Believing AND Receiving
Throughout the pages of His Word, God declares His great love for us. The Bible has even been called a love letter from God. Over and over again, He says it and He shows it, because He wants us to know it. This isn’t a love that watches over us from afar; this is an up close and very personal kind of love that God has for each one of us. And He promises that nothing can take that love away from us.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? … No, in all these things we are more than conquerers through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:35, 37-39)
Absolutely nothing can separate us from His love. That’s what His Word says, and that is truth. EXCEPT … there is one way that God’s love for us can be hindered. There is one person who can separate me from the love of Christ: MYSELF. I can separate myself from God’s love. I can choose to ignore His love for me. I can keep myself apart from Him and not allow His love to fill me or nurture me or strengthen me as He so desires.
Of course, God will never stop loving me; His love is eternal (Isaiah 54:10). Of course, His love and His goodness will continue to follow after me all of my days (Psalm 23:6), and He will never leave my side (Psalm 23:4). Yet, He will never force His love upon me. It always will be there, available to me for the taking, but it is my choice to believe it and to receive it.
You know, those are two very different things: believing and receiving. If we have faith in God through Jesus Christ, we made the choice to believe that “God so loved the world - and us, too - that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). And our belief opens the door to relationship with God, our Heavenly Father, who longs to lavish His love upon us and delights to call us His children (1 John 3:1).
But, sadly, we don’t always receive that love, which is ours by right as His daughters and sons. We think we have to earn it. We strive to prove we deserve it. We allow disappointment or discouragement to weasel their way into our hearts and shut the door on the love that would bring us comfort and see us through. When we close ourselves off from God, when we step away from His loving Presence, His love remains, only we no longer allow it to flow into our hearts and our lives.
The choice is ours: not only to believe in the love of God for us. “Jesus loves me; this I know for the Bible tells me so.” But also to receive that love, allowing it to fill us and embrace us, to heal us and restore us. We are loved by God - abundantly, lavishly, endlessly! May we open ourselves up as willing vessels to be filled to the full with His wonderful love!
A Prayer
For this reason I kneel before the Father … And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:14, 17-19)
In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
