Doubting God's love

I suspect that every piece of emotional anguish we experience is ultimately linked to the question 'Does God love me?'

I further suspect that this question is universal to every Christian. Somewhere, at some point in time, the Christian has asked that question.

What I have realised is that in many instances such a question suffers a defect of sequencing. The question is asked in the wrong order.

The real problem is often defining what love actually is.

Whether God loves or does not love is meaningless until it is understood what love actually is.

If you were asked whether a Russian could doublek, you might very well plead the question to be unanswerable until it was known what the verb 'doublek' means.

Similarly, the better question to ask is not 'Does God love me?' but rather 'what is love?'

When we define love or blessing correctly we are more properly equipped to determine whether God does or does not love.

Our failing in this regard is to identify love as the Bible does.

We load the dice when we limit love to being the conveyance of stuff, status and cash from one party to another.

If love consisted only of giving material things it would be impossible for a child to ever love a parent. It would be equally impossible for a poor man to ever love his wife, or for a modest man to ever love his friend.

He has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every blessing in Christ.

Love is vastly more spiritual than we acknowledge.

In truth, we live in a spiritual world that is punctuated by the material. Most of our experience is spiritual.

We spend so much time pursuing material blessing to provide us with a spiritual feeling.

Fortunately, God does not guarantee us material blessing but He does assure us of spiritual blessing.

While God may, from time to time, bless us materially it is not the limit of His love.

If God only blessed us materially we would, for the first time, have grounds to accuse Him of being unloving.