One of the greatest blessings Jesus obtained for us, is the love of God.  Christ came into the world and gave his life that we might know and enjoy God’s love. 

The love of God is so unfailing, so measureless, so perfectly suited to the needs of our soul, that it is all we need for a full and satisfied life.  It is the only thing in the world that is able to make us truly happy.  Moses prayed in Psalm 90:14 “Satisfy us in the morning with your unfailing love, that we may sing for joy and be glad all our days.  That prayer was made in the midst of very bleak circumstances in the wilderness. Moses had a profound feeling that life was short and filled with suffering, but he knew that God was able to fill our hearts, able to satisfy us, and cause us to sing for joy and be happy all our days WITH HIS LOVE! 

AW Tozer said, in The Pursuit of God, “God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.”

Ruth Meyers said, “Over time we come to God with such an assortment of deficiencies and inadequacies and emergencies, time and work pressures, marriage difficulties, rebellious or straying children, bereavement, financial problems, emotional problems, problems with other people, lost jobs, lost friends, lost happiness. ….Even in our best times you and I have vast inner needs.... But God knows all those (needs) within us and all their depths, and meets each one with a love that is beyond measure.”  

When we see, in the Bible, the way people found joy and satisfaction in God’s love, it forces us to ask ourselves:  Do I really understand the love of God?  How much am I experiencing the love of God?  How is the love of God affecting my attitudes and emotions? How is the love of God affecting my responses to circumstances, and to other people.  Am I having problems in relationships with people because I do not know the love of God?

Maybe most important of all:  Am I experiencing the love of God in such a way that I love HIM?  John said, “We love him because he first loved us!”  Do you know his love in such a way that it no longer seems strange to say, “God, I love you so much!”. Has his love so touched you that you want to love him, please him, obey him and to radiate his love to others?

The last thing that Jesus prayed for his disciples, was for them to know and experience God’s love!  John 17:26 “I have made you known to them, and will continue to make you known in order that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them.”  NIV

The Father loves you with the same love that he has for Jesus.  Jesus prayed that you would know that!  Jesus prayed that the Father’s love would be IN YOU.  We are to be filled up with his love as we are filled with him.  

Paul said, “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.”  The highest human experience is to be filled with God and his love!! 

This is not something for the edges of life.  Our lives are to be saturated with the love of God.  I am afraid that sometimes we say, “my sins are forgiven and God loves me - what’s next?”  The love of God is something we never get beyond or get over!

God’s love has a curing power in our hearts that nothing else does!  His love, gives us such a deep sense that we are held and loved and cared for, that it creates security, and stability.  We lose our need to control others, and to control circumstances in order to be happy or feel safe.  Because we know we are safe in the love of God.

If the love of God does not flourish in our hearts, then our insecurities and fears flourish. We won’t feel safe around other people or safe in the turmoil of life.  Our wounds remain unhealed, we’re sensitive to offenses, we become defensive and critical, or we just plain don’t think of others.  We don’t pour ourselves out for others, because we don’t sufficiently know the transforming love of God inside of our own selves. 

-Without the love of God we are easily defeated by life. But  with his love, we can overcome anything! Romans 8:35-37 “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? …. No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.” 

The love of God is big enough for your life, no matter what happens to you!  -Even if all hell breaks out against you!

*God’s loves takes us all the way to maturity, holiness and spiritual health.  Jesus showed love to the woman caught in adultery by protecting her from the vicious condemnation of the Pharisees, but he also showed love to her by saying,  “Neither to I condemn you. Now go and sin no more.”  God loves you just as you are, but he loves you too much to leave you just as you are!  

God’s love does not merely affirm who we are, in our sin and brokenness!  It is compelling, and transforming! It changes us, conforms us to the likeness of Jesus!  His love calls us out of darkness into his marvelous light. 

*The love of God enables us to love the imperfect people around us.  Dick Staub said, “Only those who experience God’s loving presence in the deepest places of their soul can be a loving presence in the souls of others.  When (we are) touched by God, our (own) deepest wounds can become our deepest well of compassion for the sorrows of others”.  

God comforts us in all our afflictions with his loving presence and so we are able to love and comfort others who are in any affliction.  We have the very love of God poured out within us  so we become the embodiment of God’s love to others! 

*It is knowing the love of God that fuels our love for him! John Owen said, “All that we learn of God will only frighten us away from Him if we do not see him as loving and merciful to us. But if your heart is taken up with the Father’s love…it cannot help but choose to be overpowered, conquered and embraced by Him.”  Psalm 86:12,13 NIV

“I will praise you Lord my God, with all my heart; I will glorify your name forever! FOR great is your love toward me.”  The love of God fires up that kind of response and praise and passion for God.  

*It is those who are in Christ that know this love.  Certainly there is a love which God has for all people.  “God so loved the world…”  Jesus invited a rich young ruler to follow him, but he turned away from Jesus, because he loved his money more than God.  Yet Mark tells us that Jesus “looked at him and loved him”, -this man who never followed Christ. 

