Experiencing God's Love

God’s Love in Revealing Himself

This post continues a series on The Love of the Father. Below are the first two posts.
Reasons We Struggle to Experience God’s Love
Seven Features of God’s Fatherly Love

One of my favorite things to do with my four-year-old daughter is enjoy a dessert together—or get a treat, as she calls it. Whether it’s ice-cream, a good cookie, or a donut, we bond as we talk, laugh, and savor the sweets. She’s recently been asking me to tell her stories about myself. It’s partly because she just likes to hear stories, and it’s partly because she gets to know me by the things I share. Whether it’s through these stories, in everyday conversation, or over the course of time as she sees what I’m like she desires to know me. All children desire this.

Seven Features of God’s Fatherly Love

Before discussing what God’s love looks like—and I’m looking specifically at how God loves us with as our father—I want to briefly consider a few reasons why “love” might lack clarity or even be unhelpful today.

Reasons We Struggle to Experience God’s Love

It can be difficult to grasp God’s love for us. For many, the love of Jesus comes through loud and clear, but God the Father often seems distant or looming. God’s attributes—including love—aren’t like human traits that strengthen or weaken nor are they like moods that come and go. God is all of his attributes perfectly, all the time. And yet, we still struggle to believe it can be true, that this great God can love us messy and stumbling sinners. Sometimes we don’t feel his love on a day-to-day basis like we desire, so walls of doubt begin to shut him out. Other times we unwittingly read the Word not through the lens of his love and grace to us in Christ, but through tinted lens of condemnation and guilt.