“Letting God Love You”

April 23, 2006

Trevor Lee

Growing up in the church I think “Jesus Loves Me” was one of the first songs I ever learned. It’s funny looking back how I tended to get the words of the songs we sang in Sunday School messed up. In “Jesus Loves Me” I always thought that it said “little ones to him be long” and I had no idea what it meant for a little one to be long or what being long had to do with Jesus loving someone. But I belted it out in my squeaky little five year old voice anyway. Because even though I didn’t get all the words I could still get the point. The Bible told me that Jesus loved me.

My first memory verse went along with this theme of God’s love too. I guess in that way it was nice because my first song in church and my first memorized verse went together. I never thought of it, but maybe they even planned it that way. Anyway, the first verse I ever memorized was John 3:16, which says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.” The verse was kind of like the song for me in that I didn’t get it all, I was just glad I could pronounce begotten, let alone know what it meant. But just like with the song, I still got the point, that God loved me enough to send his Son, and I had good enough teaching that I knew God had sent his Son to die for me.

This verse has gotten a lot of attention in American culture too. You see it on signs at sporting events, on bumper stickers, and in all kinds of gospel tracks. And I think there’s a reason why this verse gets focused on so much. John 3:16 probably sums up the gospel and the love of God better than any other single verse in the Bible. For those of us who are Christians we very much want others to know that God loves them and so many have tried to draw people’s focus to the verse that does this best. There is something intuitive for us that tells us it is important for us to know that God loves us and for others to know that God loves them.

Now I want to switch gears a little bit and have you do something with me. I’d like to have you close your eyes and imagine something with me. I know some of you might not like this kind of thing much, but it’s important to where we’re going today. So close your eyes and imagine that you are sitting in your favorite place in your house. Picture yourself there. Now you are doing whatever it is you normally do in that place. As you are sitting there you hear your front door open and then close, and as you start to get up you hear someone say your name from the entryway. Though you have never heard this voice audibly before, you know that it is the voice of Jesus. He comes around the corner and finds you sitting in your favorite place doing what you normally do there. Look at him. What is the expression on his face? As he speaks your name again what is his tone of voice? As he comes around the corner what does he do? Open your eyes.

I know that if we were to share with each other what Jesus looked and sounded like in our imaginations there would be many different answers and many different emotions to go with them. When you came in today I asked you to finish a statement for me. Three words God would use to describe me are: Here’s some of the answers that people in this room gave to that question:

For much of my life if you had asked me to do that exercise I just asked you to do and I had given you an honest answer of what was in my head, I would have told you that Jesus looked disappointed. When he spoke my name his voice was tinged with caution letting me know that I needed to be careful what I did. I think he would have stayed in the doorway looking at me and asked me why I didn’t do a better job of following him. And if I had responded with the three words that God would use to describe me, I think they would have been disappointed, forgiven, and lukewarm. I am pretty certain that in the depth of our soul, underneath all the verses we’ve learned to recite and the songs we’ve learned to sing, there are many of us who say that God loves us but have never experienced that it is true. We are the people who want other people to know that God loves them but have never experienced that love in the depth of our soul.

Some of you might be wondering why this even matters. Isn’t it okay to just know that God loves us and if we ever experience that love then it’s an add on. Or maybe you even think that experiencing God’s love can weaken your faith because it is something that rests on emotion rather than on the truth. I would certainly agree with what’s behind that, which is that knowing the truth of God’s love as it’s explained to us in the Bible is essential. I am so thankful for all the Scriptures that tell us so clearly that God loves us and that these form the basis of our faith. It is through the Scriptures that God’s love is explained and we understand the lengths he has gone to on our behalf.

At the same time, there are some reasons why it’s extremely important that we move past purely a mental understanding of the love of God. While experience can seem unsure, fleeting, or even dangerous, the dangers involved do not warrant rejecting experience all together. One of the reasons that experiencing the love of God is so important is that all real love moves beyond knowledge. Paul is writing about the love of God in Ephesians chapter 3, and starting in verse 17 he says this, (read it). By no means is this love without knowledge, love based on warm fuzzies from God. This isn’t a love that is only known through mountain top experiences of emotion, but at the same time, it is not a love that can be contained by knowledge. Paul says that he desires that the Ephesians would know this love that surpasses knowledge and that through that they would be filled with all the fullness of God. The fullness of God that we are meant to partake in as followers of Christ is not limited to knowledge of God’s love but is grounded in a love that surpasses knowledge.

