The Father's Heart

For some time now I've had doubts about my love for God. I have come to realize that the way I want to love God is not the right way to love him. Even though God keeps correcting me, I seem to always forget. I always pray and cry out to God that I want to love him more, but rather I feel unworthy, I can’t seem to feel it, I can’t feel my love! Most times this makes me sad and moody. I am going to dwell on the revelation I had tonight but that wasn't the first time God shared this with me. Love is Active not Passive. Love is not emotional though emotions can stimulate love. For example when you love someone you feel like having sex with them, sex is the highest form of expressing romantic love, but it becomes bad when it is done outside God’s standard.

Love is an expression and then you act what you feel not in the exact same way of the feeling but in a way that helps to release the hormones attached to that feeling. Our feelings or emotions are actually storage of hormones epinephrine, progesterone and testosterone e.t.c. So then what did I learn again tonight that I had been taught before and I forgot? God taught me in a strange way how to express love for him and feel satisfied. And I realized it was something I knew that I hadn't really practiced and thought of consciously. I had been influenced by secular culture unknowingly and I felt that was all there is, but there was also the other side of love. You cannot love by feeling it, you love through expression.  Love is an action not a feeling. This is the challenge with many people’s love they claim to love because they feel it. But then they are handicapped because they do not know how to show it. That’s not love that’s infatuation.  Any love that ends with feelings alone is not love. If you feel something and you can’t express it then you feel nothing. We are not awarded marks for having ideas; we are awarded marks for expressing our ideas. No matter how much our brain lights up we can’t be taken serious until we reveal what is in there.

Now I want to propose a theory that all the aspects of love have a piece of unconditionally in them. For example: agape, philia, storge and eros. Philia is family or friendship love, what real man or woman would not eventually forgive his sons or friends of wrong they had done. What true romantic love is not embedded in forgiveness and compromises? So we all have the ability to love unconditionally.

The other side of love is the agape, the selfless self serving. Agape is love in action, Love in service. We might have lost a bit of the glory of love because of modernization and enlightenment. Now this is what happened to me, I had just finished listening to a message and it exposed the weakness of my heart, I want to love God more I know I do love him but yet I wasn't satisfied because deep in my heart I didn't feel the love enough. As I was praying I started to cry. It was as if I was faced with the love of Christ literally but my love was not found, it was like Christ was saying this is my love where is yours?

Read this part carefully! As he did this I began to think about someone I was in love with and how my thoughts towards her were always to express my hearts love. As I thought about the ways I wished to express my love to her, I found out he didn't scold me or conscience prick me for my thoughts. The more I thought of expressing my love the happier I got and excited then all of a sudden a name flashed through my mind, a lady I was ministering to. I had slight doubts about God touching her the more I thought of her the more I wanted clarity about her healing and then it struck me that while I believed I needed more time to pray with her I was scared if the best option for her was not to visit the hospital, as I thought much on this God clearly spoke to my heart that I was supposed to stand for her and not waiver in faith, I do not need to hear from him if she would be healed or not, I was supposed to proceed praying based on my confidence in his ability and he wouldn't fail me. I was much at peace hearing this and then I realized that my feeling of inadequacy had vanished and disappeared it was as if I had a new found love for God, then he spoke he said I wouldn't compare my own love, with Christ’s love I wanted to separate my love and Christ’s but God made me understand that Christ’s love is my love. So all I needed do was to believe. He said the reason why I prayed for her or paid attention to her was because of my love, by even praying for her I was expressing my love; I noticed when I begin to express my love for others the feeling of inadequacy disappears. And when Christ made me understand also that those moments I feel my love for him was inadequate it was because I didn't want to utilize his love, like I felt his love should be more than it was. Christ love is simple so it beats our imagination. But all we need is to express we need not feel it the Holy Ghost does that for us he sheds the love abroad.

Having faith in the love of Christ is where many seem to fail, because they are not ready to experience the totality of Christ’s love, as long as we don’t believe in Christ’s love there will always be a feeling of inadequacy. Responding to Christ’s love is simple, it’s by faith. The love of Christ is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. If we are born again the love of Christ is in our hearts. It is the Holy Ghost that administers Christ’s Love according to our faith. Someone who Christ’s love drives crazy will never experience this feeling of inadequacy. I have also come to realize that this feeling of inadequacy we feel towards God does not originate from our sinfulness but from our relationship with our earthly parents especially our fathers. Go and mark it, if you see anyone who has a good relationship with his father such a person will naturally carry this kind of mentality into his relationship with God. Many of us have being deprived of a father’s love when we needed it most so in a way when we heard God can also become our father we naturally switched this mentality into our relationship with God. So each time we go into his presence we go with the feeling of inadequacy and also expecting to be rebuked for all the wrongs but we've forgotten that no one condemns us again. We have a perfect conscience before God through Christ Jesus.

The most profound thing I learnt is that our love for Christ is expressed as we love others first and also as we worship him.

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