Experiencing God’s Love

How do we know if the person we love loves us? How do we experience that love for ourselves? It can be helpful to identify how we best experience love and how the person we love does. Often, they are not the same at all. But whichever way we best experience someone’s love, we all want to know that we are loved. God tells us repeatedly that He loves us. It is written in His word (see today’s verse). Does it make it any less true if we don’t seem to hear or see Him saying it?

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t take enough time to read about God’s love for us. It would be a good idea to read what He says about His love for us much more often, making this part of our regular devotional time. We can ask Him to speak through the words so that He communicates His love from His Spirit to our human spirit. Then it will begin to sink in deeper and deeper into our very being, because the Bible is God’s love letter to us.

Another way we can know a person loves us is by the way they express their love. Being told we are loved is wonderful, but if it isn’t backed up by action then it can be hard to experience. It needs to be words, but also more than words. God doesn’t let us down in this area. He excels. ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Romans 5:8).

We like receiving gifts from the ones we love, (and their love is reflected even more by the amount of thought they put into this). The gifts don’t have to be expensive, but personal. God has given each one of us His Holy Spirit as a special gift. He ‘put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee (2 Corinthians 1:22). In addition to this, He has given specific gifts from His Holy Spirit to be used in His Body, the Church, ‘see God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts’ (1 Peter 4:10).

Finally, we all want to have quality time with the one we love. Quality time is not just being with the one we love but having one-to-one time with that person where everything else is put on hold. These days, it means stopping social media, turning off our mobile phone, switching off the TV, and focussing on them and them focussing on us.

If the person we love told us that they loved us but kept allowing themselves to be interrupted by a variety of things (even good things), then we would begin to wonder if they really, truly loved us. Are we guilty of treating God this way? What we can know for certain is that the King of the universe wants to spend personal, individual, one-to-one time with us, because He loves us. He is waiting for us to make the first move. ‘Come near to God and he will come near to you’ (James 4:8).