Someone wrote me today that:
" I think we need to love God first, then He loves us back and that love fills us, so we can love others."
To which I say, "Almost!" Yes we have to be filled with God's love or we cannot love others and that is a huge missing piece in today's culture. Today's weak notion of self-generated love is about "feelings" which are subject to time of day, to hormones, to blood sugar and thousands of other things. Those kinds of feelings are unable to "love" when the feeling is not right, and those feelings are usual determined by surrounding circumstances.
But our "loving God" is in response to His love. God has initiated love first, and we are the responders. The Faith part is truly believing that God is already loving you.
In this way, we see that God has to GIVE us the love to even love Him back with.
God is love. Love originates in the heart of God. God is not weak sentimentalism. God is fiercely committed love. Both passionately tender and disruptively wild.
The only love worth loving with is God's love. Everything else will let you down, because your heart was designed for perfect love.
1. God initiates love
2. Our will and heart is willing to believe and receive it.
3. We are transformed by God's love, shedding our false and sin-reactive selves, in a process to be more like our lover. Generous, free, lavish, etc.
4. We can then begin to love others the way we were meant to. Experiencing ourselves as agents of a love much larger than our own identity.
Thus to "love God" is to be in a relationship with a perfect lover… whereby we also discover that WE (for all our self-righteousness and "nice" intentions and rationalizations, but riddled with selfishness and unfaithfulness) are the one's always violating love on our end. So we come to see our enormous and consuming need for Grace. That is, for constant forgiveness, course corrections, so we root out and turn again and again back to the heart of God. Continually seeing how we are missing and underestimating God's love, being the offenders and chocking off the very level of intimacy we pretended we wanted, to thereby grow to receive more and more. Our loving God is ALL about receiving. We are the female in the relationship - we are the receivers, penetrated by a loving life force.
And that is what enlivens and empowers us to love at all. Any beliefs about love that don't focus on the Heart of God towards us, miss the core of love. We're not these noble creatures; we're terribly needy. We feel our own needs so intensely as the background to our entire lives. So we justify a million selfish behaviors. A billion self-consumed thoughts and deeds. And then wounds at all levels come to use in life, and we get into this habitual wounded-reaction-mode, as if our hearts (thirsty as they are for love) exist in some perpetual post-trauma, offended state. And yet out heart's simply won't stop needing love. So we alternately find addictive substitutes that manage to vaguely mimic the feelings of love-wholeness for a moment, or we demand that our fellow humans love us better, etc.
But if we are honest, we inevitably come to the same conclusion that Florence Allshom did:
"I used to think that being nice to people and feeling nice was loving people. Now I know it isn't. Love is the most immense unselfishness and it is so big I've never touched it."
God knows we are terrible needy. That is why He proclaimed himself to be many-breasted (El Shaddai), with a provision to fill our every need. Again, we are the receivers in this relationship. He has to fill us, to change us, to make us our true selves. We move out of needy psychology (our messy thoughts and feelings), into love-responsiveness. Into freedom to love. I get a lot out of how Leanne Payne talks about how contact with the presence of God, makes us "real" - makes us our real selves, free to respond instead of just react from needing love. Free to be. Free to create. Free to actually partner with God as amazing as that may sound! Truly alive! THIS, my friends, is exactly what we were meant to be.
Communion with the Messiah (His life, His heart, His blood, His being) is the only way to really love ourselves or love God or love others. This is where we find life, love, belonging, wholeness, security, purpose, acceptance, and every other thing we need, that without them drive us into much unhappiness and frustrated attempts to control life, instead of to joyfully surf this life like a giant wave of love. The only love worth loving ourselves with is God's love. He will treat our hearts FAR BETTER than we ever would treat our own. And let's face it, isn't that exactly what you, just like me, has been longing for all along?
"The realized and integrated personality, finding its identity only in God, and no longer seeking it in a role (wife, mother, father), in a career or profession (doctor, lawyer, pastor, artist) or in a class (woman, white-collar worker, black), is no longer shaped or determined by fears of failure or by what others think of it. Its justification is God alone. This redeemed personality is freed from the superimpositions of the sins, mistakes, and foibles of others and of those of its own past; it is freed from the rejections it has experienced, both in its past and in its present. It is truly free; free to love - even its own enemies; free to create - in spite of the fears and hate surrounding it.
This personality no longer attempts to relate to others (much less to the Body of Christ) on the basis of expertise of any kind, for it no longer finds its identity in that expertise. Fears, outward pressures, undue domination by others no longer shape its inner life, nor even-over too long a period- the circumstances of its outer life; secure within its inner being, it is enabled to confront and to deal with these things rather than be shaped by them.
