As Christ people, we orbit around this essential truth: God loves you. I’ve become fond of saying it this way, “You were created by God so that He can love you. That’s why you exist.” We sing it in our songs, read it as the unbreakable, unarguable thread that ties the whole Bible together and literally come face-to-face with the fullness of it through King Jesus.
It was an epiphany of His love that led me to follow Jesus in the first place back in 2013 and yet, even so, I’ve struggled through bouts of distancing myself from this truth, the latest one spanning from December to the end of February. It’s not that I doubt His love for me, it’s that I choose not to rest in it. I choose to seek control, identity or satisfaction outside of love. I choose not to trust - depend on - that He is, in fact, as good as He says He is…as I’ve experienced and known Him to be. Essentially, I choose not to receive from Him, and therefore, I give up my ability to love Him back. And when you don’t give and receive, relationship weakens, cracks and eventually breaks.
I’ve officially arrived back in Mijas, Spain to finish my last term of G42 and a couple of nights ago, I woke up in the middle of the night, mind racing incoherently. I flitted from subject to subject, leaving loose end notions frayed and frazzled, not getting anywhere at all - including back to sleep. The capstone to all my thinking: “I just want to know I am loved so I can move on to something else.”
And then, at 2:00am, Holy Spirit spoke. And when He speaks, one ought to take notes:
“There is nothing to move on to. Being loved is the point. Because God is Love and Jesus is God. He is the perfect reflection of God’s radiance and therefore, there is nothing to move on to beyond Jesus. Beyond love. Beyond being loved. And if, for the rest of your life, the only thing you remember is that you are loved, you will remember the entirety of God. So be loved. He loves you because He loves you because He loves you because He loves you. And He does so, not because of anything you do or don’t do, but because that’s who He created you to be. To be loved.”
“And that’s who He created your neighbor to be too. To be loved by Him and to be loved by you through His love for you. Out of love, comes more love. Out of His extravagant, overwhelming, impractical, reckless, un-earnable, unconditional love for you comes love for yourself and others. Because love cannot reproduce anything else.”
“So don’t fight it. Don’t deny it. Don’t strive for it. Simply allow it. Allow Him and in your allowance, something far beyond magic — something of divinity — will take place. The eternal seed lodge away in the soil of your soul will crack open and Life will bloom between your ribs. Love will grow beyond what you’d ever dare hoped, for even your capacity of hope will expand in all directions at once. There is no other point beyond love because there is no other point beyond God.”
So let us not move on, as if there were anything to gain beyond God. We never have to worry about getting to the end of Him and therefore, we never have to worry about getting to the end of love. And please know, in the depths of your being, He won’t love you more when you become better. He won’t love you more if you do more. He loves you 100% all the time because that is who He is.
Allow Him to speak to your inner being and fill you up from the inside with Light. Overflow with knowing the very reason you - a beautiful, unique and extraordinary existence - take up space at all is so that the God of the universe can love you boundlessly through Jesus Christ. Be loved, dear friends.