by Jacob Ninan
We all have a need to know we are loved. We also want to feel loved. That is one of the deepest needs of the fallen human heart. When we lack it, our whole being begins to work subconsciously towards finding someone who will love us. Sometimes this urge can be so strong, even though we are usually unaware of what exactly is driving us, that we are tempted to figuratively throw ourselves at someone in order to get that person to show love to us. Obviously, this can lead to wrong relationships that will leave us with heavy weights to carry around for the rest of our life. When people strongly feel a lack of love in their lives, some of them begin to run after pleasure of different forms, hoping that pleasure will fill up this vacuum there is in them. But it is a deceptive hope, because this pursuit of pleasure will not only leave them dissatisfied all along but also push them along, making them believe that yet another experience of pleasure will take them to the ultimate bliss.
This desire for love is heightened for people who have not experienced the normal level of love, affection and attention from their parents in their childhood. This is getting to be more common as parents are becoming more and more preoccupied with the heavy demands of their work and finding less time even for each other. Parents seem to think that they can keep their children distracted and happy with videos and video games. But this backfires on them because the children become dependent on gadgets for sustaining the level of pleasure, and discard other profitable activities such as reading or playing games. Many times they push for more pleasure because they find that they are not getting the same pleasure they had earlier. Some of them get into drinks, drugs or sex. But since they are not getting enough affection from their parents, many of these children do not reach out to them for help but become more secretive and lying.
After God created Adam and Eve and placed them in the Garden, He provided for everything they needed, and they lacked absolutely nothing in terms of their physical, psychological and spiritual needs. They would not have even felt at any time that they lacked something. But when they sinned against God and chose a life that was independent from Him, suddenly they felt the emergence of all kinds of lacks. We read that they immediately felt shame and guilt towards God because of what they had done, and tried to hide themselves from Him. Soon their independence hit them on their face when they turned against each other also. All of us are very familiar with 'needs' because we have been born in that fallen condition as descendents of the first parents (Psa.51:5). We all suffer also from the consequences of sin – our own sins, those of others and the sins of mankind from the time of the Fall.
Now God offers us His plan for our salvation through the Lord Jesus Christ as our Saviour. Everyone would like to be free from the different things that cause them suffering, which have actually come about as a result of sin. But God knows that all problems are the result of sin, and His plan is to save us first of all from sin. That was the reason why He sent Jesus into this world to make a way of salvation for us (Matt.1:21). When we become more and more free from sinning, we can avoid producing more suffering for ourselves. But at the same time, we have to realise that we can fully escape the results of other people's sin only when we are with God in eternity, and till then we have to learn from God how to endure them.
The justice of God demands that we must be punished for our sins, but the love of God wants to restore us to a relationship with Him. When Jesus took the punishment for our sins, that gives us an opportunity to ask God for forgiveness. When we admit our sins and our sinfulness to God and express our desire not to sin against Him again, God gives us forgiveness as a gift by an undeserved favour that He shows us. We must remember that casually saying 'sorry' to God is not enough for Him to forgive us, but there should be a fear to sin against Him again (Psa.130:4). In response to our repentance from sin and faith in Jesus as our Saviour, God also performs a miracle in us by taking away our sinful heart and giving us a heart that hates to sin against Him (Ezek.36:26,27). The Holy Spirit begins to dwell in our heart to strengthen us to deny ourselves and do the will of God whenever we are tempted to please ourselves (Rom.8:13). He teaches, encourages, comforts, corrects, guides and leads us in the way we should walk (Jn.16:13).
When we submit to the Holy Spirit as He prompts us at different times, we begin to experience the relationship with God as our Father, and the security of knowing that He understands us, loves us and is always making plans for our best. This gives us stability in our life and meets the strong need for love that we feel. We no longer feel empty, or as if nobody understands us or no one loves us. This is a very important part of the salvation that Jesus gives us to enjoy. Let us see now how this works out in practical ways in our relationships with people and God.
