I spend my life helping people experience transformation, the greatest of which involves experiencing the love of Father God that Jesus Christ displayed to the world. With such a wondrous love, why do so many battle connecting to it?
Father God’s Love and Transformation
Everything in our lives rises and falls on our capacity to live in the power of love. Receiving it from the Father is the key to all transformation, so we shouldn’t be surprised that there is a great war over our ability to receive that love.
Receiving the Father’s love often feels very complicated. But we need to recognize the simplicity of receiving His love. In addition, there can be some really practical ways we can engage the love of the Father that can overthrow the battles that come against us to separate of from this great love of God.
As a point of clarity, I am writing this article for those who are believers in Christ. They have said yes to the work of Christ on the cross and His resurrection, while laid out the manifestation of God’s love for us.
Yet at the same time, you have a struggle with receiving Father God’s love and connecting to the power of it in your life. You may have struggled like I did, where you know about God’s love, but experiencing it in your heart was not a daily struggle and challenge.
As we navigate this journey of love, here are some ways you receive and experience the love of Father God in a real way in your life.
1. Recognize Who He is as Father
Whether that reference is a good one or negative one, the place to start is by recognizing God is your Father. Once you became born again and received the work of Christ into your life, you became a child of God, with an inheritance to be a son or daughter of God.
For most, this foundation has been skipped over. Meanwhile, our eternal destiny is to manifest our identity as sons of God.
Yet how can we manifest sonship if we never connect to the Father’s heart for us?
We can begin by speaking to Him as Father. Call out to Him and acknowledge who He is as a good Father, a perfect Father and a loving Father. When we do this, we align our thinking with who He is.
2. Be Honest About the Struggle, but Don’t Stay There.
For most, that is a struggle, so it’s ok to admit that. Be honest with God.
But don’t get stuck there. Many people say, “I struggle to experience God’s love,” and yet they don’t move any further. This can lead you to feeling trapped and stuck.
With God, you are never left hanging, so it’s important to turn your honest struggle into an empowering discovery. Never let your honest struggle leave you stuck.
You can do this by turning your stuck reference into a position of learning.
Instead of staying parked in, “God I don’t know Your love,” begin asking, “How can I begin learning, experiencing and discovering the power of the Father’s great love for me?”
When you turn your stuck moment into an empowering question, it now becomes the tapestry of what you look for in life. If you set yourself to discover God’s love everywhere you go, you will see it and experience His love in ways you never knew you could. You’ll tune your senses to the signals of heaven that God sends your way. Reading the Bible will be a whole new experience. Prayer will have an intentional focus.
I said simply to God, “I do not know you as a Father. I don’t know how to receive your love….will You teach me?” I turned a place of honest frustration into an empowering opportunity to learn and grow.
3. Set Healthy Expectations
If you expect God to land into your room, light the sky and physically show His hand to you, then you may be setting yourself up for disappointment. The Bible reminds us that no one has seen the Father, but we experience who He is by learning to live in the love that Jesus demonstrated.
But you need to set healthy expectations of what this looks like. Too many people pray and ask God to do something from heaven, when in reality, He has manifested everything in Jesus, so that we may by faith engage a love relationship with God.
To set healthy expectations, you also need to be patient with yourself. If you grew up in a cold or loveless home, it will take some time to get used to what healthy love is like.
I often get people contacting me for coaching who are angry with themselves that they cannot receive God’s love. They are incredibly hard on themselves, which makes the healing process so much harder.
Be patient with the process and with yourself. See this love experience as a journey and not just a destination. The more you love the learning and take the pressure off, the better this process will get.
Remember, the problem is not God and it’s not you. Something is in the way and it will take time to peel off those layers.
4. Learn What it Means to Receive
For so many of us, we have been conditioned into believing that we have to earn or perform our way into feeling loved and accepted. The Kingdom of God involves learning to freely receive what is given to us. This can often be a big adjustment for the many who battle unworthiness, or who feel this love is too good to be true.
When engaging the love of God, we have to learn to flex our receiving muscles. We do this by coming into full agreement with the love He has for us. This can take time, because believing involves coming into full unity what God’s love says to us. We are coming out of brokenness and dark experiences that seek to pull on our belief systems. Receiving involves positioning our hearts in recognition that God sees us as people worth loving. Therefore, the love we give back to Him is a response to the love He has already given to us.
