You and I need a greater understanding of God’s love. After reading 1 John, I realized how very little I know about living in God’s love. “And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him” (1 John 4:16, NKJV).
Many Christians know about God’s love for them only theologically. They have learned the scriptures and have heard them preached, and yet their understanding is limited to a line from a children’s chorus: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
We believe God loves us, the world and the lost, but it is an abstract faith! Not many Christians can say with authority, “I know Jesus loves me because I understand what his love is. It is the foundation of my daily walk.”
Is your daily walk bereft of belief in God’s love? Do you instead live under a cloud of guilt, fear and condemnation? God did not save you to live in condemnation. Jesus said, “Most assuredly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes in him who sent me has everlasting life, and shall not come into judgment, but has passed from death into life” (John 5:24). “There is therefore now no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, who do not walk according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit” (Romans 8:1).
Guilt and condemnation are of the devil. One meaning of condemnation is wrath. This means that on the Judgment Day you will be free from God’s wrath. But condemnation also means “the feeling of never measuring up to standards.” And the Word is teaching us that the believer will not be subject to the feeling of never measuring up!
“That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height – to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (Ephesians 3:17-19).
Rooted and grounded means “to have a deep and stable foundation of knowing and understanding God’s love for you.” That knowledge is the foundational truth upon which all other truths must build!