Knowledge of God begins by knowing He loves you

As Christians we are told that God loves us. We sing songs as a child, “Jesus loves me this I know, because the Bible tells me so”. But do we really know the love of God toward us? Pay close attention to those words, “toward us”. 1 John 4:9 says, “In this the love of God was manifested toward us in that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him”. “Toward us”, seems to suggest a movement of His love. A movement so great that He would send His Son, Jesus, in the form a human being, born as an infant, to be tortured until He was unrecognizable (Isaiah 52:14). “God proves His love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us” (Romans 5:8).  “Toward us”; a power so great that it cannot be contained, like a tsunami of love! A powerful force that must be expressed. God’s love is so extraordinary, that it moved “toward us”.

Ephesians 3:18 helps us to understand the enormity of God’s love “toward us”.  His love is confirmed to have width, depth, height and length. According to Ephesians, His love is so great that it far surpasses mere knowledge; it is not simply an intellectual process of thought or understanding. It is far greater. It is so great that it cannot be known without experiencing it.

Ephesians 2:4,5 (Amplified) describes His love this way: “But God so rich is He in His mercy! Because of and in order to satisfy the great and wonderful and intense love with which He loved us, even though we were dead in (our own) shortcomings and trespasses, He made us alive together in fellowship and in union with Christ…” By God’s love “toward us” we now live through Jesus Christ Who has taken residence in our spirit (Galatians 2:20).

Love is not just a quality of God; love is actually Who God is! “God is love” (1 John 4:16). We come to experience and know His love because He has given of Himself, by giving us His Spirit.  Think about this, Almighty God has shared Himself with human beings through Jesus Christ, His Son; you are united with Jesus … “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and we who abide in love abide in God, and God in us” (1 John 4:16). John 17:22 confirms His love: “I (Jesus) in them, and You (Father) in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me.”

Do we need to do something to possess His Spirit, to be loved by Him? No! We do nothing! “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” (John 3:16) It is by believing what God did, that we receive. There is nothing to earn; it is a gift. God poured out His love “toward us” through the Holy Spirit Who He has given to us (Romans 5:5). You cannot tap into God’s goodness through your actions. He does not respond to you in proportion to how much you pray, read His Word, or do nice things for others. Nothing you do impresses Him so much that He would bless you, that He would sacrifice of His Son, or send His Holy Spirit to be one with you. You do not move God. God has already moved toward you because of His magnificent love!

Before this remarkable gift we were separated from God. Love destroyed the separation. In a sinful state humanity was separated from Him and all of His blessing unless they performed, that is kept the law. The problem was mankind could not keep the law perfectly as instructed by God. They suffered the consequences. Jesus changed all that! Romans 8:3 describes it this way: “For what the law could not do in that it was weak through the flesh, God did by sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, on account of sin: He condemned sin in the flesh”.  For each of us, Jesus took that punishment that we deserved. Jesus actually “put away and abolished sin by His sacrifice (of Himself)” (Hebrews 9:26, Amplified).

The expression of God’s love toward us, is explained in detail in Isaiah 53:1-5. We learn that Jesus was ordinary, “nothing attractive about Him” (Message); “people actually turned away” from Him (Message). For each of us, He knew pain and suffering firsthand (Message). “He was despised and rejected by men”. “Jesus bore our griefs, (sicknesses, weaknesses and distresses)” (Amplified). “He carried our sorrows and pains (of punishment)” (Amplified). “He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our guilt and iniquities; the chastisement (needful to obtain) peace and well-being for us was upon Him, and with the stripes (that wounded) Him we are healed and made whole” (Amplified). Love expressed itself by taking our sin, taking our punishment for sin, and taking away sickness and disease that was the fruit of sin. (The reference of sin here is the sin that entered the world through Adam and Eve, not individual sin.) Satan was brought to nought (Hebrews 2:14), made a public example of (Colossians 2:15), by the actions of Jesus Christ. Due to His actions, the “Father has delivered and drawn us to Himself out of control and the dominion of darkness and has transferred us into the kingdom of the Son of His love” (Colossians 1:13). These things are done! We are not waiting for God to move toward us; He has already moved! Because they are done, we are just like Jesus now in this world (1 John 4:17)! We have been molded into the image of Jesus and share His likeness in our spirit (Romans 8:29; Amplified). “In accordance with this will (of God), we have been made holy (consecrated and sanctified) through the offering made once for all of the body of Jesus Christ” (Hebrews 10:10; Amplified). “By the single offering of Jesus, we are forever cleansed and perfected” (Hebrews 10:14; Amplified). Our holiness and perfection are speaking about our spirit.

For each child of God today, we have the opportunity to live in the benefits of the finished work of the cross. We have the privilege of experiencing God’s love, experiencing the finished work accomplished by Jesus. But do we experience it? Or do we simply know that we are forgiven of our sins, because we believe in Jesus, but the rest of our life is lived just like our unsaved neighbor? We are justified, made just as if we have never sinned (Hebrews 10:14; Hebrews 10:10; Romans 8:30), but what does that mean for daily living other than we have the right to enter heaven? Do you allow your flesh to rule you or are you living victoriously from your spirit? What does it mean that we are the righteousness of God, and how does that impact our day-to-day living? The answers to these questions are what it means to know by revelation and experience the love of God. Knowledge of Him is possible, knowing His love and the experience of it, is possible; the Word confirms it: “You have received not the spirit of this world, but the Spirit who is from God, that you might know the things that have been freely given to you by God” (1 Corinthians 2:12). We were created by Him, born anew, for this experience. You are the desire of His heart! He has a tsunami of love for you! Ask Him every day to show you how much He loves you, that is to give you revelation of His love, so that you may live victoriously through Him as you live on this earth.