Learning God’s Love Language
Today I want to have a conversation about love. This is how God kicked it off with me so I’ll do the same for you. He said ” I want to change the love you perceive and receive. My love can transform you.” And this made me realize that I didn’t truly understand what love looked like from God. It makes me wonder if I didn’t understand it, I probably haven’t fully received it so how could I possibly give it?
I realized how much my perspective and expectation of love have been altered by my experience with love. But that’s out of order my expectation should feed my experience not the other way around. And when our experience feeds our expectations we get more of what we’ve had. When what we’ve had is misaligned with what pure love actually is, then it means our brokenness is driving our love journey. So when you look at your current perspective of love what experiences have fed it and what expectations has that created? Have you honestly ever experienced the love that God described? Was it with people? Was it with God? Is it possible that your perspective of love is off? Well if it is, God is coming to purify that perspective so buckle up.
This month I got a revelation of God’s love and it changed the way I saw myself. Now I want everyone to experience what I have, not just believing God loves them because He saved them but experiencing His love daily.
So as we continue this conversation I want you to consider the answers to these questions. What is the love you want to experience? What is really your desire? And is that a desire born from a healed place? The love that I wanted to experience from God, from friends, family, or romantically had roots. My desire to be loved was correct but my perspective of what love looked like changed based on how I matured and honestly how healed I was. Deliverance changes your perspective. So the question becomes, in your current state, the love you want, could you recognize it if you saw it?
See, God loves us perfectly but we don’t see it perfectly. So what perspective shifts do we need to make? First, we need to understand what love looks like from God, then what love can look like from us.
Him Loving Us
There are three ways I see God show His love for me that I didn’t see before.
Being With Us
First is by being with us. So before we dive into this point I want to check in with you.
How’s your heart? Our journey to love and be loved has left some of us battled and bruised. Some of our perspectives of love are based on survival and dysfunction but not the love that was designed for us. And I’m not just talking about struggle love or unbalanced love or manipulation disguised as love. Those are overt. We can all agree that those are out of line. We are in a constant state of discovering the depth of God’s love but I’m concerned that some of us have stopped short. There’s so much more God wants to reveal to us but we’ve settled for our limited perspective of love. So my question for you is do you want more?
For me, I could always see the evidence of His “like” but I misunderstood the proof of God’s love. And I’m not just talking about Him dying on the cross. Don’t think I’m minimizing that because I’m not. My current existence wouldn’t be possible without it, but I think too many of us stop there. Honestly, I think some of us focus on the basics of provision- He woke me up this morning, He put a roof on my head and food on my table- for some of us that’s a big deal but for many of us we just say these things when we have nothing better to say. We should have more impactful proof of God’s love for us. God desires to show us He loves us in a personal way. He wants it for all of us and if we’re not experiencing it it’s because we are not perceiving or receiving it. Either it’s happening and we aren’t aware or there are things in our lives stopping us from receiving what God wants to give. Either way, we’re leaving money on the table and squandering the opportunity to experience life-changing moments. Let me give you an example.
I had an encounter with Jesus. I was sitting in a room full of people and it felt like I was alone. Jesus was standing in front of me. He smiled and grabbed my face where His hands were on either side of my cheeks and He said “I love you. I want you.” I could feel the weight of every word said and they broke something inside of me. It was almost like there were walls around my heart that shattered, experiences that I had been holding onto that at that moment I let go of. It was like there was a deep breath I could finally take now that my heart was free. I felt love, warmth, peace, and joy all radiate inside and around me. I felt complete, beautiful, chosen, and esteemed. And I wept because it felt so great and I had never experienced anything like it. This was the love God had been wanting me to feel. I had desperately searched for this moment for so long and I thought it could be found in acceptance, feeling valued, or being chosen by someone’s son. All that I have given to feel loved and all this time God was willing to freely give it.
Disciplining Us
For so long I put pressure on myself to do things right. It caused me to stress, delay or move prematurely. I didn’t want to make a mistake because that equaled pain or embarrassment. I have lived like the reality of who I was would let God down. And like I had to be good enough or I would be punished. Few of us live in the reality of His love. Every Christian knows Jesus died for us but He lived for us too and He lives with us. Everything He does is out of love.
It is crazy for me to realize that in many ways I felt like I wasn’t good enough for God. When you think God loves you or you’re trying to believe He does you can slip into trying to earn His love and that becomes your expectation of what love costs. Let God free you from this. His love costs us nothing and He will love us regardless. Our response though shows how much we value His love. And my response was something I had to deal with.
The other day I was reading the bible during my devotional time and Prov. 3:11-12 hit me like a lightning bolt. It says:
My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline,
and do not resent his rebuke,
because the Lord disciplines those he loves,
as a father the son, he delights in
Now for one, I’m not calling myself a man so let’s get that out of the way but the revelation that his me was: When we choose the easy way out we are despising God’s love. Some of us hate making mistakes or being wrong but there are benefits to discipline when the motivation for it is love. We grow much faster, receive more blessings and avoid being drug by the struggle bus when we allow God to discipline us in the way He wants to. Value the discipline.
