Monday Meditation: FEEL THE LOVE

On this last day of February, the month of love, I felt it was the perfect time to take a leap (yes, pun intended) and talk about feeling loved. Many of the sermons, messages and events this month were focused on valuing relationships and love. 

But honestly, how do any of us know how to love, if we don’t first feel loved? 

How can you give something you may not have ever really felt? 

And in today’s world, there are so many of us who have not experienced healthy and unconditional love. So to define it, lets’ go back to the source where love first began, with God.

John 3:16 is such a familiar verse, but have you really dissected what these words mean?

For God loved the world in this way… not just that God so loved. God showed His love for the world by giving His most prized possession, His Son. Who loves like that? I don’t know of anyone who has ever experienced that kind of love from anyone. That's a love so deep and priceless, there's nothing that can compare.

I have an amazing husband who consistently lets me know how much he loves me. I also have five beautiful kids that I love to the core of my being and they let me know how much they love me. But I couldn’t ever have felt their love nor given my love the way I do before feeling how much God loves me. When each child was born, I was amazed at how my capacity to love expanded uniquely for each one. But that was due to the day I realized the depths of His love. It took my breath away and floored me.  I couldn’t believe that I was worth that much to Him, yet was unworthy at the same time. But that’s what God made clear as the truth when He made Jesus’ death the price for me and for you.

Real love is reassuring.

God’s love consistently assures me that I have value and worth.

REal love is endless.

                I don’t ever have to worry about this type of love ending…. It’s eternal as He is eternal.

ReAl love is affirming.

                Just that truth with in itself gives the guarantee that I am somebody and somebody loves me. This is the Good News personified through Jesus’ life, death and love for me.

ReaL love is liberating.

God’s love offers a freedom to have self-worth versus insecurities which can cause us to doubt ourselves and if we will ever find real love.

We can feel the love because we didn’t have to initiate it. God did. He loved us first. And if He is the only One Who ever loves us, that is really more than enough.

Feel that kind of love. Accept that kind of love. Use that kind of love to help you love others… even those who don’t love you back.  Love in this way.  Yes, it is very self-sacrificing, yet simultaneously self-valuing. 

Check out a deeper explanation of God’s love in 1 John 4:7-12,

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

How do we feel the love... real love? 

Believe that God loved you while you were unlovable. Cherish that knowledge and know if He loved us, we can be loved and love as well.