onto speaking about the cycle of love and start speaking about the practical ways of applying God's love. Like I spent so long writing it, but I just couldn't bring myself to post it. Anyway, long story short I got confirmation from the HS today to continue with the journey of understanding God's love, but from a new perspective - the journey of loving ourselves. Moral of the story, doing things your way isn't by any means the best way - ask God and he'll show you what to do (Proverbs 3:5-6). Lean into God and he'll lean into you! ANYWAY, into today's topic! In this journey of faith, I've realised that from love all else flows. An understanding of love makes everything else make sense - it wasn't till I began to intentionally try to understand God's love that I was able to understand the grace and mercy of God (it's so funny to me that I literally had the grace and mercy of God with me for so long and I was completely blinded by it! Thank God for revelation ah). I want to share with us possible reasons why we might not be accepting God's love. The thing is, no-one sits there and says that they don't want God's love or that they feel like they can't accept his love.. that would be weird right? But the thing with the devil is that he attempts to feed into our lives subtle lies and slowly we begin to believe them. This is why it is important to feed into the word and to renew our minds (Romans 12:2) and fix our thoughts on what is true (Philippians 4:8) because honestly an idle mind is the devil’s playground. He wants us to believe that we aren't worthy of God's love and he finds contentment with us sticking to a life of sin and abiding in the world, but as children of God we're set apart. We're no longer bound by the flesh, we have a new life in Christ - a spirt lead life. It’s only by us recognising this that we can take a step further into understanding God’s love.

1 John 3:1 (KJV) reiterates this:

"manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God"

Just to break down what is trying to be said to us here. "Bestow" means to put something in place specifically, but it also connotes a gift. Some other translations say "lavished" "given" and even "extended". (S/N I would 100% recommend checking between different translation as it personally enhances my understanding of the message God's trying to get across).

What 1 John 3:1 says about his love: His love is:

• A gift

• A blessing

• Placed upon us

Long story short, it completely de-attaches God's love from us. The emphasis of it being a “gift” means it can not be earnt. He willingly gave his love to Us He didn't have to, he had a choice and he chooses us every single time without a doubt. Equally, we have a choice the first step of this is choosing to receive it, but it's this receiving part that's the hardest.

Personally, what I found was the barrier between me and accepting God's love was me, like I thought I understood that it wasn't for me to earn but inevitably I would end up acting as if I had to earn it. I found it hard to deem myself worthy of his love, so I would judge and condemn myself every time I fell short or acted in a way I knew I shouldn't have. I was holding onto years of shame, guilt, unworthiness and even perhaps pride. This isn't what God wants for us as his children, he wants us to:

"approach the God's throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need".

This confidence is us humbly coming before God and laying out all of our cares and our worries, both the good and the bad. He doesn’t just love the good parts of of us, but he loves us at the state in which he finds us. The broken us, the hurt us. Is the only one who can make us whole again. He is the only one who can do the mending, it a pointless exercise us trying to figure it out on our own as we’re always going to find problems with us. The good news is, that we don’t have to, nor do we need to because only the creator of a product truly knows how best the product works. We can lift the weight of trying to have it all figured out and simply just come as are. No facades, no fronts and no hiding.

This is all part of the journey of recognising that no amount of human effort could bring God to love us any more, it isn't a point scoring match. His love is fixed, constant and standard. It's no big deal to God, but the enemy will continue to attempt to feed us with lies that aim to bring us further away from God, lies of condemnation and even perhaps comparison. But friends, the good news is that God doesn't compare us to other believers nor does he judge us by our mistakes. He loves us just as he finds us, he sees no insecurities, he sees no imperfections. It's us that does this. It's us that comes into the relationship with trust issues. It's us that creates this divide between us and God. That is why the whole point of our relationship with God is to gradually close this gap. The best and most effective way for us to do this is to become children of God, meaning we should mimic his love and extend this same love that he gave to us first to ourselves. Friends I’m not sure what's stopping you from believing that God loves you but what's so beautiful about the love of God is that because of this love that is vested in us, we are now automatically children of God i.e. we're marked by him. Marked by his special love, we are marked by the precious blood of the lamb. We were bought with a price, a price that he already paid, so let's stop crucifying ourselves, condemning ourselves and making ourselves unnecessarily pay for something that has already been paid for! In other words, nothing we do can ever make God love us any more. The type of gift he gives us it is one-sided giving - even if we don't want it, we have it. It's there for us to utilise.

So, what am I trying to say? In no way am I undermining our feelings and emotions, but what I am trying to say is that we have a part to play in understanding God's love for us and that can simply be done by us trying to see things from God's perspective, not our own. This is why I encourage us all to try to decipher what exactly it is that is stopping us from accepting God's love if it's sin I want to encourage us that there is no too far with God. Romans 8 perfectly reiterates this, God is rooting for you and because God is for you, nothing can ever be against you (verse 31). Not yourself, not your feelings, not your emotions. Nothing can ever separate us from his love. That writer of Romans was SO sure of this love that he was "convinced" that nothing could ever separate us from his love. There is no power greater than the love of Jesus Christ. All that's left now is for us to accept this. I understand it's a journey, possibly one of the hardest journeys in our faith that we might have to embark on, but that's why it's so important for us to pinpoint. I urge you to ponder on this question: "What is stopping me from accepting God's love" and I pray that as we all ponder on this question together that God begins to reveal to us the parts of our lives we need to let go of. In Jesus Name! AMEN Thanks again for reading Day 3, I hope you're blessed! Enjoy your day friends. Love you with the love of Christ xxx