People have many ideas about what love is: being kind to someone, a romantic feeling, a physical relationship, or even having a legal marriage certificate. But all these understandings fall far short of truly satisfying us. They also have little power to change us and to help us grow and mature. The reality is that love, whether from man or God, is not something we can easily define without a subjective experience. That is because love is a Person — it is the Lord depositing Himself, His very life with all His attributes, into us (Rom. 5:5). And our loving Him is a matter of believing, or receiving Him. Our experience of receiving this living Person determines how deep our understanding of love is today.
For us to receive His love, we first have to recognize the Lord coming as love to us. When the Lord first appeared to us, it had nothing to do with what we had accomplished, nor was it through our own seeking or self-effort (5:8). When we saw Him, we were attracted by Him, and then a reaction occurred: we spontaneously received Him into us as our person, content, and being. But that spontaneous reaction requires our vessels to be emptied and opened so that we can have room to receive His love. As believers, our receiving Him began the moment we were at our end, when we realized we were nothing. In that moment, the world had lost its attraction; nothing but the Lord mattered anymore. The Lord’s appearing to us in this way, and our subsequent free fall, is our encounter with Him as love to us. Here, there is no struggle, no calculation. Receiving God into us requires that we lose ourselves in who He is. This profound commitment, this deep engagement, is what we mean when we say, “Lord, I’m loved by You.”
(Above are notes of fellowship taken from gatherings on 6/30/2024 and 7/3/2024, not reviewed by the speaker.)