Think about any very close relationship you have had. Unfortunately, for some I know that your relationships have been characterized by abuse, neglect, and dysfunction. But if you have had a healthy loving relationship, think about the different ways you knew the love of the other person. Certainly you knew in your head that they loved you, you could base this on things they did or said. You had evidence to back up your claim. But my guess is that you also knew they loved you in a way you can’t fully explain. You knew in your heart, in your soul. There were times when you were filled with joy, warmth, or excitement you couldn’t explain, but that was an important part of your relationship. God is the author of relationships and of love itself. He has created us as beings who have knowledge and experience, and they are both essential. He has created us as beings capable of experiencing love beyond knowledge.

So experience of God’s love is important because he has created us to experience it. The language God uses to describe his love throughout Scripture highlights this. In Hosea 2 God delineates the reasons he is angry with his people the Israelites. He speaks of Israel as his unfaithful wife. This should already tell us something of the emotions tied up with the relationship God has with people. Instead of just saying what they had done, he inserts the misdeeds of his people into a metaphor that carries great emotional weight. For the faithful partner of an adulterous marriage there is great pain and sorrow. It is not an impersonal thing. So God uses this emotional experiential metaphor to outline the unfaithfulness of his people, and just when you think he is about to say that he will destroy them or have nothing more to do with them come verses 14-16. Listen to what God says. Read them. These are words of passion, emotion, and experience. They are words of relationship. In fact, the end of this passage focuses on the change in relationship that God desires to have with his people, moving from being a master to being a husband.

God is willing to be his people’s master. If they continue to be unfaithful, walking intentionally away from him, he will do what he needs to bring them back. But he desires to be their husband. To love them as a good husband loves his wife. Not only to care for her and speak kindly to her, but to hold her in his arms and have her experience love and safety there.

Another passage that speaks to the experiential nature of the love of God is Zephaniah 3:17. “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.” I can’t remember the last time I delighted over anything with singing, save worshipping God. Our God’s love for us is such that He delights in us, He sings over us. The interesting thing about this verse is that it doesn’t even tell us why He loves us so much. Even the context talks more about how God shows His love than about why He shows His love. This passage is devoted to God declaring His love for people.

And not only does God love us like this but He longs for us to come and experience this love. In Matthew 23:37 Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.” And this too is not an impersonal statement of the unfaithfulness of Israel. The literary construction here, Jesus saying the name of Jerusalem twice, is a way of expressing grief and a desire for things to be different. When Absalom is killed in the Old Testament and his father David finds out he cries out in grief, O Absalom, Absalom. And Jesus also uses a metaphor that is known for tender care. A hen cared for her chicks with love, compassion, protection, and kindness.

So it is important that we experience the love of God because the nature of real love is that it is known and experienced and also because God wants us to experience it. So why don’t we? Why so often does the love of God stay in our head and not penetrate our heart or soul? At the end of that passage in Matthew Jesus says that the Israelites did not experience the love of God because they were not willing. Today, as the people of God, so often we are not willing to let God love us just like the Israelites weren’t. You may be thinking, “I want to experience the love of God. I am willing, I just don’t experience it!” I know that for much of my life I would have said the same thing. I wanted to experience the love of God very much. But what I didn’t realize was that there are barriers that get in the way that we’re often not even aware of. There are barriers in our lives that keep our knowledge of God’s love and our experience from matching up.

One of these barriers for some of us is our past. Pastor Peterson has been going with a number of other people from our church to the women’s prison near here to lead a service for them. One of these times he asked the women there what came to their minds when they thought of love. One of the women responded with a single word, devouring. Whatever experiences this woman had in the past, she had come to believe that the character of love was devouring. Whether it is devouring, abusive, or short-lived, maybe your experiences with what was supposed to be love have brought you to a place where love does not even seem appealing.

