What does it mean to really love God? To love the divine? What does it look like? What does it feel like?
How can I, a finite created human being, love a Creator, an infinite Spirit?
Does it feel like the love I have for my husband or my children? That love is in spite of their flaws. God has no flaws. So it can’t be exactly like that.
Does it feel like the love I have for my country? Again, that’s in spite of its flaws. And my country isn’t personal – it’s a conglomeration of people and land and ideas.
I know about God. I’m slowly getting to know Him. But love?
Often, when I spend time reading and thinking about His love for weak and broken people like me, I think I feel warmth spark in my soul. But it isn’t steady. I’m not even sure you could call it a flame. Just a spark.
Underwhelming. The little spark, the barest warmth in my heart, does disservice to what I believe, to what I know that God has done for me. I think I should be a roaring bonfire of love. But even if I was, compared to the immeasurable and incomparable, that would be less than a spark by comparison
But still I wonder. How do you love a being that you can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch, can’t hug or be hugged by?
I saw your tweet and had to stop by. 🙂
Here’s my input:
John 14:15 If you are obeying his commands, you love him. It’s not about a feeling – feelings come and go. It’s steadfast obedience that shows your love. It’s the same thing as marriage. There are the thrilling moments and the mundane. But it’s the commitment that best manifests love.
That was the topic of the sermon this past weekend at mass. Our monsignor talked about showing our love – by praying, by speaking His name, and every once in a while stopping to actually say “I love you” in prayer.
When Jesus was asked what was most important in the Scriptures he said to “Love the Lord your God” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”. Elsewhere he said that if we would be his disciples we would “pick up our cross daily” to follow him (sacrificial language). In the Sermon on the Mount he told us to “Love our enemies and pray for those who persecute” us.
My wife is the person whom I love the most in this entire world but there are days when she is my worst enemy. Despite how I “feel” at any given time I am called to love her as Jesus loved the church – by dying for her. Even when she is wrong I am to die to myself and for her because that is what Jesus did for me – he died for me “yet while I was still a sinner.”
If love is a nice or ecstatic feeling, I too must have issues with loving God.
Do you suppose it might be more like the love a child has for her or his parent? Parents are incomprehensible to children esp young ones. If the parents are reasonably good, the child just trusts them with the big issues. If the parents are bad … well that raises a lot of difficult and uncomfortable questions does it not? How do you love a God who may be like your father (or mother) if your mother (or father) was a skunk?
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins. (I John 4:10 KJV)
I’ve always assumed we are incapable of real, genuine, unconditional and sacrificial love, and we “see through a glass dimly” (I Cor) until we get to heaven. Just imagine – if married love is a picture of Christ’s love for the church – what a wedding that’s going to be in heaven, when we are finally His bride!!!
What Lady Jennie said!
I am also reminded of the mustard seed. It doesn’t matter how small our faith or sense of relationship is – we are already so small in comparison – the important thing is that it is real. Following those commands and walking the walk in the times when you can’t really feel the love and the drive to do so is exactly what carries us closer, so that eventually we can feel that bonfire. And feel the hugs!
All I know is that my most uttered prayer is, “I believe. Help me in my unbelief.”
Sometimes I flip it around and think, “What makes me feel loved?” And when it comes to my kids, it’s when they listen and act like they believe what I said. And when they talk to me, confide in me. Very similar to what you wrote here. Thank you!
Hmmm. I don’t think I’ve said “I love you” to God in prayer much. Thank you for sharing that.
I know that the nice ecstatic feelings come and go in all relationships (for me right now, it’s most striking with my children). But I’m not sure they come to go when it comes to God. Sometimes I read or hear people talking, and their love for God is so full that it oozes out of them. And I want that. Just not sure how to get it.
Thank you for sharing that verse and your thoughts, Gen. Maybe you’re right and I’m looking for or expecting what is not possible. Food for thought.
Same here. Pretty much every day.
Just keep saying yes. When you sense him leading you to make a choice, say yes. When you sense him pulling you away to be alone with him, say yes.
He will lead you to the love that he has for you.
We become able to love God in those moments — however fleeting — when we want to want to love our neighbor as ourselves — and recognize that ‘our neighbor’ is every human being who touches our lives and whose life we touch — including those we call ‘enemies’. (Or perhaps those who are better than me at this ‘love’ thing are able to want to love their neighbor/enemy. Though it’s hard to imagine and staggering when you encounter it, some even love their neighbor/enemy.)
One great mystery of love is that God knows and loves us even when we don’t know who he is or even that he is. God, after all, is love. And we only understand what that means to the extent that we know and understand Jesus of Nazareth. He is our only window into the nature of God. And sometimes we learn to experience his love when we are loved in tangible ways by others. I know that’s how it was with me. Indeed, it’s the reason the early church spread through the nations even in the face of opposition and oppression.
God is not off someplace distant. It’s him in whom we live and move and have our being. Similarly, Jesus is not somewhere else. He is the head of his church, of his body, and is as close to us as our next breath. You may or may not ever have a mystical awareness or revelation of God. Some people have. Some haven’t. Some have had an encounter — perhaps even with Jesus himself in his resurrected flesh — and then never had anything similar again. Others have known the dark night of the soul for years and even decades.
There is a synergy involved, in part. Jesus will not force himself upon us, and so we can work to block him. We might do it willfully or we might do it by trying to separate ourselves from other human beings. It is difficult to experience love if we push those who might love us away. I know that much as I’ve done both at different times. God’s love is constant — it is his being. If we are to enter into salvation, which is union with Christ, we must also become love. But love means actively willing the good of the other, and it seems to me that Jesus knows exactly how much experience of him is ultimately for our good, that is which will be for our salvation and not warp us.
That’s actually my concern with much of the modern charismatic movement. It’s not that I don’t believe that God can and does and always has manifested in sometimes amazing ways. Nor is it that I don’t believe in the person and manifestation of the Holy Spirit. Rather, I have had spiritual encounters and experiences (most outside the context of Christianity), and I look at the pride that is sometimes produced, at the actions that occur, and at the demands placed on participants, and while I don’t question the reality of many of the experiences (there will always be some charlatanry) or their spiritual origin, I’m not convinced they are always the action of the Holy Spirit. If you read the stories of the Fathers and the saints (especially those we call the desert fathers), you’ll see they were almost always first suspicious when an angel appeared to them. They remembered that Satan himself appears as an angel of light. Similarly, when they received wonderful and powerful gifts of the Spirit, they did not flaunt them (lest they become prideful), but withdrew further. (Those who truly needed the application of their gift(s) from love for their salvation always seemed to find them, even if they were not looking for them.)
Do you love God? Do you love your enemy? If the answer to the latter is ‘no’ (as it is for me), then that’s the place to start. Love finally drew me into Christianity. I don’t think I’ve ever had the sort of direct experience that some have had, but I find today that I am filled with a deep knowledge of the love of Jesus welling up in my spirit. But even when depression had slammed shut the door of that knowledge, I remembered it — at least from time to time. It’s a strange God we worship, one who loved us and desired for us to know him so much that he became fully and wholly one of us to rescue us and to bring us into communion with him. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.