Experiencing the love of people
God has designed it in such a way that we can love and receive love not only in marriage, but also from other relationships with differing levels of closeness. But none of us is perfect, and one common mistake we make is to unconsciously expect that others should be perfect in their dealings with us! In other words, they should be always loving, patient and merciful to us. We can see this tendency when we are quick to recognise their faults, and even tell them what is wrong with them. It does not occur to us that some of our attitude or behaviour may have hurt them or that some of their behaviour towards us is the result of our provocation! Is it any wonder if we find some people who do not love us? Is our own behaviour towards them encouraging them to love us, or to keep a safe distance from us?We forget that we ourselves are not perfect in our dealings towards the others too. At the same time we want other people to be merciful to our mistakes! Recognising this fact in the depth of our mind can help us move towards the goal of building a loving relationship with others around us. If we have not come to realise this already, it will be definitely worth it to take enough time to think about it and become clear about it.
One of the main things that hinder us from getting close to anyone is that we have a tendency to keep a list in our mind of all the things others have done against us. Then the devil tempts us now and then to go through in our mind the memories of our painful experiences with other people, like a cow chewing the cud, and actually strengthen our bitterness towards them. Many grown up people have become very bitter towards their parents, siblings, classmates, schoolteachers, etc., and this bitterness is eating their hearts on the inside. Even if they have learnt to pretend to be nice to these people when they meet them, they know the real feelings that are inside them. What can such a state of our heart do except to give out signals of dislike and bitterness during the different contacts we have? Let us not imagine that nobody else will notice these signals. But then do we find ourselves sitting and imagining why nobody likes us or wants to be friends with us? "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice" (Eph.4:31).
Have you thought why it is difficult to forgive others? We cannot try to pretend that they have not really done us any wrong, because we know very well that they have. We may be still hurting from them. We may have suffered great losses because of what they did to us. It is not sufficient just to have a commandment telling us to forgive them. Many of those who have tried their best to forgive others will admit it is almost impossible.
God knows this, and when He tells us to forgive others, He gives us a secret key. "Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you" (Eph.4:32). What helps us to forgive others is to remember how much God Himself has forgiven us, and what He had to do in order to become able to forgive us. If some of us feel that God has not been fair to us, just think what would have happened if He was fair or just towards us. Then He would have had to punish us for all our sins in thoughts, words and deeds, and we would be already at the bottom of hell. That is what we deserve. But then He was fair to us in another way, when He realised we were born in sin and there was no way we could have saved ourselves from our sinful nature. So, realising that if He waited for us to stop sinning and become godly people, it would never happen, He took our punishment on Himself and put away the barrier that would keep us away from Him. Because of His love for us and the desire to save us, He watched in agony as the Son went through abuse, torture and death in our place.
So, our forgiveness was truly a precious and costly gift God gives to us which we do not deserve. It is an undeserved favour God is showing us, which is what we call grace. When we stretch out our hands and receive that gift, we must know that Jesus is purchasing us from the kingdom of Satan by paying the ransom with His blood. We now belong to Jesus. He is now not only our Saviour, but also our Lord and Owner. We do not have any more of whatever rights we thought we had, and we become entirely dependent on what Jesus gives us. As those who live only because of the grace of God, we now have absolutely no right to judge other people!
When we forgive them, we are saying that we are letting them go free from our hold. We don't have any right to punish them or even wish them evil! God will deal with them in His own wisdom. When we understand this, it becomes easier to forgive others. Whatever terrible things they may have done to us, we must realise that those are small in comparison to what we have done to God through our sins.
Forgiving others is a decision we take, considering that it is what God wants us to do, and that we have no other option under our circumstances. Actually, God even goes on to warn us that if we still decide not to forgive someone, He might even take back the forgiveness He has given us (Matt.18:32-35). But even after we decide to let someone go free, our feelings may still trouble us whenever memories of them come up in our mind. Satan will also take great delight in reminding us about them now and them. If we allow those feelings to crowd our mind, our forgiving will not be effective, and our mind may again get filled with bitterness. The way to deal with these feelings is to remind ourselves every time these memories come up that we have already forgiven these people and that we are not going to be like a cow chewing the cud. Soon you will see that your bitter feelings lose their power over you.
