Mikki's Blog - Living in the Grace and Love of God » God’s Heart

Love of God

Mikki — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 16:32:55 +0000

Love of God – Has it captured your heart?

I could paint with a broad stroke and speak of His love for all humanity. I could talk about the affection of God as it relates to the Church. Those aspects of God’s love form an important framework, but what we all long to know – or perhaps to know increasingly -is the love of God for each of us individually.

And lest you think that is selfish, let me assure you that that is precisely what God wants for you! God has moved from the beginning of time to insure that any who wanted, could have a very personal relationship with Him and receive the affections of His heart.

As a child, when I first committed my life to God through Christ, I was looking to escape judgment. I came to the foot of the cross in fear. I was motivated more by the fear of God than the love of God. Yet the longer I walk with God, the more my understanding of Him becomes relational. The more I have come to know Him, the more I understand that our relationship is anchored in love and the less I am motivated in immature ways by my fear of God.

As the disciples of Jesus grew in their understanding of God, Jesus challenged their thinking. “No longer do I call you servants, for a servant doesn’t know what his master is doing; but I call you friends…” John 15:15 Jesus gave us picture of a friendship that flows from love in John 15:13. “Greater love has no one than this, than one lay down his life for his friends.” On the cross, Jesus became a literal offering for us, laying down his life so that we could be personally related to God. He took care of everything that could separate us from God. This sacrificial unconditional giving is at the heart of understanding the love of God. Truly, no one loves us like God loves us.

The Love of God Motive

Although fear can bring us to God, God wants us to move so far beyond that! He passionately desires that we know His love.

If I am afraid of you, I won’t feel safe in your presence. I won’t be able to share my heart with you freely. It is the same with God. Yes, we are to reverence Him but when our obedience and worship flow from a place of love instead of a place of fear, we are free to truly offer all we are to God. The safety we find in this unconditional love of God transforms our hearts, purifies our motives of service.

1 John 4: 17-19 tells us that the love of God will bring us to completion, maturity, and we will be able to be confident in the day of judgment. There is NO fear in love; but perfect, mature love casts out fear. Fear involves torment and judgment. Understanding God’s love will remove fear from our hearts as we are made mature in His love. The reason we love Him is because He loved us first! His unending passionate and patient compassion for us is amazing.

Relating from the Love of God

I’ve heard it said that fear and love are opposites and that they are the two primary emotions from which all other emotions flow. If we can operate from that thought for a moment and evaluate your relationship with God in terms of how much you relate to God from a basis of love or how much you relate to God through fear, where would you find yourself on such a continuum?

LOVE——————————————————————- FEAR

Of course, our relationships aren’t linear but using this illustration as a point of examination, can you ask yourself the following?

Do I understand my relationship with God more from a view of His love or my fear of Him?
Do I approach God intimately or through a system of rules?
Do I know more of God’s love than I did a year ago, two years ago, ten years ago?
Do I feel secure in God’s love for me or am I afraid He is just waiting to judge me?

I think of the words from an old hymn, The Love of God, that Lehman wrote in 1917:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

Oh, love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
The saints’ and angels’ song.

The love of God! It frees us from fear and leads us into deeper levels of intimacy with God. May we all live experientially in the love of God today and in all the days to come.

My BFF

Mikki — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:50:31 +0000

If I asked you to define the word “friend”, you would probably come up with a list of terms to describe a person you are on good terms with, someone you are attached to with positive feelings, etc.

However, if I asked you to describe what a BFF is, your definition would carry even stronger feelings, more intensity. A BFF is a best friend forever.

Our hearts long to believe that such a thing is possible. From grade school on, friends write the acronym BFF on their notes and notebooks; lovers carve it into trees or tattoo it on their skin. In reality, best friends don’t always keep their relationship intact “forever”. Friendships, like all relationships, require work. In order to remain BFF, two people have to be committed to working through the stuff that comes to separate them. Everything from words to actions to intentions to misunderstandings can drive a wedge in a relationship and kill a friendship. True friends work hard to understand one another, forgive one another, and grow in their relationship.

After all, no relationship remains stagnant. Relationships either wane or grow. Everything that is living is growing.

What is a BFF? All our definitions would vary slightly but at the heart of them, we might find the following:

Someone who has been there for you at all times

Someone who will listen to whatever you have to say because they value you

Someone who thinks about you even if they’re not with you and will call or email or IM or text just to see how you are

In an ideal world, a BFF might be someone you’ve known most of your life

Someone you’ve been through a lot with

Someone who really cares about you and wants what’s best for you

Someone who will tell you the truth, even when it hurts, but can do it in love without destroying you

Someone you want to share special moments with

Someone who often knows how you feel or what you think without you saying a word (although this is a somewhat romanticized idea and usually doesn’t happen without a lot of work)

Someone who knows what makes your heart come alive

Well, I could go on and on, but the point is that we all long to have a BFF. We were created for relationship! However, we live in a fallen world with fallen humanity and all relationships come up short of the glorious potential that God meant them to have.

