Does Genuine Love Have Limits?
Do you go through difficult things? Do you face struggles, hardships, uncertainties, unresolved challenges, maybe feeling like you’re in way over your head? Of course, we go through seasons, and life has its ups and downs. Sometimes we have the strength and wisdom to navigate turbulent times, but sometimes we flounder.
When I find myself in flounder mode, way out of my comfort zone, struggling to navigate a challenging season or turbulent uncertainty, I have come to very much appreciate that God’s love for me is a very strong grounding anchor. To this end, I think it's very important to pause and make some opportunity for reflecting on God with the immensity and infinite quality of genuine love.
Consider what Paul says in Romans 8:35, “Can anything separate us from the love Christ has for us? Can troubles or problems or sufferings or hunger or nakedness or danger or violent death?”
As well as Romans 8:38-39, “Yes, I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor ruling spirits, nothing now, nothing in the future, no powers, nothing above us, nothing below us, nor anything else in the whole world will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
In these verses, Paul lists stuff that we all go through or encounter at various times in our life: tribulation, distress, persecution, hunger, shame/exposure, danger, violence, death, life, angels, spirits, time now, the future, powers, stuff around us. This is a really extensive list that Paul provides, and it’s safe to say that we will all encounter these struggles or various situations throughout the course of our life, despite our best efforts.
All of this stuff comes and goes, but what remains constant, reliable, steady and unchanging is God loving us for the simple reality that God is love, based on 1 John 4:8. No matter what is happening or not happening in our lives, nothing can separate us from God’s love. While we might know this in our thoughts, I think it would be very helpful to ask if we might be separating or disconnecting ourselves from God loving us.
Is it possible that you’ve disconnected from God’s love because you’re extremely busy? Maybe you feel detached from God loving you because of some emotional struggles that you’re experiencing. Perhaps you’ve become less aware of God’s love because life has been in tsunami mode, and you feel like you’re drowning. Or maybe you’ve just simply forgotten about God loving you. It’s also possible that we have let some things disconnect or separate us from God’s love – going through hardships and struggles that can consume and even overwhelm our attention.
As we reach the end of this blog, I would like for you to take some minutes to pause and take some inventory of your life to consider if there are some areas and places in your life where you’ve detached from God’s love. It’s important for us to take some reflection moments because the foundation for a deep and intimate relationship with God is genuine love. If we get sidetracked or distracted from genuine love, God loving us, then it can be easy to be mechanical and distant in our relationship with God.
Let’s choose to live daily in the loving embrace of our Heavenly Father and to love Him back, as well as let God’s love come through us in our horizontal existence. Genuine love is steady and unchanging!