Director Devo: Kate “Dingo Baby” Blocker

Do you feel settled in God’s love for you? Do you, today, feel deeply and completely rested in the strict confidence that you are loved by God?

In my life with Christ, the answer has varied—sometimes it’s an easy ‘yes’ and other times, it’s a hard ‘no.’ Don’t get me wrong, I know that God loves me. I know that Jesus loves me (queue the song). But my heart doesn’t feel fully, without a doubt, convinced of it at every moment. For many of us, at some point, we have struggled to believe that God truly loves us, and that His love for us isn’t based on our performance or diminished by our doubts, numbness, or forgetfulness of Him.  

God isn’t confusing on this matter. He tells us plainly and repeatedly of His love for us in His word, yet still, we are skillful at manufacturing new objections to the truth about His love. We tend to measure His love using metrics of our own effort, merit, circumstance, or feelings. We often try to set the terms and conditions upon how much God does or doesn’t love us. And because it’s impossible for us to overestimate His love, we’re left with the conclusion that it’s less. Less big. Less permanent. Less intimate. Less knowing. Less freely given than it really is. Our minds and hearts are quick to build walls, to negotiate a version of His love that fits our limited understanding, often shrinking it to something more manageable and sensible.  

In Ephesians 3:16-19, Paul prays for the believers in Ephesus to have the strength to comprehend the boundless love of Christ. He writes, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” 

On our own, we tend toward lessening His love for us. But in Christ, with power through His Spirit in our inner being, we can truly comprehend Christ’s love for us. But why does it matter? His love for us is independent of our wortthiness and unshaken by our doubts in it. And still He wants us to know His love because He made us to be loved by Him, and He desires us to grow up in His love. 

As Dane Ortlund claims in Deeper, “Your growth in Christ will go no further than your settledness, way down deep in your heart, that God loves you. His affection for his own never wanes, never sours, never cools… That thing about you that makes you wince most only strengthens his delight in embracing you. At your point of deepest shame and regret, that’s where Christ loves you the most.” 

God longs for us to grasp more fully how much He loves us. When we are settled in His love, we are free to rest and empowered to grow. In the deepened knowledge of His love, Paul says that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. Though at times we are filled with doubt, distracted by a million things, and desperate to prove ourselves worthy, the Spirit strengthens us to know His love, so we can, instead, be filled completely by Him.  

He’s inviting us to rest, and to let Him love us as much as He wants to.