Another problem from the past can be what we have learned about God that isn’t true. Some have had abusive or neglectful fathers, so when God is called Father it reminds them of the horrors of their past. Others have learned that God is always watching, waiting for you to mess up so he can send a lightning bolt down from heaven. And others have learned that God is up in heaven just watching what goes on here without too much interest. Maybe you have had experiences that have given you a skewed perspective on God.

And this is where knowledge can be so important. Scripture teaches us that God’s love is pure and perfect. That God delights over us and will never leave us. God wants to help you move beyond your past experiences with pseudo-love and your warped perceptions of who he is. To gather you under His wings and show you the power of the most perfect love that can ever exist.

Our past is something we probably did not control to a large extent. We may have some control over how it impacts us or the steps we take to move past it, but some of it may have been done to us. The other big barrier to experiencing the love of God, on the other hand, is all about our control and our desire to control God’s love.

The story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 is a passage we usually use to reflect on the amazing, forgiving love of God. Today I want to look at this story again and focus on a different part of the story.

Luke 15:11-20 Jesus continued: "There was a man who had two sons. 12The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his property between them.

13"Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. 14After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. 15So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. 16He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

17"When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! 18I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. 19I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' 20So he got up and went to his father.
      "But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

I want to stop here. From the outset of this story the son has desired control. He wanted to choose when he got his inheritance, and in doing so disrespected his father in an unheard of way. He wanted to choose how he lived his life and the kind of friends he would have, so he did. Now we find the son wallowing in the mire of a pigpen, eating slop out of a pig trough, and he realizes that he should return home. But he doesn’t just go home. As he’s lying there he formulates a speech to give to his father. On the surface it seems like he is doing a noble thing. He is admitting his guilt, something he should do. But he doesn’t just admit his guilt in the speech he prepares, he says, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.” He is deciding how his father is able to love him. His motives may seem noble, and they may even be noble, but in the end he is still seeking to control things. His father will not decide what to do with him; the son has already decided it.

And we often do the same thing. Instead of just letting God love us as He says He does, we try to control His love and fail to experience it in the process. One of the ways we try to control God’s love is by professing that God’s love is based on grace and living like it is based on works. If you are honest, how much of your concept of how Jesus would look at you and what He would say to you is based on the proportion of how much you’ve done to please him lately and how much of what you’ve done would disappoint him? In the Evangelical church we talk about the grace of God a lot. We praise God for his grace and thank him that his love and our salvation don’t rest on us or what we do, but as we go about our lives we don’t embrace that reality. We fall into the sin we have repented of so many times before. We miss a day, a week, or a month of reading the Bible or praying. After awhile we feel like we have to spend any time we do spend with God justifying our actions to him. “God, I haven’t prayed in a while. Sorry about that. I’ve just been really busy, and I know that’s not a good excuse but with work and school and family it’s just been hard to find any extra time. And I know I haven’t exactly been nice to my co-worker, but if you knew him you’d know how hard he is to love. Well, I guess you do know him, but it’s just really hard.” And on and on. We end up trying to find a way to justify ourselves enough that God will be okay with us. Instead of living what we say we believe and falling into his grace and mercy. Believing that we are forgiven and loved and that our justification for our actions is unnecessary and unhelpful. But if we did that we would have to give up the control we think we have over the love of God.

We also try to control God’s love by deciding what it should look like. What would feel like for you to experience God’s love? What would happen if God really loved you? Do you have a picture of a feeling or an event in your head? For me it would be a feeling of great emotion during a time of worship. For so long I would enter times of worship longing to be overwhelmed by God. That’s what I thought it would feel like to experience God’s love. And I have felt God’s love in that way, but more so since I stopped believing that was the only way it would come.

In a marriage do a husband and wife only experience each other’s love when they embrace? Of course not. In a marriage there are many ways that love is expressed and experienced. A card, a quick kiss, a spoken I love you, cleaning the house, making love. All of these things can convey love, but they do it in different ways and at different depths. If there can be such varied ways of experiencing love in a human relationship, how many more ways could God use to help us experience His love? We have to learn to look for God’s love everywhere. One way I’ve seen God help me experience His love is through times where I feel overjoyed about seemingly small things in life. I have learned that His experience of joy is one of the ways I experience the love of God. Instead of telling God what His love should look and feel like, ask Him to open your eyes and your heart to see all the ways He is trying to express His love to you.