It has insofar as its finiteness permits, willed to be one with God. Its will one with its Creator's, it can therefore perfectly collaborate with its Creator. Paradoxically appearing to have lost itself, the personality finds itself for the first time truly creative."
-Leanne Payne in Real PresenceAt the cross outside of Jerusalem, God, in Yeshua, provided the ultimate demonstration of love. A love willing to sacrifice its own son, in order to GIVE itself to us. To revitalize us and transform us in response to it. The Father, in Christ, put his very heart NAKED on display - knowing it would me mocked, rejected by the high-minded religious leaders, would be misunderstood, would be rejected by most. FOR THE SAKE OF THE FEW who would choose to RESPOND to that heart - the lifeblood poured OUT so that, via faith, it could get IN us. Forming the basis of a relationship of love, rather than a God-man relationship of condemnation and separation.
God has zero interest in religious ceremony that is not a heart response to His heart. Religious systems of any kind that are about the system, and not about God's heart do not and cannot radiate divine life! Systems and ceremony are lifeless in an of themselves.
Instead God is passionately interested at getting us to understand He is our lover (our everything), and to see His heart of sheer Goodness. Only then can we trust Him. Only then can we respond in ANY way to Him from a true orientation. Only then can a meaningful intimacy, partnership and relationship of faith be formed. Only then are we responding to the REAL Him. Only then can we find our passion and our purpose, in the light of His passion and purpose. Only then are we free. And only a free person can freely choose to love back in a way that is meaningful and beautiful. I am alive only because I responded to God's love, like a little child's trusting heart, to let Him live inside me. It is ALL about God, not about me. Let my life more and more reflect His love. Everything else pales in compassion to that.
I look at myself and see 1000 ways I am a MESS. I don't live up to me own ideals. I might focus on one aspect, only to neglect 3 dozen other aspects. I too am riddled with self-distortion and every human neediness, frailty and failing. AND YET, it is as if my being comes into FOCUS in the presence of God's love. Here I find a radically difference perspective. I find life. I find power. I find the divine perspective. Even in the chaos and mess and imperfection, God is choosing to be at work through me. I can do more than I EVEN IMAGINE as God works through me -- some times with me, many times despite me. God's love is the standard by which to reference everything. And that only helps me begin to see how much I need God's love. In Christ I am powerful and effective. In Christ I can move mountains. Apart from Christ, I can do nothing (meaning that everything I do in my own ability will only be things I am embarrassed of later on).
But in Christ I can BE and DO the goodness I want to - the goodness I was meant, purposed and designed to do. In Christ, I am a force for love and goodness. God has chosen to change the world one heart at a time, THROUGH those hearts willing to be changed by God's love. I am unstoppable -- fearless and free to be vulnerable for the sake of love. The only way I can be that is because I am first made secure and whole by being filled with the love of God.
Thus I transcend all human philosophy and surmount all psychology. God's life in my sprit, trumps the tangles in my soul.
As I reflect Him, I can participate in Tikkun - the overarching restoration of all things back into alignment with the heart and purposes of God. I exist as an extension of the Kingdom of God into the dimension of time and space, radiant with the very approval, life and authority that God gave his very own Son! Mine is now a divinely empowered life - totally free and able. Not to indulge stupid and temporary urges, but free and empowered to participate in the building of the Kingdom of God as it expands and extends throughout creation, just as if fills heaven with God's very Glory.
Our love is a response to God's love. Any goodness I might participate in is a response to God's goodness.
The secret is not trying to be "good", "moral", or "religious". Rather my prayer is "Show me Your heart, God." So that I may respond to that revelation. The more you show me the more I am in awe. Responding to God's heart = worship, my highest calling that will take eternity to respond back.
And to close with the ultimate words about love ever written by a human: so simple any child can understand, yet so true and so profound
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.
In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is whole and complete in us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.
And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world.
Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God.
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.
There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.
We love because God first loved us.
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.
-- First John Chapter 4.Two Resources that more deeply articulate this and helped me go beyond mere attempts at self-esteem, to an integrated self/personality, to better be on the path of love.
The Sacred Romance
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sacred-Romance-Drawing-Closer/dp/0785273425/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1399575926&sr=8-1&keywords=the+sacred+romance
Real Presence
http://www.amazon.com/Real-Presence-Spirit-Works-Lewis/dp/0891071644/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1399576543&sr=8-4&keywords=real+presence+leanne+payne