But there is one BFF relationship that you can always count on.

God wants to be your BFF. Throughout scripture, He moved toward His people. He has done all the work necessary for us to be BFFs. But our lives are a journey in the process of growing in our trust of Him.

In truth, God is the kindest person you’ll ever know. He always believes the best about you. He always longs to talk to you. He always knows how you feel. He knows what makes you come alive. He wants the best for you. He will tell you the truth in love. He is always there for you. He is always thinking about you. He has known you from the beginning and wanted you so much, that He gave sacrificially to have you.

The idea of friendship with God may seem challenging and non-religious, but it is God’s idea. The entirety of scripture is the story of how God has consistently moved toward us because He wants to be with us. He loves us!

Abraham and Moses got glimpses of what it meant for God to be their friend, but now Jesus has offered friendship to us all. In John 15:15, He told his followers that He called them friends. He said that He shared with them the intimate things that His Father had shared with Him.

We’ve all experienced that at times. We get good news. We want to call our BFF. We get bad news. We want to call our BFF. We want to share life intimately with others who hold a significant place in our lives. In much the same way, God wants to share with us. Exodus 33:11 tells us that God spoke to Moses face to face, just as a man would speak to his friend.

God wants us all to know Him. He wants us to trust His kind heart. Life is a long series of assaults on our heart’s journey to know and trust God and others, but there is such a reality as friendship with God and the rewards of such a relationship are beyond our comprehension.

Proverbs says that there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. For all of us, God is that friend. Yet we often fail to appreciate the special friendship that God offers. We fail to access that friendship, yet all the while God Himself is waiting on us to invite Him into all the intimate details of our lives.

God wants to take your relationship with Him to a deeper level. He wants to be your BFF. The rest is up to you.

What Can God Do About Our Pain and Disappointment?

Mikki — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 01:30:59 +0000

Most of us are more than qualified to write a good country song or two. You know, something like,

“My heart is in more pieces than your picture on my floor…” or “This bottle is as empty as my heart.”

Seriously, (and I will sell the rights to those song titles if any of you want to cash in on my genius), pain and disappointment are a part of all our lives.

How can we stay grounded when life is hard, disappointments are many, and we find ourselves helplessly watching our dreams die? Can God do anything about our pain and disappointment?

As I pondered this last week, I thought of how the early disciples must have felt after Jesus was crucified. They had opened their hearts and dared to dream the dream of all dreams! They had given up their preconceived notions, traditional beliefs, and so much more to follow Christ. Their days had been full of miracles and mysteries, excitement and fulfillment.

Then, seemingly suddenly, everything was turned upside down, and they end up with a crucified Christ and a lot of confusion. But that’s not the end of their emotional roller coaster. With Christ’s resurrection came a flood of hope, mixed with a whole wagon load of questions, and much to be settled in each one of their hearts and relationally between them all.

I am quite sure there was a lot of restoration that needed to happen between believers. Much had been said and done in those last days and I imagine that there were quite a few offenses that needed to be dealt with.

Can you just imagine the swirl of gossip, accusation, and slander that surrounded the events of Christ’s last days and crucifixion? And then there was the question of the resurrection. Who believed and who doubted?

We can look at the teaching and prayers of Jesus in John 14-17 and see what Jesus knew they would have to deal with:

Worry, doubt, unbelief, feelings of abandonment, the need to change –again – in order to accept the ministry of the Holy Spirit, fear, the predicted “pruning”, the challenge to love, how to deal with the hatred of the world, religious persecution – from the established religious leaders, sorrow, being separated from Jesus, tribulation, the need for unity and sanctification, and the need to forgive, just to name a few!

That’s what we might call “a tall order!”

And it was in fact, an impossible order, without the ministry of the Holy Spirit who came and filled the believers. Yes, the 120 waited and prayed, and allowed God to deal with their hearts, but I promise you, they were still an imperfect people, but they served a perfect God who had, in reality, already trumped all that they enemy had accomplished.

Certainly, their problems didn’t magically disappear, but the Holy Spirit did bring the empowerment they needed to love one another.

The followers of Jesus had faced the challenges of a very dark season. They had failed many of the tests of the season. But yet God still chose to breathe new life into their hearts and fill them with His Holy Spirit and use them to birth His church.

And we find this truth, even in what appears to be total darkness to us, God is still on His holy throne. He still has a plan. He still has all the power we need. He still longs to fill us with His Spirit. He still wants to use us even when we blow it.

What can God do about pain and disappointment? With honest, repentant hearts, He can do more than we can ask or think. And that realization leads us all to the foot of the cross in love and thankfulness, just as the writer of Hebrews says “to find mercy and grace to help in our time of need.”