God Loves You
MEANS
You Are God’s Favorite!
Receiving a Personal Revelation of
MEANS
You Are God’s Favorite!
God’s smile is upon you. You light up his face
as much as anyone has ever lit up a lover’s face.
as much as anyone has ever lit up a lover’s face.
(This important webpage is also available in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Danish, Bemba, and Afrikaans)
Receiving a Personal Revelation of
God’s Love for You
Discovering God’s Love for You
How to Know if God Loves You
|
I sometimes wonder if attempting to describe the most magnificent sunset
to someone blind from birth would be easier than making this introduction
believable to the disillusioned millions of us whose taste of love has so far
been largely limited to human imperfections. The bitter disappointment of
being let down by humans causes many of us to lose hope of ever finding
genuine, selfless love of Godlike proportions – even in God himself.
At least until crushed by
the harsh reality of human failings, however, it seems everyone longs to be
in love.
Both thrilling and
fulfilling, being in love is a continual source of wonder and delight,
bringing joy and contentment like nothing else. It makes life worth living;
transforming a drab, dour existence into sheer exhilaration. It is what we
were made for, even though human relationships allow only elusive, often
frustrating, glimpses of it. God alone has the divine perfection we crave in a lover, but what
holds us back is the unfounded fear that God’s love for us is shallow
– more aloof and clinical than the red-hot passion of someone exciting who is
head-over-heels in love with us.
It seems too good to be
believable, but the mind-boggling truth is that the awesome God of Perfection, for whom nothing is
impossible, is more passionately in love with you – yes, you – than any human has
ever felt for anyone. No one can expect to feel
convinced of this in just a short webpage, but we have to start somewhere.
We know that fervent love
for God and love for all humanity is God’s top priority for us (Mark 12:28-31) and yet we struggle to love
as we should. This is largely because we get things back to front. We try to love in order to win God’s love. That’s like
trying to drive a car without fueling it. What starts the whole process
is a revelation of how
stupendously in love with us God already is.
1 John 4:19 We love
because he first loved us.
The key to falling in love with God – and
staying in love with him and loving humanity as well – is found not so much in trying
to love but in simply dwelling on God’s love for us. Discovering and
clinging to the truth that God is thrilled with us continually draws us to
him and transforms us. It is also the secret to victorious living. As I have
written elsewhere:
When feeling
defeated, one of the most important things is to focus on God’s great love
for you and not let deceptive spirits trick you into thinking that God frowns
on you when you fall into sin. Yes, God is disappointed, but when a little
child with good parents runs off and falls, what’s the first thing he does?
He looks to mommy or daddy for comfort. You, too, should run into Daddy’s
arms for the comfort you need. God is on your side. He cares deeply for you. Your spiritual
enemies, however, want to make you feel uneasy about running to God. They
know we instinctively shrink from anyone we fear might be angry or displeased
with us and we will keep that person at arm’s length. Your enemies want you to be standoffish from the
only One who can truly deliver you and defeat their attempts to bring you
down.
They don’t want
you to rejoice in God’s forgiveness but to feel miserable and isolated from
the warmth of God’s comfort.
Your whole life will light up when you know in every fiber of your being
that Almighty God is, to use one of the closest human expressions, madly in
love with you.
Nothing is so exciting, fulfilling and heart-warming as being loved by
the most wonderful Person in the universe.
No one understands you like
your Maker. He alone has been with you every moment from your conception. No
one feels your every pain and delights in your happiness like God. No one
longs to exalt you and shower you with gifts as much as him.
More than anything else in
the universe, glimpsing
the immensity of God’s personal, passionate love for you will flood your life
with peace and security. Thereafter, neither death nor disaster could
ever rob you of the eternal love throbbing within you. Suddenly life will
have meaning like never before.
Yes, the God with powers beyond our wildest dreams delights in you,
loving you more passionately than the most devoted mother or proudest father
or grandparent, and more than any starry-eyed lover has ever loved.
And yet God’s spiritual enemies are relentlessly scheming ways to
undermine your awareness of the purity and intensity of God’s boundless love
for you. Every Christian on this planet is subjected to this repeated
assault. Remaining
continually conscious of God’s love for us and convinced of its magnitude is
one of life’s greatest and relentless challenges.
The groundless fear that the
loving, forgiving Lord frowns on us is like an oppressive fog. It saps us of
enthusiasm and weakens our eagerness to cooperate with God in receiving the
wonderful things our loving Lord longs for us to enjoy. Contrast this with
the assurance that the King of all kings is thrilled with you; that there is
a real sense in which you are the center of his universe and that he is
selflessly devoted to maximizing your eternal happiness. A glimpse of God’s
never-ending love for you will spur you to victory in every area of your life.
Your faith will soar and you’ll be inspired to mind-boggling heights of
achievement.
