Increasing Knowledge of God's Love

Does God really love us? He showed His love on the cross, but does He still love us? If so, why do we still experience pain and suffering? How can that be good?

Show Notes:

If the only characteristics that were true about God were the elements of His power, as well as His justice and holiness, there would be no hope for humankind. In fact, we never would have lasted this long. Without God's love for us, He would have wiped humanity from the face of the Earth, maybe to make room for a race less obstinate and fickle. Fortunately for us, though, God is not only the most powerful being in the world—star-breather, life-former, thought-knower—He also cares for us. While He seeks His own glory in all things, He equally seeks our good.

These two goals are not at odds with each other. God receives glory from us when we enjoy Him, so when He seeks our ultimate good, He is also seeking His own glory. And when we seek God, which is our highest good, we are fulfilled and happy. If you are interested in learning more about this particular topic, I would highly recommend John Piper's Desiring God. As he puts it, "God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him." Each outcome leads to the other.

I have found that many Christians either believe the things I said about God in the last episode but they do not really believe that God loves them, or they believe God is loving but forget how big and powerful He is. This is the cause of a lot of fear. If you know God is loving but don't really believe He's powerful enough to take care of you, anything could happen. If you believe God is powerful but don't really believe He loves you enough to always make decisions based on your best interests, then He might take care of you when it's convenient but choose to do something that puts you at risk when it suits Him.

Today we're going to look at the trait of God's love and how it is manifested toward us. Before we go any further, we need to define love. The world would tell us that it is an unpredictable feeling, one that may or may not last very long. Once it's gone, it doesn't often come back. Just about any popular romance movie will exemplify this definition. Even we in the church fall prey to this description, and I believe it has distorted our view of God and His love.

In 1 John 3:16-18, the apostle John tells us what love looks like as believers. "This is how we have come to know love: He laid down His life for us. We should also lay down our lives for our brother. If anyone has this world's goods and sees his brother in need but closes his eyes to his need – how can God's love reside in him? Little children, we must not love in word or speech, but with truth and action."

Many people read just the first of these verses and conclude that love means being willing to die for another person, but there is so much more to it than that. John says that we know what love is because Jesus "laid down His life for us," and we should "lay down our lives" for our fellow Christians. In the next verse, he gives us an example of what that looks like—giving away what you have for the sake of others. Jesus laying down His life didn't just include His death; it was a life-long process of taking care of those around Him and generally being about His Father's will. It is the same for us. The main component of love is sacrifice and self-forgetfulness. As C.S. Lewis says in Mere Christianity, "If we were to meet a truly humble person, we would never come away from meeting them thinking they were humble. They would not be always telling us they were a nobody (because a person who keeps saying they are a nobody is actually a self-obsessed person). The thing we would remember from meeting a truly gospel-humble person is how much they seemed to be totally interested in us. Because the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less." (Mere Christianity, 1952)

And so, we aim to think of ourselves less. But to what end? John answers that question in the next verse. We are to fill the needs of our fellow believers. If we summarize, according to John, love is spending our lives sacrificially filling other people's needs.

Though he goes about it differently, Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:

"Love is patient, love is kind

Love does not envy,

Is not boastful, is not conceited,

Does not act improperly,

Is not selfish, is not provoked,

Does not keep a record of wrongs.

Love finds no joy in unrighteousness

But rejoices in the truth.

It bears all things, believes all things,

Hopes all things, endures all things."

True love, according to the Bible, is not a feeling or in any way related to sexual desire or fulfillment. It is seeing other people's needs and taking care of them, all while forgetting that you exist. That's not to say that we don't practice good self-care. But the point of healthy self-care is that we will make the most of ourselves and our time for the sake of others. It is not selfish. It's like studying for a test and realizing that you are so tired that you're not going to be productive any longer, so you set your alarm for a couple hours earlier than normal in the morning so you can finish studying then, and you get some sleep now. We should rest, eat well, exercise, and not over-work ourselves so that we can be more effective in serving and loving other people.

Having defined love, we are now equipped to look at God's love. If love is sacrificially filling others' needs, what is it that we need? According to Ephesians 2:1-10, we are dead and in need of life. Through the sacrifice Jesus made by His life and death, God has given us that and more. He has seated us in Heaven with Jesus, given us good works to do for His glory, and promised to show us kindness for the rest of eternity.

If you've grown up in the church, you probably don't have a problem believing that God loved you through the cross. You've heard it all your life. The issue is now. Does He love you today, yesterday, and tomorrow, or did He just show His love once through the cross so He could save you but then use and abuse you at His whim?

In the book of Romans, Paul spends the first seven chapters explaining how no one measures up to God's standard of righteousness but how God, in His love, provided a way for us to receive the righteousness of Christ through His death on the cross—in essence, the gospel. Now Paul has moved on to sanctification. He's about to answer the question I just posed. Does God still love us? The whole of chapter eight is a glorious exposition of God's continued love for the believer, but I'll just hit the highlights:

"Therefore, no condemnation now exists for those in Christ Jesus, because the Spirit's law of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death…. Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. You, however, are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God lives in you…. All those led by God's Spirit are God's sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father!' The Spirit Himself testifies together with our spirit that we are God's children, and if children, also heirs—heirs of God and coheirs with Christ—seeing that we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him….

"We know that all things work together for the good of those who love God: those who are called according to His purpose. For those He foreknew He also predestined… and those He predestined, He also called; and those He called, He also justified; and those He justified, He also glorified.

