Like this:

I. Introduction A. Clarity and Opaqueness in the Bible The Bible is very clear on a couple of things, and God awfully gray and complicated on everything else. I had a wonderful young lady, a young lady so terribly broken inside, who has had abuse pilled upon abuse, pilled upon abuse and who is in such need God’s healing inside, ask me: “Carter why is God’s healing me have to be so complicated.” I told her that it wasn’t that God is or his healing is complicated, it’s actually quite simple. Really, it’s humanity that is complicated; it is her brokenness that is complicated. This is why the Bible seems to be so very complicated sometimes. It can perfect sense to me in one moment, and the next I can feel totally out of control and like I’ve never understood a thing. This is one of the great fights that Christians have on their hands –to allow God to make simple a very complicated situation. B. God’s love for you is Clear However, one of the things that the Bible is supremely clear on is that God loves you. This is a nonnegotiable truth for the Christian. It is the foundation on which everything else is built. If your belief that God loves you is faulty in the least, then your relationship with Him will be faulty. To degree that you understand and transformationally believe that God loves you, to that very same degree will your relationship with Him be able to deepen. The Bible is very clear on this topic. Everything that God does, every action he takes, every word He utters, every will that His has, and every thing He created has been done, said, thought, and formed out of love and nothing else. The sole motivating factor in God’s life in His mind is to love humanity back to Him. Everything hinges, every understanding of Christ banks on this truth alone. If God does not love you, then Christianity dies. Many denominations and sects within Christianity fail at this. They think God is angry, they think He is mad and vengeful and brings evils upon us. The oddity of this all is that those beliefs are closer to Islam than they are Christianity. Muslims believe that Satan, that evil are simply the long arm of the Justice of God. They believe that Satan is one of God’s minions that he has around to do his dirty work. They fail to recognize that God is above all other things, a lover. - The word “Love,” in its various forms occurs over 500 times in the entire Bible. - God says that husbands should love their wives as He loves us. - Christ says, that there is no greater love than to lay one’s life down for one’s friends. He then goes on to display that love by dieing for us. - Paul asks the question, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” And he responds, answering his own question, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” - The Bible says that the fact that Christ died for us while we were still sinners proves that He loves us. - Paul uses the word “beloved” in nearly every letter he writes to the different Christians across the European and Asian continents. The Bible is clear on the fact that God loved the world so dang much that He died for it, so that it may live. C. If God loves me, then why do I feel unloved? So I have just one question: If this is all true, if all the magnificence and glory of God’s love is true, if it is true that His love for us is so unimaginably unconditional, if He loves us despite the fact that we are sinners and responsible for the death of His son, if He created all this for us, and if He chooses to save us from ourselves and to lead us into eternal perfection, joy, happiness, and love with Him, if we are truly never ever alone, if we are truly never ever separate from His love, if what Paul says is true that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor kings, nor whatever is happening our world now, nor whatever is going to happen in our world, nor the power of Satan, nor the heights of joy or the depths of depression can separate from the Love of God, if it is true that NOTHING in ALL OF CREATION could ever part us from God’s love….then why do I still, so many times, perhaps even daily, feel so unloved by God? Why, in so many ways, do I feel devoid of any sort of notion or feeling other than head knowledge, that God loves me? If I cannot be separated from it, then why do I feel so separated from it right now? I have asked myself this question repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, months, and years. It is a question that hits at the very heart of the brokenness of humanity. In fact, it is in this area that sin was originally allowed into our world and our existence. When Satan entered into the Garden of Eden and tempted Adam and Eve, he did so by tempting them to doubt God’s love for them. Many people believe that it is pride that is at the foundation of all sin; but I’ve come to disagree with that. The crack in humanity that Sin has crept into was created by the impact of suddenly ceasing to believe that God loved us unconditionally. Love or the belief in a lack there of, is the key to everything in my mind. So today what I want to do is look at the Logic of God’s Love and to address why we may feel so unloved when the Bible clearly says that we are so very loved. II. John 4:7-11, 19 A. turning to the Bible To answer the question of why or how we could feel so incredibly unloved when we have such a clear declaration of God’s love for us by Him through His word, I want to turn to the book of 1 John. I turn to this book because of all the book in the New Testament, this book spends more time discussing God’s love than any of the others; and it is second in the entire Bible only to the Psalms in the number times love is mentioned. John Wesley said of this book, “How plain, how full, and how deep a [collection] of genuine Christianity.” This book reveals to us, in a very deep way, the flow of God’s love in our lives and in our world; and it is this that we turn to understand our dilemma. Now the section that I want to look at in the book is 1 John 4:7-11, and then also verse 19. This is a section that has historically been referred to as, “The Logic of the Love of God” precisely because it reveals to us the course of his love in our world, and how it is acquired, transferred, and received. What I want to do is try to hash out the author’s very complex logic so we can see how this love manifests itself, where it comes from, how to receive, and how it could be that we don’t feel loved sometimes. B. 1 John 4:11-7, 19 1. The author of 1 John begins this section by exhorting those to whom he is writing to love one another. He encourages his audience to love each and the reasoning behind, according to Him, is because love is from God. This seems kind of innocuous at first, a general statement with very little meaning to it; but there is more taking place under the surface of the words than meets the eye. I’ve told ya’ll many times that the original languages of Greek and Hebrew don’t translate well into English, the reality is that very few languages translate well into English. This is another example where full meaning is