Head Knowledge or Heart Understanding?

God’s Love: 100% Satisfaction Guarantee

And yet, if you are like me, boundless love is a hard concept to grasp. See, I know that God loves me deeply, far more than any other. But how do I know this? Well, the Bible tells me so!

I know all this - my mind is well aware of the facts. Yet the question becomes is my heart aware; does it believe? The truth of the matter friends is that we can stuff our heads full of knowledge everyday until we sound like a walking dictionary, and never know the true love of Christ.

Romans is a book that has a lot of words written by a guy eloquent enough to knock the socks off some of our best public speakers today. As such, it has big words and huge concepts that easily need a second or even third “retake” to grasp the concept. I find myself reading Romans and loving the words and breezing on through… then all of a sudden I’m looking back going, “what the heck did I just read?” It’s God’s Word, to be sure, but Paul’s years of talking to a bunch of Greek thinkers with big beards and small glasses definitely influenced the interesting wording of parts of this book. So I read it and can’t even remember what I read. I’d like to call this a case of “mindless understanding.”

Yet Romans is also a book that presents concepts that are so well put the mind can easily grasp it, and yet the heart struggles to grasp the idea at all. I also read Romans and experience this. Romans 8:38-39 is simply worded: “Nothing can stop God from loving you. You are His child, so He loves you. The end.” There you have it! Simple, right? Wrong. My heart struggles to grasp God’s love as boundless. I doubt I’m the only one.

Obtaining Heartfelt Knowing

So how then do we not just read and be mesmerized by the beautiful words of this passage? How do we go from mindless understanding to a heartfelt knowing? I believe the Holy Spirit at work in our lives accomplishes this. Grasping the reality of the love of God as it relates to us takes understanding of the mind, and a certainty in your heart and spirit. But how do we take a heart that is bombarded by outside influences and internal struggles and grasp the life-giving reality of God’s love? By allowing the Spirit to work in you. Salvation brought us two major things: the gift of eternal life in Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit as our helper. The Holy Spirit can take the words on the pages of the Bible and bring them to life, the Bible is described as “living and active” (Hebrews 4:12), and it is the Bible that is a foundation for our certainty and heartfelt knowing that God’s love is real, limitless, and meant for us.

Remember this: How does a child know that their father loves them? He holds them tightly, his hands reach to protect and tenderly express affection, he speaks it often. How many times should a father tell his child that he loves them? I don’t believe there is a number that is a good limit, if a father tells his child that he loves them 1000 times a day it will not be too much. How do we know that God loves us? He tells us, not only in words like “nothing…will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus”, but through His actions. Love drove that long walk to Calvary, love fuelled the death blow struck at Death itself through that ultimate sacrifice, love gave the fire of the Holy Spirit to empower, and so much more! If we can read the Bible and not see love, we are merely running our eyes over the words, not truly reading the Bible, and certainly not allowing the Spirit to read the Bible with us. If this is you, ask the Holy Spirit to breathe life into God’s Word. Then open your eyes to the world around you. God’s love is in that father or mother, holding their child’s hand as they cross a street. God’s love is in the sunset, so painstakingly painted only to be wiped away and created anew the next day. God’s love is in the money showed up just in time, or the still small voice that comforts when the world is falling apart, whispering “I’m proud of you, little one”. Then crack open the Bible again with a desperate prayer that the Holy Spirit would give the blind sight, because that can be the only explanation for not *knowing* and experiencing the love of the God who would suffer the worst possible torture for us and then allow us to reject Him on a daily basis.