A FRESH EXPERIENCE OF GOD'S LOVE

"God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us." Romans 5:5 ESV

I love to travel. I would much rather experience a place, than read about it. What a great thrill was it for me to go to London, Canterbury, and Oxford England in 2000 and 2008. I had read so many books, seen so many films, and looked at so many photos of England in my life but I had never been there. It is one thing to have read about England, it was another entirely to experience it firsthand.

So it is with the love of God. The bible constantly affirms that God loves you, but. God wants you to go beyond merely knowing about the fact that He loves you. He wants you to move past simply believing and affirming by faith that he loves you. He doesn’t want us to allow ourselves to become spectators to His love. He desires that His love be deeply and intimately embraced. He wants you to taste it! He wants to feel the joy of being loved! He wants you to receive His love personally and powerfully in a way that is life changing. We are called to love God with our minds but also our hearts. We are more than minds aren’t we? True, genuine love, is experienced love. A love that isn’t experienced is not complete. Love is not something just “out there” to admire and observe. It is also something “in here” to feel and enjoy.

This is especially important. The Bible tells us that God Himself actively pursues a love-relationship with you. He wants us to experience and feel His love, and that He has taken all the necessary steps to see that we do. I want to explore with you several texts of Scripture that affirm this truth.

Our first is perhaps the most important one of all. It is found in Romans 5:5. The N.I.V. translates it, “God has poured out his love into our hearts.” The New Living Bible translates it, “For we know how dearly God loves us, because He has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with His love.”

Something we know in the heart that is more than a fact that we infer from argument. You can know some things from argument that you don't experience in your heart. You might argue 1) The Bible says, "For God so loved the world" (John 3:16); 2) I am part of the world; 3) therefore, God loves me. That's one way of knowing you are loved by God.

Or you might go further and say, 1) Christ told his disciples, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13); 2) I am one of his friends because I follow him and keep his commandments (John 15:14); 3) therefore, Christ loves me with the greatest love.

Or in Romans 5:6-10 we can speak of the factual proof and demonstration of God’s love demonstrated by the cross.

These are ways of knowing you are loved by the use of argument. And that is important. We need to see these things and use them as part of our arsenal in our fight of faith. But that is not what Romans 5:5 is talking about. Romans 5:5 says that there is an experience of God's love for us that is not mainly a logical inference. It is something poured out. It is something felt in the heart. Known in the way the heart knows.

God takes great initiative in His relationship with us. He desires a relationship that is real, intimate, and personal. He desires us to “know Him” personally and intimately, not just “know about Him”. (Jeremiah 17:9;John 17:3; Philippians. 3:10) Paul tells us that God "poured out" His love "Into our hearts." The verb poured out is used elsewhere of the spilling of wine (Luke 5:37), the shedding of Christ's blood (Matthew 26:28), and of the pouring out of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost (Acts 10:45). More graphic still is its use in Acts 1:18 of the fate of Judas: "With the reward he got for his wickedness, Judas bought a field; there he fell headlong, his body burst open and all his intestines spilled out" (emphasis added).

Paul is emphasizing the unstinting lavishness with which God has flooded our hearts with a sense of His love for us. Like an overflowing stream in a thirsty land, so is the rich flood of divine love poured out and shed abroad in the heart.

This is an exuberant communication of God's love. The love of God, writes Charles Hodge, "does not descend upon us as dew drops, but as a stream which spreads itself abroad through the whole soul, filling it with the consciousness of His presence and favor."' The Holy Spirit works to evoke and stimulate in your heart the overwhelming conviction that God loves you. The amplitude and immensity of God's devotion is not abstract and generic, but concrete and personal;not for everyone in general but for you in particular.

This experience varies from time to time and person to person and can be (and should be) pursued in ever-fuller measures. Now, why do I say this? Because the tenses of the verbs are different in verse 5 between the outpouring of God's love and the giving of the Holy Spirit. Notice: "The love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us." The difference here is that the first tense "has been poured out"  (perfect indicative) implies in the original Greek that there was a past act for all believers but there is also and ongoing effect or an ongoing act as well right at this moment!. But the tense of "was given to us"(aorist participle) implies a completed and once for all action. In other words, “the love of God that was poured into your hearts by the Holy Spirit in the past is being presently poured into your hearts as well.

The thought is that knowledge of the love of God, having flooded our hearts, jilts them now, just as a valley once flooded remains full of water and enjoys its present refreshment. Paul assumes that all his readers, like himself, will be living in the enjoyment of a strong and abiding sense of God's love for them. In other words, God's love doesn't leak! Unlike the waters of Noah that receded after a time, God's love remains perpetually at flood stage in our souls!

Do we always feel it now? We were given the Holy Spirit in the past, but the outpouring seems to have ongoing and varied expressions in the present.

