Behind the scenes, many believers have an ache in their heart that’s hard to talk about. They feel condemned and defeated in having this struggle. It has to do with connecting to God’s love and being able to rest confidently in His abiding presence.
Many have said to me, “I can’t remember the last time I really knew what it was like to feel loved or be deeply aware of how much God loves me.”
I’ve been there and know that feeling very well. If you say you haven’t, you’re probably not being honest with yourself. Seems there is such a war over believers resting in and enjoying the vast love that God has for them.
At the same time, this struggle has become so commonplace that people tolerate not being connected to God’s love. Even though the love of God is the foundation of a powerful relationship with God, many throw their hands up because they don’t know what to do.
Too much of my life, I knew about God’ love in knowledge and theory, but not in experience. I didn’t have a possession of God’s love for me. In fact, I felt like He just tolerated me.
I knew God loved me enough to bring me into salvation, but then after that, the relationship was one of me working to earn His approval and love. Like many believers I talk to, the sense of separation from His love and voice was happening too often.
He Loves Me, He Likes Me
It took me a long time to realize that God not only loves me, He likes me. He likes when I simply show up. He delights in me.
God has an affection towards you. He rejoices to see you. He loves connecting with you. His love and grace welcomes you with open arms.
He accepts you in. God loves working in and through your life, even with all your mess ups, failures and weaknesses.
It can be easy to sense God’s love when things are going well and you feel strong. But His love is ever present in your sin and weaknesses. This is where I need to learn God’s love the most. He loves me right in the midst of my broken moments of life.
He loves every part of you, even those areas you are ashamed of.
But it can be easy to say these things in our minds, but a completely different thing to experience it in our hearts.
So allow me to share a couple things that are helpful in learning to connect to God’s love and experience it personally.
1. God is a Good Father
No one is good but One, that is, God. Mark 10:18b (NKJV)
In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Matthew 6:9 (NKJV)
Learning to connect to God’s love gets empowered when we know who He is. He is first and foremost a Father. If you want to connect to someone best, you need to learn more about who they are.
He is a Father–a good Father. But for so many, what a good father is like can be deeply distorted. Their model and reference for a father is distorted.
We live in a generation that has major earthly father wounds. Therefore, we transpose those wounds onto our perspective of God. Even the question, “How could God allow evil in the world?” is heavily influenced by their earthly father’s passivity. He didn’t show up. Dad didn’t stick around. Even if he did, he wasn’t present.
These visible experiences get put onto our lense of our Heavenly Father.
Healing the Father Wound
Your earthly father couldn’t love you in the way you need it. He may have been harsh, abusive or absent all together. Maybe he was a performance based father, where you spent your life trying to earn his love but never felt like you ever got it.
You approach God the same way, not as a Good Father who loves you, but through some kind of religious pressure. That is why so many are comfortable with religious busyness and performance based Christianity. It has become a never ending way of seeking to appraoch God.
Many feel distant from God because they are communicating with Him on a different frequency than who He really is. They call out to Him as a God who is not really paying attention or who has little interest in them.
But if you want to get into the bull’s eye of connection to God, tune into the frequency of who He is as a Good Father.
Too many are trying to appease God without learning to see who He is as a Good Father. They live a never ending life of attempting to build up right living, only to get angry with God when they are burned out and empty from all their burdened living.
So the first question is, “what is interfering from you seeing who He is as a Good Father?” That can be the place to begin in connecting to His love.
2. God IS Love
And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. 1 John 4:16 (NKJV)
Here is what brings home a connection to God’s love. God doesn’t just have love for you. He is love to you.
Love is the very essence of His nature.
Anytime you have recieved any loving interaction or a taste of love in some form, you are experiencing a blessing of who God is. When you interact with love, that love experience is meant to lead you to understanding who God is.
He is infinte love in His nature. Love is not something He “puts on” or “turns on.” It is simply who He is. God is the very essence of love.
So when you interact with God, you’re interacting with love. You can end of spending a lifetime discovering the depth, breath and height of that love, never arriving into the fullness of it. Because His love never ends.
God loves you all the way, all the time, all the way through. If I am connecting to God, it must be built on the foundation of His deep nature of love towards me.
3. God Loved You First
We love Him because He first loved us. 1 John 4:19 (NKJV)
It can be so easy for you to try to connect with God’s love and end of completely drained and frustrated. This is often because we forget that He first loved us.
Therefore, connecting to God’s love is made powerful when we learn to receive that love. Our love towards God is a response of His love that we have received.
If you start off trying to love God without first learning to receive the love He has for you, then you’ll easily find yourself burnt out from all your efforts.
God loved you first. He started this whole thing.
So stop “trying to love Him” and first learn what it means to be loved by Him. If you want to have a powerful relationship with God, you’ll need to let go of thinking of all the things you need to do for Him and learn to receive.
That is a whole different posture. It goes counter cultural to what we normally live in. We are so used to earning things, to feeling like we need to do something to count ourselves worthy of receiving love. The love we live in on earth is so conditional, with strings attached. Love is so easily withdrawn from people, it’s no wonder we struggle to receive God’s unending love.
Learning Gratitude
The quickest way I can connect to God’s love is by thanking Him for the love that is available to me. When I focus on gratitude, it tunes my heart to focus in on the goodness of God and His love. It positions my heart to keep looking out for that love. I read the Scriptures with His love in mind.
Thanksgiving is the gateway. It opens us up to experiencing God’s presence. It’s a way of saying “thank you that it already is here. Your love is already here and I’m just going to continually position my heart to receive it today.”
When I engage gratitude, I come into agreement with His love and tune myself into that love. I place His love on the tapestry of my day and journey. I let that love infiltrate every area of my heart. That gratitude positions me to be a vessel of love to others, because I simply give out what I have been learning to receive.
Gracias
Love is a free gift of God’s grace. We cannot earn it, we must receive it by grace. Grace is the pathway by which everything that God’s ways come to us. Through faith we receive it.
Thanksgiving unlocks grace and positions our hearts to receive all that God is.
We say “grace” before eating a meal, which means giving thanks. The Spanish say, “gracias” to mean “thank you.” There is a deep correlation between how grace works and the connection thanksgiving has.
If you want to learn to receive His love, get grateful.
Recommended Resources: