This past week some of my colleagues and I were talking about God’s love.  How do we experience it?  How does it affect our daily living?  How can we help others experience it?

What we discovered was that intellectually understanding God is love is one thing, but embracing his intimate love for us particularly is another thing entirely.  Most people don’t live with God’s intimate embrace of love for us.  Instead, we settle for the intellectual knowledge that God loves us.  However, settling for the knowledge of God’s love for us without experiencing it is like owning a Ferrari without the keys.  It looks fast in your garage, but you will never experience the thrill of driving it. That’s when it hit me…  

The problem of embracing God's love for us is our personal experience of evil. Share on X

The context of God’s love always comes to people who have been beat up.  None of us awakened to God’s love in the context of only love.  We have experienced what our spiritual father and mother experienced in the garden when they took the forbidden fruit and ate it.  We experience the knowledge of evil.  Unfortunately, our suffering from this experience of evil is not equal.  Some have more, and others have less.  Yet, the reality is that we all have some experience of evil as the backdrop to the message: God is love.

So how can spiritual leaders (both lay and clergy) take the theological understanding of God’s love and apply it to our living and leading?  How do we reveal a God who is love to a world that either rejects that premise or pays lip service to it given the evil that they have experienced in life?  Given the context of our experience of evil, this is going to take some work on our end.

There are three things that help me understand God’s love in the context of the evil I have faced.  Here’s the first:

1. God Pursues: God is singularly focused on me entering a relationship with him for my benefit.  Over and over again, he reveals himself as the Grand Pursuer of those who are lost.  He stops at nothing to invite me into a relationship with him, forgiving my failures and cleaning up my self-inflicted wounds.  Every book in the Bible reveals his never ending, unstoppable love for us.  God simply does not give up, and his purpose is not to get something out of me, but to put something into me – his love.  

As leaders, we can help those blinded to God’s love for them because of their personal experience of evil by revealing God’s pursuit in the stories of the Bible.  It isn’t enough just to give people principles to live by.  We desperately need to go beyond the goal of understanding God in our teaching and move toward experiencing God through our teaching.  We can begin to awaken people to experience God’s love for them by showing people how God passionately pursues them.

When I see the relentless pursuit of God toward me in the Bible, I become open to the possibility of receiving his love for me.  When I see all the ways the barriers he has crossed, all the hurdles he has jumped, all the obstacles he has removed, I begin to soften to the reality that God does indeed love me.  God doesn’t pursue us with a “take it or leave it mentality.”  He isn’t so easily bruised by my sheepish nature or my wicked behavior.  He is a passionate lover with only one thing on his mind…to draw me close.  When we reveal God’s passionate pursuit of us in our teaching, the warmth of his love begins to melt the cold ice that has incased our souls.

So how are you helping people experience God’s love in the context of their experience of evil?

I would love to hear how you are helping people experience God’s love.  Next week, I will share the second thing that helps me experience God’s love.