How are we to seek the fullness of this experience? There are several verses in the New testament that help us..

I.  2 Thessalonians 3:5

"May the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the steadfastness of Christ."

Here we have Paul praying that God would do something now for the Thessalonians. What does he want God to do now? He wants God to "direct their hearts." This is a remarkable phrase! The heart has directions. It moves toward one thing or another. It moves toward what it regards as attractive and satisfying and valuable.

"The soul is measured by its heights, some high and others low; but the heart is measured by its delights and its pleasures never lie."

Paul is praying that God would give the heart a sight of the love of God as more attractive and satisfying and valuable than ordinary earthly things. "May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God." What would this be other than an experience of God's love? And it must be that, even though we are Christians, this movement from where we are into the love of God is needed. Otherwise Paul would not pray it. Therefore, the experience of the love of God is different from time to time and from person to person. Here we are as Christians. We have all tasted of God's love for us and have been drawn into trusting all that God is for us in Christ. But our hearts are not always steadfast. They drift and they waver. As the Puritans used to say, "There is much insensibility to divine things among Christians." This is why we need revival. And this is what revival is. Revival is not first the conversion of the lost. Revival is first the answer to Paul's prayer in 2 Thessalonians 3:5, "May the Lord direct your hearts into the love of God." When the Lord takes hold of the hearts of his people and directs them into the love of God, they experience the outpouring of the love of God through the Holy Spirit. When that happens to lots of people in the same place at the same time, we call it revival.

II. 2 Corinthians 13:14

"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all"

Paul is closing his epistle to the Corinthians. He ends with a benediction. Here he calls on God, in the presence of the people, to make his love manifestly present and real to them. "The love of God be with you!". Make it manifestly present to you!

What do I mean by "manifestly" present? For Christians, isn't the love of God always present with us? Romans 8:35 and 39 tell us that nothing can separate us from the love of God. So if nothing can separate us from the love of God, why does Paul pray, "The love of God be with you"? The reason is because, even though the love of God is always present with believers, we do not always experience the love of God as present. Many of us at times feel the opposite, that we are not loved by God. Therefore, we want God to make his love more manifestly known. More obviously. More experientially. We sing that song, “More love, more power, more of you in my life.” This is why. Paul is calling for in 2 Corinthians 13:14 the love of God to be poured out more fully and more consciously in our hearts.

III. Jude 21

"keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life."

Jude exhorts, do what you must, to avail yourself of the unparalleled joy of receiving the love of God. That this experience is ultimately a work of God the Father, through the Holy Spirit, is confirmed by Paul's prayer in 2 Thessalonians 3:5

In the final analysis, if we are to "feel" loved of the Father it is the Father Himself who must (and will) act to remove every obstacle and clear away every encumbrance to that inexpressible experience. I can’t do it. Hearing teaching on the Father's love can’t alone do it. Reading these scriptures can't do it. God must do it.

The obstacles to this are very real indeed for us all. that is why Paul prays and we can pray that God would Himself act to obliterate such obstacles to the enjoyment of being loved and manifest, pour out, direct, our hearts into an ongoing full, deep, personal, and intimate experience into His love.

Surely, then, we must begin to pray for ourselves and for one another even as Paul prayed for the Thessalonians. Experiencing the love of God, not just thinking about it, is something we should desire with all our hearts.

IV. Ephesians 3:14-19.

For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name, 16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, 17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, 18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

No passage in the Bible can fill you with longings in prayer for an experience of God's love like this one. Consider what Paul is asking for as we read the prayer backward. In verse 19, he is asking that we be filled with all the fullness of God. That is an experience. We don't always have that. We want it. We pursue it. How does it come? In comes through an experiential knowing of the incomprehensible love of Christ - "to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge." And how does that experiential knowing of the love of Christ come? In verse 17, Paul asks that they be "rooted and grounded in love" so that they "may be able to comprehend" this incomprehensible love. Well, how does that rooting and grounding in love happen? Paul prays for it to happen (in verses 16-17) by the strengthening of the Spirit in the inner man so that Christ dwells (manifestly) in the heart by faith.

So here we are at the work of the Holy Spirit again. And is not all this astonishing experience in Ephesians 3:14-19 simply an unfolding of the simple sentence in Romans 5:5 that the love of God be poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who is given to us?

Oh dear reader, I pray that you and I would seek a deeper experience of the love of God. First, that you would be reflective and thoughtful on these verses I have shared and with the truth of Christ's love and and the demonstration of his love for us when he came and lived and died and rose. Second, pray for it. Really pray for it! Pray these four verses daily! Third, that you would receive it right now in Jesus Name.
Praying to see, experience, savor, and show the love of God in my life,

Pastor Bill