Yet the Bible is unmistakably clear that there is a completely unique realm of love of the Father has for those who belong to Christ.  that we receive as a child of God!  We are those whom God loves”.  Paul wrote “To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints”  Romans 1:7  This is our mark, our honor our great blessing, as God’s children, that we are loved by God. 

Yet, our understanding of this love and our experience of this love can be much more than it is!  Paul prayed, “May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God”.  2 Thessalonians 3:5 Our hearts can be aimed in another direction and need to be redirected into God’s love. Our experience of God’s love can be more or less.  

*Three ways we know the love of God (and can grow in it): By the word, by the Holy Spirit, and by the cross of Jesus. 

*First: In the Bible God tells us of his feelings for us, of his love for us.  God reminded his people in Jeremiah 31:3 “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”  In Isaiah 43:4 God said, “you are precious in my eyes, and honored, and I love you.”  He feels the same about you. 

This is a living word which we must not only read, but hear in our hearts!  Psalm 143:8 says, “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love.” -NIV  Or KJV -“Cause me to hear your loving kindness in the morning.”  We need “hear” God say, “I love you”.  We need his love to come to us each morning, and it will if we look for it and listen for it. 

In God’s word we find the sweetest descriptions of his love for us!  Ephesians 2:8  “But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.”  1 John 3:1 “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!” 

Zepahniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is in your midst, a mighty one who will save; he will rejoice over you with gladness; he will quiet you by his love; he will exult over you with loud singing.”  He sings over you and rejoices over you, because he loves you!

We need to go to the Bible again and again to remind us of his love, and to remove all our distorted ideas about his love.   Ruth Meyers said,  “All of us in some degree have false or incomplete notions about God and his love. And these wrong ideas about him lie at the root of many of our problems.  So we go to the Bible to cut through the tangle of our false notions and find out what God is really like. With increasing spiritual vision we take in the truth about him that sparkle on it’s pages. There we get to know our wonderful God and learn to actually experience his love day by day in our minds and emotions and in our character.”   

*Second: The Holy Spirit brings the experience of God’s love into our hears.  The love of God is to be deeply felt and known within us, and it can be!.  Romans 5:5 says our hope in God is not disappointed “because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given to us.”   We have solid evidence of God’s love for us and all that he has promised us, because we know his love INSIDE of us. It floods and overflows our hearts! 

David Guzik said, “The Apostle Paul’s logical arguments in Romans are devastating, but the Book of Romans doesn’t lack emotion or passionate experiences with God. Paul wants us to think the right thoughts about God, but he also wants us to have the right experience with God –the love of God… poured out in our hearts.”

Your heart is who you are on the inside, with all your feelings, thoughts, and desires.  Jesus said the Pharisees clean the outside of the cup but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence.  The love of God has to reach the inside of you, and then flood your heart,  affecting your thoughts and personality and everything about you! 

Spurgeon compared the love of God to an alabaster box of expensive perfume.  He said, “it is a very precious ointment but we know nothing of it, it remains a mystery, a secret, until the Holy Spirit opens the box fills the chamber of our hearts.”

David compared the love of God to a feast of the very best food! -a feast for his inner person!  He said,  “Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods; with singing lips my mouth will praise you.” Psalm 63:4-6 This inward fullness and joy, in God’s love is all there waiting for you!

*Third: The ultimate proof of God’s love for us is the death of Jesus for our sins.  1 John 3:16 “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” NIV No matter how we feel, we are always to look at the cross as proof of the Father’s love.

Romans 5:6-8 “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God SHOWS his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  Iian Murray wrote a book called The Cross – The Pulpit of God’s Love - meaning the cross itself preaches God’s love to us.  

*What must we do? 

First: Understand the great need you have to know and experience the love of God!! Makes such a difference to have you heart bathed in the love of God or not!  It may the biggest need you have. 

Second: Believe what God has said to us about his love!  John said, “We have come to know and TO BELIEVE the love God has for us.”  You do not have to wait for some special feeling to come over you.  Belief is an action of your heart that you choose!  John Owen said “The greatest sorrow and burden you can lay on the Father, the greatest unkindness you do to him, is not to believe that he loves you”.  

*Third:  Pray! Ask God to satisfy you with his unfailing love. Pray Psalm 90:14!  Pray Psalm 143:8 “Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love!”

*Last: DRAW NEAR to his love.  Set your mind upon his love and put your heart up close to his love.  When I am cold in our Living Room I go sit down in front of the fireplace!    Jesus said, "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love.” “Live in my love!”  Or “Stay up close to my love!”   You can go put your heart next to God’s love and be warmed by it. 

Pray: Lord, we are so honored that you us! We are so blessed, so stunned that you love us!  Give us the full knowledge of your love.  And give us the full experience of your love.   

“Now may the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God and the steadfastness of Christ.”