I love Mandi (for those of you who are not in the know, Mandi is my wife). Every time I say that out loud I smile. =)
I don’t need talked into it. I don’t need to leave post-it notes on my mirror reminding me to love Mandi during my day. My problem isn’t not wanting to be with Mandi, my problem is I can’t seem to get enough time with Mandi. I think about her all the time throughout the day. I pray for her throughout the day. I look forward to coming home to her at night, and the nights she is out late or has to go to bed early are the nights I struggle with the most because I need my Mandi-time! I can’t imagine not loving Mandi.
Yet, if I were being totally honest with you, there have been nineteen years of my life where I did not love Mandi at all or even think about her.
Most of that was because I had not met her yet. But even after we did meet, I couldn’t say that I loved her. Frankly, she kind of tuned me off…and the feeling was mutual! It was more like ‘hate at first sight’ than ‘love at first sight.’
So what changed? The more I got to know her the more I found myself starting to like her. The more time we spent together the more I found I wanted to be with her. I never said to myself, “Self, I think you should fall in love with Mandi!” Why would you even want to when your first impression was that she should be avoided at all costs? But the more we got to know one another, the more we wanted to get to know one another. Hate turned to like, which grew into love, and that love went from being friends, to being in love and a year and a half later we were married. And this December will be our 25th anniversary.
What’s the point?
The point is that you can’t love a person you don’t know exists. If you don’t know a person exists how can you love them?
The point is that you may even know that a person exists but not love them. You may know something about them and my even love what you think you know about them, but you can’t love them until you meet them and get to know them.
You can’t love who you don’t know.
In John 17:20-26, Jesus assures those who would be His future disciples that He knows us, that He loves us, that we have been made one with Him and the Father and with one another, and that He will continue to work to make Himself and the Father known so that His disciples will know the Father’s love for them, and further that that love is the same as His love for Jesus.
In short, Jesus was praying that the love He received and reflected back to the Father and the unity it produced would be received and reflected back by His disciples. When they lived in that love with the Father, they would live out that love with one another, and in so doing experience a unity of love between God and neighbor that would make it clear to everyone that the Father sent Jesus and loves them as He loves Jesus.
In verses 25-26 Jesus says that the world doesn’t know the Father. The only way to know Him in a relational sense is for Him to be revealed. This is what Jesus does through His Spirit. He does it in two ways:
- Revealing God in Scripture.
- Revealing God in the heart of the believer.
To love God we need two things:
We need the illumination of Scripture so that we know about God.
We need the illumination of the Holy Spirit so that we can love God.
It’s true you can learn some things about God from the world around us. Paul admits that in Romans 1:20 (NIV),
For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.
But while we can learn some things about God from the world, we can’t learn anything about our need of a savior, His plan for redemption, or about Jesus. The only place to get that is from the Bible. You can know that God is by looking at the world, but you can’t ever find out who God is by looking at the world.
The reason for reading the Bible, listening to sermons, and taking part in Bible studies is to increase our knowledge and understanding of who God is, what He is doing, and how He wants to relate with us. That is why Paul says, How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? (Romans 10:14, NIV). You can’t love who you don’t know. If we want to love God we need to get to know Him, and the place where we can get that knowledge is the Bible.
Now, as important as reading the Bible is, it isn’t enough on its own to produce love for God is it? If that were true then anyone who read the Bible would be a Christian. But I know lots of people, some who have read the Bible cover to cover, who are no more convinced that it is really the inspired word of God than before they started. Why is that? Because knowing the Bible and knowing God is not the same thing is it? There is a huge difference between knowing about God and knowing God personally isn’t there?
This is why we need illumination from the Holy Spirit. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2:14 (NIV),
The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.
Reading the Bible gives us head knowledge, but the Spirit gives heart knowledge. What do I mean by that? What I mean by head knowledge is that reading the Bible gives us the understanding of who God is; it gives us the idea of who God is, and creates a picture of Him in our mind. Heart knowledge is how we feel about and respond to that mental picture. For instance, it is one thing to understand that God is, it is another to see God as beautiful and worthy of love. It is one thing to understand the idea that the Bible teaches Jesus is the Messiah, but it is another to really be convinced that that is true, that He is trustworthy and good.
Loving God requires both illumination of the head and illumination of the heart. The first you get by reading, studying, and discussing Scripture. The second God gives Himself through the Holy Spirit.
Learning To Be Full Of Grace And Truth. 