"What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him grant us everything?...

"…Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can affliction or anguish or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: Because of You we are being put to death all day long; we are counted as sheep to be slaughtered. No, in all these things we are more than victorious through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that not even death or life, angels or rulers, things present or things to come, hostile powers, height or depth, or any other created thing will have the power to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord!" (Romans 8:1-2, 8-9a, 14-17, 28-29a, 30-32, 35-39, emphasis mine)

What beautiful, live-giving truths. One of Paul's greatest arguments here is in verse 32, which says, "He did not even spare His own Son but offered Him up for us all; how will He not also with Him grant us everything?" Paul must have known that there would be this temptation to slip away from believing that God loves us in the here and now. He argues that God did the big thing; He laid aside His glory and came as a human being, then He died in the place of sinners. This is incomprehensible. If God went to that extreme to save sinners out of love (John 3:16), how could he possibly stop loving us?

Even still, we forget. When we don't remember how great God's love is for us, our trust in Him begins to slip. Without trust, fears creep into our lives. Why do we forget so easily? What can we do to remember?

I have found that the fastest way to forget how much God loves me is to take my righteousness into my own hands. I have a tendency that I think many believers share, and that is to look at the cross and say, "Yes, I'm in! God has brought me into His family and secured my eternal destiny. Now I have to make sure I stay here." Then I try to do well and keep God happy with me, all the while feeling both guilty about how I'm failing and superior to those who are messing up more visibly than I am.

This is called self-righteousness, and it belittles the work of Christ. It says, "Yes, God, Your work was good, but it wasn't good enough. Let me help." But we are incapable of helping, and we have nothing good to offer God except what He's already given us and enabled us to do.

When Jesus died on the cross, two very important things happened. First, He took upon Himself all of the sin of every person who would ever be saved. All the ugly, stinky, abhorrent nastiness of my sin and yours was placed in the body of the Son of God (1 Peter 2:24). Second, God the Father exerted all the force of His wrath for all of that sin on Jesus. When we become believers, we receive the righteousness of Jesus in place of the sin He paid for (Phil. 3:9, 2 Cor. 5:21). This is called justification.

What does this mean? It means that as believers, there is no wrath left for us (Rom. 5:9-10). There is nothing we can do to make God punish us or even be disappointed in us. He knows everything that we have done and will do, and He paid for it all. We have been brought near to God (Eph. 2:13) and are called children and heirs of God (Rom. 8:17-19). In John 15:9, Jesus tells His disciples that just as much as the Father loves Him (that would be infinite and incomprehensible love), so Jesus loved them, loves us. This is what justification means for us.

There's something some of you are probably thinking that flies in the face of this, right? To one degree or another, we have all experienced loss, pain, and disappointment. A lot of bible teachers dismiss this by saying, "Well, those are the result of sin in the world, and they're not God's fault. God wants good things for you." But that doesn't actually solve the problem, because it makes God out to be this kind person who wants good for you but doesn't have the power to give it to you. He's not really sovereign and in control of everything. If He's not in control, then we still have reason to be afraid. And as we looked at last week, God really does have the power. So why does He allow us to hurt?

In Genesis 50:20, Joseph is talking to his brothers in Egypt. He is the second most powerful man in the world, and his brothers sold him into slavery when he was younger. Now he has the power to get back at them if he wants, and they are terrified. Instead, Joseph takes the long view. He sees God's hand in the situation and tell his brothers this, "As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today."

Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." This word "good" means the same thing as it does coming from Joseph's lips. Did Joseph suffer? Did he experience loss and pain? Of course. So how can he say it was good? How can Paul in Romans say that everything works together for good when he experienced terrible things over the course of his ministry?

The reason we have a hard time reconciling this is because we have a skewed perspective of good. God created us to know Him and to be fulfilled in our relationship with Him. When sin entered the world, that relationship was lost, and all of human history pointed to and waited expectantly for the time when it would be possible to restore that relationship. When Christ died on the cross, it became possible again for human beings across the globe, from all walks of life, of all ages to have a fulfilling, joyful relationship with their Creator again. That's what we were made for.

But because of sin, we think that avoiding pain, loss, and suffering is our best good. That's how we structure our lives, to experience the least physical and emotional discomfort as possible. But if you look around you at the people who have the most means for keeping themselves from experiencing pain and loss, are they happy? They're not. For one, they're never satisfied; they always want more comfort, more ease. For two, they're terrified that something is going to happen and bring it all crashing down.

On the other hand, when those who really know God experience hard things, how do they react? What does it do to them? It brings them closer to Him. Our natural, sinful tendency is to put our trust in things that are not God. We trust school, government, our car's safety features, locks on our doors at home, etc., etc. to keep us safe, and we trust friends, family, work, hobbies, etc. to give us joy and fulfillment. God loves us enough to send hard things our way to strip us of those trusts, because He knows that our ultimate source of security and fulfillment comes from Him.

God doesn't promise us an easy life, in fact, He promises us a hard one. But He also promises that He will be with us, has a plan for us, and will turn anything we may think is bad in the moment to good in the end. As you go through your day today, think about how God has used things you did not enjoy, things you might have labeled as 'bad' when they happened for your good in the end. Remember that He will always do that and fear not.

Thanks for joining me on the podcast today. Next week we're going to wrap up the series on fear with a few more practical steps, examples, and stories. I hope you'll join me then.