So bookmark or note the web
address of this page to ensure you won’t lose it and then pamper yourself by
exploring every link below. Each is prayerfully crafted to intensify your
awareness of, and enjoyment of, the most exquisite love anyone could ever
dream of. As you proceed through the links you will find comfort and help in
squashing your doubts that God sees you as special and is in love with you;
doubts that God is lovable and doubts that he is truly good and kind and
selfless and fair.
You wouldn’t believe how
excited I am about taking you on life’s most thrilling and fulfilling
adventure. If, however, I wanted to help you experience the heights of
playing sport, as much as I might wish to do it all for you, much would
depend upon you as to how far you go. So it is with life’s greatest
adventure: I’ll do my utmost, but the more you put into it, the more astounding the result will be. In fact, no matter
who you are, if you exceed my resolve to seek the heart of God, there is no
reason why you cannot end up surpassing my enjoyment of God. I challenge you
to shame me by doing just that. Obviously, I cannot take you beyond where I
have been, but I’d be deeply honored if God granted me the privilege of
pointing the way.
Before we take the plunge,
we need to pray. Please join me.
Loving God,
I long for you to be the love of my life. I hear of others having gooey feelings about you and dramatic spiritual experiences but at times it seems my only feeling is that of being left out. I want to find you warm and intimate and perfect in all your ways but sometimes you seem cold and aloof and more interested in other people.
If you truly are
the God of infinite love, the God whose love is so staggering that it
surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:19) with the power to go far beyond what I can ask or
think (Ephesians 3:20), I dare to ask for love that surpasses my wildest
dreams.
Nevertheless, I
crave not just excitement and fulfillment but reality. I don’t want to be
duped by sentimental nonsense. Neither do I want to be sidetracked by
superficiality so that I miss the wonders that you offer. I don’t want to
delude myself, nor miss out on the best you have for me. Please open my eyes
to your real nature. I want to know you as you truly are and to have the courage
and conviction to devote my life to what you reveal. So I seek you for a
spiritual revelation, a divine encounter so powerful that, whether it comes
slow or fast, it ends up adding an entire dimension to my life. If you are so
beautiful that – as they say even of nice humans – to know you is to love
you, and if to know you is to truly live (John 17:3), open my eyes
to the perfection and stunning beauty of your goodness. Captivate me. If the
greatest commandment is to love you, my God, with my whole heart, soul and
mind (Matthew
22:37-38), empower me to seek you tenaciously until I receive
a revelation of your love that is so real and vast that I truly fall in love
with you.
Not out of pride
or selfishness but out of a yearning to thrill you, I want more of you than
even what the average Christian settles for. May I become determined to do
whatever it takes not to rob myself and break your heart by settling for less
than the unique fulfillment and heights of ecstasy and intimacy with you that
Christ suffered inconceivable agony for you and I to enjoy.
I’m a little
apprehensive of where this might lead but perfect love casts out fear (1 John
4:18) and you are
meant to be Perfect Love. If you really are Perfect Love, you alone are truly
safe, and I open myself up to you. Come with me as I read the following
pages. Empower me to use them as a diving board to plunge deep into spiritual
reality.
Before I can
expect you to do this, however, there is one nagging issue I need to settle.
Facing up to this should not be as hard as it feels since one of the
liberating things about drawing close to you is that I can truly be myself. I
don’t have to hide my faults because you already know them. Moreover, you say
over and over in your Word that you are eager to cleanse to spotless purity
all who admit their failings, and that you lift high all who humble
themselves.
I cannot expect
you to open my eyes to your love if I have blinded those eyes with arrogance.
So I need to come clean with you. I have called you God and yet criticized
you as if you were the foolish one and I were the one with infinite knowledge
and wisdom. I have called you Lord (meaning Master) and ordered you around –
“Lord do this, Lord do that” – as if I were the master and you were my slave.
In reality, you owe no one anything; we owe you everything. You have given
and given and given, and in self-centered arrogance, each of us have taken
and taken and taken. You have never wronged us; we have wronged you too many
thousand times to count, and yet you have kept turning the other cheek and
kept on forgiving, while we have had the hideous audacity to falsely blame
you.
It’s not just
other people who have done this, Lord: I’m guilty of it, too. I not only seek
your forgiveness and cleansing, I ask that you show me anything I need do to
cooperate with you in eradicating from my life arrogance, bitterness and any
other blemishes that could spiritually blind me; fogging my ability to behold
your beauty.
So now, if I
have given myself enough time to settle these key issues, come with me as I
walk through these webpages.
Having skimmed the surface in this webpage, I beg you to plunge into the helpful and inspiring reading below to deepen your awareness of God’s love for you. To maximize your enjoyment of the most wonderful Person in the universe, it is important to read prayerfully every page. They are part of an enormous Christian website, so to avoid getting lost, don’t forget to bookmark this webpage. |
Understanding God’s Love for You
How to Know if God Loves Me
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