Another thing we do is that we decide we’re unlovable. Forgiven maybe. The Bible says we’re forgiven and so we can believe that somehow we’re forgiven. And the Bible says that God loves us too, but it didn’t mean people like us. We’ve done too much wrong. We don’t follow Christ like we should. And then we’re back to basing God’s love on our works. When we tell God we’re unlovable we are controlling something that is not ours to control. I think this is closest to what the Prodigal Son did. He told his dad he was unlovable. He asked his dad to forgive him and take him back as a servant, but he thought it would be too much for his dad to love him again. I wonder if when the dad embraced his son if the son finally gave up and just enjoyed the embrace. I wonder if he stopped trying to control things quite so much and took joy in being a son. In experiencing the love of his father without having to control it.

So when you’re lying in the pigpen eating slop like the Prodigal son, what’s the speech you prepare when you go to the Father? How do you try to control His love? Will you just let God love you, with no conditions or controls?

You may be thinking, so how do I let God love me? To begin with, that may be the wrong question. If by how do I let God love me you mean what can I try, what book do I need to read, how much quiet time do I need to have, then you’re already trying to take control back. Experiencing the love of God in your heart and soul is a work of the Holy Spirit and is not something we control.

So I can’t give you some list of things to do to experience the love of God. I hope that you have been given insight by God into some of the barriers you’ve set up that keep you from being willing to experience His love as He wants you to experience it and that you will be able to use your awareness of those things to move toward letting go and experiencing God’s love.

The other thing I can do is sharing something that was very important in my journey in this area. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I grew up knowing about the love of God and I am so thankful I did. It was this knowledge that kept me from running after things that would have led me away from God. And it carried me for quite a while. But a couple years into my time in seminary I reached a point where I just said to God, “Just knowing isn’t enough. I need to know you love me in my heart and soul. I need to believe it with all of me. I know it’s true but I need for that truth to resonate in my soul.” There was a song during that time that was instrumental for me in helping me cry out to God. I’d like to play a little bit of it for you now. It’s by a group called “Some Kind of Hero”, a group that came largely from this church, and the song is called “Love Me.”

Did any of you feel any tension while that song played? When I first listened to it my thought was, “That is so selfish to ask God to love me after he has already displayed His love by coming to earth and dying and rising again for me.” It’s true, God has displayed His love in the greatest way imaginable, but sometimes if you hear it enough you stop letting it impact you. Even though I thought that the song grabbed me and I kept listening to it. And over the course of a couple weeks the Holy Spirit used that song along with some other things in my life to teach my soul that He loves me. I came to see that it was not selfish to ask God to love me as long as I was willing to see the barriers I had set up to experiencing His love, to repent of those, and to give up control of God’s love.

In the book Transformed Into Fire, Jeanne Guyon, says, “Dear reader, there is nothing in this universe that is easier to obtain than the enjoyment of Jesus Christ! Your Lord is more present to you than you are to yourself! Furthermore, His desire to give Himself to you is greater than your desire to lay hold of Him.” We can ask God to love us because He wants to more than we want Him to, if will only let Him do it.

Ever since he was about six months old, Isaiah, our son, has not liked being hugged or held. I would go to pick him up, give him a hug, and tell him I loved him and he would just push off me and act like I was torturing him. He would never just rest in my embrace. Well, for whatever reason he has started hating his bath in the last couple weeks, something he used to love, and one day last week I was on bath duty. From the time I started running the water he got antsy. And the minute his feet touched the water you’d think the water was boiling as loud as he was screaming. I washed him as fast as I possibly could, pulled him out, and wrapped him in a blanket. Then I took him and went and sat in the rocking chair in his room. For a second he pushed off me, but then his body relaxed, he went limp against me and just lay in my arms. Periodically he would look up at me, eyes still holding the remnants of tears, and then he would just rest in my arms again. He gave up and let me love him.