I have a beautiful cat with
thick gray hair which reminds me of a lot of people I meet. It has a
difficult time receiving love. Often when I reach down to scratch its
head, it runs away. Occasionally, it will approach me, meowing to let me
know it wants love. But it can only receive my love for about one
minute.
God made us to be
loved. It is a basic need of the human heart. How do we know
this? Because God created us to need Him and God is love according to 1
John 4:8. Yet, many Christ followers struggle to receive His love as well
as people's love.
I was one of
them. While I believed and preached that God loves us, I had minimal
experience of it. The problem was not on God's side. It was on my
side. This spilled over into my relationship with my wife and others, in
that I had difficulty receiving their love.
Our Father's love
is like a water faucet. The moment we become one of His children through
faith in Christ, that faucet turns on cascading on us forever. We are
like a cup under it. If we are turned right side up, we are filled with
His love for us. If we are turned upside down, we cannot be filled with
His love for us.
What causes us to
be turned upside down has to do with our stinking thinking. We are all
programmed by the Knowledge of Good and Evil when we are born which we
inherited from Adam. Though unaware of this, it causes us to believe that
we have to make ourselves loveable. We gauge whether we are loveable by
how well we perform, what other's think of us, how we look and what we have.
Parents pay a
critical role in this as well. If we grow up in a family where grace is
in place, we will experience a lot of unconditional love. If we don't, we
will experience a lot of rejection. Either way, unless we understand the
Gospel of grace, we will be hindered from receiving love.
To be able to
receive love, we need a revelation of Christ in us. There is a great
prayer in Ephesians 3:14-19 that I encourage you to pray often for yourself and
those you care about, even as I do. The prayer is basically asking our
Father to deepen the revelation of Christ in us to us.
"When I think
of the wisdom and scope of his plan, I fall down on my knees and pray to the
Father of all the great family of God-some of them already in heaven and some
down here on earth- 16 that out of his glorious, unlimited resources he will
give you the mighty inner strengthening of his Holy Spirit. 17 And I pray that
Christ will be more and more at home in your hearts, living within you as you
trust in him. May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous
love; 18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children
should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to
experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never
see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled
up with God himself." Living Bible
For me and many
others I have taught and counseled through the years, receiving the revelation
of Christ in us as our Life, we experienced His love for us which opened us up
to be able to receive the love of others. I encourage you to make a
copy of this prayer and pray it often.
Live free in Christ,
www.GraceLifeInternational.com All Content Copyright © 2014 Mark Maulding