One way I’m learning to lean into this is the first inclination I have that God wants me to do or not do something I try to go with it. If it’s not turning on the TV and praying instead or if it’s repenting for something I should have never done in the first place my goal now is to correct it quickly. I know what it’s like to avoid doing something God has told me to adjust only to waste time, cause stress and have to come back and finally do it anyway. Well if I’m going to end up having to do it anyway, how much sense does it make to waste time? I now want the journey that creates the most impact for me and the kingdom. It may not be easy but we all get to choose our hard and I’d rather deal with the challenge of growth than the struggle of disobedience.
Commissioning Us
A brother of mine, spiritual, not biological, said this recently: God chose you to bring something new into the world through. Think about that. God entrusted you with something that this world had never seen. Your unique mix of personality, skills, gifts, and talents is one of a kind and intentionally given to you to impact the world in the way only you can. That’s mindblowing once you really think about it. Your gifts and talents are proof that God will invest in His children (that nugget came from my Uncle), but what is our response to the gifts we carry? We learn our abilities but do we learn their purpose? Do you know why you were given these gifts and what you’re supposed to do with them? The willingness to investigate their purpose shows us how much we value our gifts. Asking God the purpose of our gifts and keeping ourselves focused on listening until we get an answer protects them from being haphazardly used and gives us the strategy to be effective and create the impact we want to have in the world. But we’ve got to be willing to ask and actually use the gifts however God directs us, whether we see the benefit for us, whether we see the impact, whether we get the recognition, whether we want to. None of that matters. When we truly see that God loved us enough to invest in us, we will have no problem investing in others.
Us Loving Him
All my life I was taught how to serve God but not how to seek Him. See it’s when you learn how to seek Him with all your heart that you find Him. The best way I can articulate the difference between a head that comprehends service without a heart to seek is the difference between Mary and Martha. One understood the importance of service and that’s not bad but there was something greater she could have had. A seeker’s heart desires to know God and that’s the more important thing. I can serve Him and never know Him but if I seek to know Him, I’ll serve Him by default. It’s more efficient and I get both done in one fell swoop.
For much of my life, the focus has been on serving God at church, seeking Him for answers, or reading the Bible to know Him, but that was the extent of the relationship. See, a servant doesn’t experience the complete love of their master but a son or daughter is privileged to experience the love of their Father.
So, What has your perspective and experience of God been? Who is He really to you? And is it enough? Here’s the thing, no revelation I have of God is ever enough. Because there is always more God has to give I am grateful for what He’s given but I maintain my hunger for more and that sets me up to get more. Have you stopped seeking? Have you assumed that what you’ve experienced is all there is of God or all He wants to give?
The first commandment is to love your God with all your heart. God put that first for a reason. Now I don’t know all the reasons but I know that when you love someone much of what you do for them is out of your desire to want to give your best to them. I think we do ourselves a disservice when we expect it to always be easy for us to show our love to God in the way that He has asked. But I’ll tell you this, it’s only hard when we try to do it ourselves.
For so long I tried to love Him instead of actually loving Him. I have finally gotten to the place where I was able to receive His love and loving him became automatic. The truth is we were created to love him. It’s our default. If we don’t it’s because distractions, brokenness, lies, dysfunction, and all of these things are impeding the connection between His heart and ours. We’ve got to reset. And the beautiful thing is he knows we need help to love Him and he gives it if we just ask.
I routinely ask God to give me the desire to seek Him. You can also ask God to give you the hunger to know Him.
I heard my spiritual mother put it like this- Lord make yourself real to me. Let me desire you more than anything else.
But here’s the thing about when you ask God or are seeking Him, you have to maintain an atmosphere where you can receive His response. Maintain a lifestyle where communication flows and you stay aware of what God is saying and doing in your life.
The Wrap Up
It’s funny how maintaining our love connection with God impacts others.
When you truly have a revelation of God’s love it changes the way you treat yourself, the treatment you accept, and how you handle others. Your love is on full so you don’t operate with the desperateness that comes with being deficient. You don’t settle for pseudo-love you have the desire to raise your standard and wait for actual love. And you can freely give love because you know what it feels like to receive it.
What has looking for love in the wrong places cost you? What is it costing you now? How has it changed your perspective or expectation of what is normal and acceptable? Be delivered and free to accept God’s love and His standard for how you should love and be loved. And refuse to settle for anything less than that- order and honor. You are worth not taking a shortcut or cutting corners. You are worth someone being willing to do things by heaven’s order. Marrying you before intimacy or living together. Honoring you by not compromising your purity or commitment to God. Freely blessing you without taking advantage of you. Valuing who you are without altering you for their benefit. Romantic or platonic there is a standard for how you should be handled. As you learn them, require them.
Understanding His love helped me understand how valuable the life He has for me is. I want to live excellently. I love Him differently and I show it differently which means I show up in the world differently. My expectations of what’s possible are different that affect what I go after and what I expect.
If perfect love casts out all fear then what is the result of understanding more about how God loves us? It’s a fearless life.
So if the love we’re experiencing isn’t aligned with God’s definition of love we have to ask ourselves What in your love expectation is actually rooted in fear? God wants to clear some things out of you today.
Today I want us to commit to refusing to settle in love. To do that we have to ask God to purify our perspective of love and to strive to do our best to live a life that honors that.
Go back through some of the questions I asked. Think on them and answer them. God wants to reveal to you how He loves you and it’s deeper and more impactful than we have ever realized.