sort glossed over. What the author does here is he uses a grammatical construction that carries with it heavy implications. Greek doesn’t have the word “of” in it. It uses different ways to imply the word “of” or “from.” In this instance what the author does is use a construction that is called the “genitive of origin.” It is a construction used to imply where something finds its origin or source. The author uses this to tell us, though in subtle way, that the source of all love, the originating place of love in our world is found in God. He essentially says that love is birthed by God. 2. The reason, therefore, that loving one another is important is because it comes from God. The author supports this statement by reiterating it in a different way in verse 8. He states that those who do not love do not know God, for God is love. Literally what the author says is that those who do not love do not understand or comprehend God. 3. This is vitally important to our question we wish to have answered, “why don’t I feel loved by God when he says he loves me?” What the author is saying here is that Love, as we have already stated, originates in God and God births in humanity. In other words, humanity does not have the ability to muster, create, or generate love in any way. Those who have the capacity to love are given it by God because love, yet again, comes only from God. Now, if the ability to love comes from God, the when someone does not love, it means that they are, for some reason, not receiving that ability from God for whatever reason 4. This very point is restated two more times when the author says in verse 10, “not that we loved, but that he loved us,” and then in verse 19, “We loved because He first loved us.” The author of 1 John, who is identified simply as “The Elder,” is pounding home this truth: love flows from God, to us, and then from us to another person. Those who understand and comprehend God receive His love and then it flows from them to another person, to a group of people, or back to God. 5. The Love of God is like a river that originates on a mountain, for this passage is very clear that God’s love for us was revealed on a mountain, the mountain that Christ murdered on. The love of God pours down from that mountain, from that source, and it begins to fill the valleys and the different holes in our hearts. When we are filled with this love, it pours out onto others and then they pour it out onto others, and eventually the whole world is led to God by the love of God which was revealed on the cross, on a mountain. We become inundated with his love, saturated, and soaked to the point that it begins to spill out like a cup too full, and it soaks all that it is around. C. Now back to our Question Now back to our question. “Why and how can it be that as you sit there in this service, or as you lay down to sleep at night, or as you work that you could in a moment feel so unloved by the Father, by God?” The only viable answer is that something must be reducing God’s flow of love to you to a mere trickle or drip. We tend to think that people who are unloving or are feeling unloved are evil or truly unlovable; but is it possible that something is mentally, spiritually, or emotionally hindering their ability to receive God’s love? We know that it cannot be that God is holding back His love for us. He poured it out in mass with Christ’s death. Is it possible, however, that you resist His love somehow? There are many ways to resist God’s love; but one of the most profound is to think, somewhere down inside, that we are unlovable or disqualified from His love. Many times it is something as simple as, “I don’t feel like I’m pretty enough to love, or smart enough, or successful enough to love.” Sometimes we grow up in cultures or households that have perfectionism as their driving ambition. We learn to worship and love and understand that perfection is all that is lovable; but God clearly loves humanity, and we’re certainly not perfect. However, sometimes it is a deeper wound or a deeper problem that makes us feel unloved. I talked to a woman a while back who was raped multiple times a day her boyfriend and who had been divorced several times. The flow of the love of God to her was broken not because she had done anything wrong, but because she was so ashamed and felt so unlovable because what had been done to her. Then, sometimes, most of the time, we feel unlovable because of we have done. Perhaps you’ve sinned over and over and over and over again, crying and apologizing for the same sins day in and day out. You’ve decided that since you can’t stop the sin, you are unworthy to be loved. You’ve decided that since you can’t stop drinking, or doing drugs, or looking at porn, or committing adultery, or being lazy, or being angry all the time, that you are just not lovable. However the truth is that all of these things, all of these barriers come from one common mistake that humanity is awfully guilty of and has been through out history. We have the tendency of taking our problems and our brokenness and superimposing them onto God. David Benner, distinguished professor of Psychology and Spirituality and the Psychological Studies Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, writes, “We all tend to fashion a god who fits our falsity.” We think God has the same limitations that we have in the areas of grace, mercy, forgiveness…and particularly in the area of love We cannot imagine a God who could truly recognize murder, adultery, premarital sex, homosexuality, porn addictions, sex addictions, drug addictions, alcoholism, racism, vulgar speech, abortion, war, hate, genocide while still loving those guilty these acts. Why? Because we, ourselves, are incapable of loving people with these problems and who commit these acts. We assume God is like us; but He’s not. Your assumptions about how unlovable you are because you think you are unlovable are wrong to try push onto God. Stop it. But I must admit that my telling you this will not stop it. The barriers in your life to God’s love are something that you must explore. They are things, mindsets, tendencies, beliefs, opinions, and realities that God alone can challenge. This is something that must be done in the secret place, in the quiet air of prayer and contemplation. You must face your demons, your beliefs, your attitudes, and your sins; because it is only when you sit down and truly face the reasons you feel so inescapably unlovable, you will find in that in that dark painful place inside of you dwells the God of the Universe and He will say to you, “child, I’ve known this all along, and I’ve loved you still. All that needed to happen was that you needed to know how unlovable you were so that you could know how loved you are.” I must affix this with a warning label though. This process may well cause you more pain initially than feelings of joy and peace. It may stir up dark emotions and painful memories that you have supplanted for so many years. If you have the courage and have nothing more to lose, I challenge you to go there. Amen.

Advertisement