Forgiving others, however, does not solve the problem entirely. There may be some people we can avoid most of the time, but sometimes the people who provoke us may be in our own family or in our place of work! Even when we try to keep forgiving them, they keep on irritating us without stop! That is why God tells us one more thing to do. "Bearing with one another, and forgiving each other, whoever has a complaint against anyone; just as the Lord forgave you, so also should you" (Col.3:13). Bearing with others is when we have to continually deal with people who are not changing. They continually provoke us, and many times they do not even seem to be aware that they are doing anything wrong! Praying for them to change is not working. Then what we need to do is to learn to change the way we think about them as a way to face the times when they trouble us.
If we can accept in our mind that they are sadly 'like that', and accept the possibility that they may never change, that will help us to lower our expectations from them, and thus to avoid getting disappointed. We can remind ourselves that these are opportunities to learn to love our enemies (!) and to forgive them because they do not know what they are doing (Lk.23:34).
When we have forgiven others, it will become possible for us to love them. When our heart and mind get cleared of bitterness towards them, our behaviour will show that change. We can be kind to them and do good to them. When we go around spreading love towards others, will that not cause others to show love to us too?
Experiencing the love of God
Many people are not clear about the nature of God's love towards them. In fact, there is a lot of misunderstanding about it. One of the common misstatements about the love of God is that He hates sin, but loves the sinner. If God hates sin, He must hate those who do sin too. In fact, He does, and that is why He has prepared a place of eternal torment for sinners. If sin can be understood as anything that is against God's nature, it should be clear that He cannot love those who choose to sin.But there is a sense in which God loves all people, because He is the One who created all of us. His love for those who sin is in the sense that He wants them to turn from their sins and be reconciled to Him, and so He has prepared a way of salvation for them. In that way, what we mean by love is His ultimately wishing good for everyone. For example, when God punishes or disciplines someone, it is with the desire that they and others who see them will learn to repent. At the same time we must be clear that this kind of love for mankind will not lead God to overlook man's sin. If He overlooked sin, that would be contrary to His sense of justice, because His justice requires that all sin must be punished. Once we understand this, we can see in what sense we can talk about an unconditional love on God's part. It is unconditional only to the extent that all sinners are being offered a way of salvation (Jn.3:16). It is not unconditional in the other sense that His love will continue to be upon people irrespective of how they behave, or that His love for all people will be the same. One part of God's nature is love, but that must go together with all the other aspects of His nature, namely, holiness, righteousness, justice and impartiality.
Even though God wants all men to be saved and to come to the place where they can experience the fullness of His love for them, we must admit that all men do not experience the love of God in the same way. We have seen just now that those who continue to sin can only experience God's love to the extent that He keeps offering them His way for their salvation. They can also experience God's love in the form of His providing for their earthly life without respect of persons (Matt.5:45). But at the same time God is angry with them for the way they are living, continuing in sin.
Those who repent from their sins and accept the salvation God offers them get the privilege to be born again and become children of God. They are now given the privilege to relate to God as their Father and enjoy His fellowship at that level of closeness. But it should be obvious that all children of God do not enjoy the love of God to the same level. Those who take pains to deny themselves in order to do the will of God and become faithful to Him in every small detail, will get to know Him more intimately than all others (Psa.15:1,2).
Just to understand that there is a difference in the level of love and closeness people experience from God, look at the different people around Jesus while He was on earth. There were sinners, including religious leaders, who were opposed to Him and kept away from Him and who therefore enjoyed very little love from Him. Then there were the crowds who followed Him around who enjoyed His presence a lot, who benefited from His deeds, who could see the miracles He did and hear the lessons He taught. But certainly they were not as close to Jesus as His twelve disciples. Going on further, we can see that even among the twelve disciples there were three, Peter, James and John, who enjoyed a special closeness with Jesus.
So, what we need to learn about the love of God from all this is this. How much of God's love we enjoy will depend a lot on us. It is not unconditional. Here is God offering everything to us. He has removed the veil that blocked the Holy of Holies in the Temple, and offers us the privilege to enter in freely with the blood of Jesus Christ. We can talk to Him, listen to Him, and learn what He wants us to do. Using another picture, we are now the tabernacle of God. He dwells in us and are with us wherever we go, guiding and strengthening us, and accomplishing His works through us. Let us open ourselves to Him without restrictions and let us surrender ourselves to His leading. Then there will not be any limit to how much of His love we can enjoy (Jn.14:21,23).