5. Recognize Personal Brokenness that is in the Way
As you humbly position your heart to discover the Father’s great love for you. It’s important to be aware of the lies that come to the surface and get in the way. This is the time to really let go of those limiting and deceiving beliefs so we can fall into God’s love with greater trust.
What are the lies that you’re believing? Begin to face them. Break agreement and establish new agreements.
Many of the lies we believe involve the broken father image in our hearts. We have to be renewed in the truth of what it means to engage a good Father.
What does father mean to you? That is where this journey can truly begin to open up. It’s important that we stop avoiding the father subject and face it. Look at it square in the face and face it.
So, what’s the lie you need to address that keeps you from walking in the fullness of with Father God’s love? You might say “I want to be close to You Father” but He’s saying the same thing. He’s laid out the table for that intimacy to take shape.
6. Cultivate Gratitude
Nothing connects us to who God is like thanksgiving does. If you want to connect to the love of God, begin thanking Him for the love He has for you. The more we practice gratitude, the more we focus and tune our attention to what is good.
Thanksgiving is the gateway to connecting to God’s presence, goodness and love. If you are stuck, begin to give thanks for His love, which will tune your senses to what you are expressing thanks for.
7. Practice Your Confidence
The book of Hebrews tells us to go “boldly before the throne of grace.” As you thank Father God of His great love for you, go boldly before Him and practice your confidence in that love. Declare it. Share it. Write about it. Speak it out. Consume your life with the aroma of His love and let it be the backdrop over which you see everything.
One of the manifestations of being rooted in His love is a growing confidence, not in what we can muster up, but in what our Dad in heaven says about us. When you connect to the Father’s approval over you, your confidence will soar.
Be confident in your approach to God. Rather than just standing back and waiting for something to fall on you, go boldly. Rise up in confidence, even though you are still in process. Let it be an act of faith.
8. Learn to Love Yourself
One of the biggest signs that we have learned to receive God’s love is that we love ourselves with the love that He has for us. Loving yourself should never be arrogance. It is an act of coming into agreement with how God sees you. It involves coming to peace in the satisfaction of what His love means for you.
As a result, loving yourself involves being more patient and kind with yourself. Your thoughts, words and actions towards yourself coming into alignment with God’s ways towards you.
9. Go Love on Others
When I step out and love on others, God meets me and fills me with more of His love. If you get stuck in trying to receive God’s love, its may be time to go out and love someone else. Get out of your head and get connected to what someone else is going through.
This should not be in a way that ignores your own reception of God’s love for yourself. Loving others should not replace receiving love, but any love that is received needs to be given out. You should not ignore yourself or use loving on others as a way to get approval from God. Those two traps get masses of Christians hung up in burnout and dead ends.
But love has its greatest work when we love one another. You don’t have to wait until you feel like you have fully arrived. Whatever love you have received from God, immediately give it out freely.
10. Get with Others who are on the Same Course
This can be a challenge, but they are out. There is a remnant of people who desire to live in wholeness and want to live out an authentic love relationship with God and others. It’s time for sons and daughters to rise up and share the Father’s heart in a real and authentic way, letting your story of transformation become your greatest message.
More and more people are searching for those who want to live healed, free and transformed; but in a authentic way that allows vulnerability and loving support. You may need to step out and be a person that is safe so that others can process their journey together with you.
Prayer
Father, I pray in the name of Jesus, that You would fill me with Your goodness and the power of your mighty love. I pray that you help me to know You as a Father. Come with Your love and heal my broken heart. Bind up my wounds and restore me in Your love.
Release a greater understanding of You in my heart as a Father who loves me and accepts me. You are a Father who wants to be close to His children? So, I pray for the opening of my heart right now to receive the Father’s love. I open my heart to Your love. Thank you for Your love.
You did not send your Son to die on the cross so that I would remain in separation. I was designed to live in Your love and freely give it out. I receive it today. This is a new day with a new opportunity to love and be loved.
I thank You for it, in Jesus name, amen.