Look Who Jesus Loves
By Andrew WommackIf you have listened to any of my teachings, you’ve heard me speak about the love of God. That’s what changed my life. The titles, subjects, and Scripture references of my albums are all different, but I’m always teaching about some aspect of God’s unconditional love.
I believe a true, experiential understanding of God’s love will drastically change anyone’s life. That’s the point that the Apostle Paul was making in Ephesians 3:19.
It says,
“And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God.”
Knowing God’s love experientially surpasses mere head knowledge, and it always results in us being filled with all the fullness of God. I could say it this way: If you aren’t experiencing all the fullness of God, then you aren’t experiencing God’s love.
Many people would argue with that. They would say that they know God loves them but that they are just under their circumstances at the moment. My answer would be, “What are you doing under there!” The Bible says we are to be above only and not beneath (Deut. 28:13).
When we are enjoying God’s love, everything else pales in comparison. No problem can compare to the unsearchable riches of God’s love. It’s like the old song says, “Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in His wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim, in the light of His glory and grace.” That is absolutely true.
At a recent Gospel Truth Seminar, I taught on the love of God in every session. I’ve had a teaching series available on this subject for years, God’s Kind Of Love: The Cure for What Ails Ya! However, at this seminar I took a totally different approach. Instead of restating the obvious, I decided to specifically counter wrong thinking that blinds us to His love.
Every Christian has the head knowledge of God’s love for them, but because of wrong thinking, it seldom translates into experience. There are things (primarily religious teachings) that dilute and weaken that revelation of God’s love.
I began with the sovereignty of God. Wrong thinking about this is one of the biggest problems people have in experiencing God’s love. If you believe God is the One who is causing all the problems in the world, it will definitely affect your relationship with Him.
Let me illustrate it this way: What if you thought I was the one who killed thousands in the September 11 terrorist attacks, caused the tsunamis that devastated Asia, and destroyed New Orleans with a hurricane. On the other hand, what if you thought I was so heartless that I would cause babies to be born with birth defects and people to suffer terrible things like murder and rape so I could teach them a lesson. If every evil thing in life were my fault, how would you feel about me?
There isn’t a civilized nation on the earth that wouldn’t have me killed, if they could prove I was behind all these things. Yet this is what the Lord is being blamed for every day. It’s even written in our contracts―major natural disasters and tragedies are called “acts of God.”
This isn’t a true representation of God. God is not the source of our problems.Understanding the sovereignty of God correctly is so important that I spent an entire session on the subject. Anyone who doesn’t get this right will never truly appreciate God’s love. It’s impossible to feel good about God if you believe the accusers that depict Him as evil.
Next I taught about God’s unconditional love. That is a radical concept. Nearly all of religion links God’s love and acceptance of people to their worthiness. In other words, God’s love is proportional to their performance.
Some Christian religious groups, after presenting salvation as a free gift of God’s grace, turn right around and teach new believers that their continuing relationship with the Lord now depends on their performance. If they don’t live holy, go to church, read their Bibles, and pay tithes, etc., then the Lord won’t bless them or answer their prayers.
That kind of thinking will block a person from receiving the love of God. When their performance falls short, and it always does, their own hearts will condemn them. They just can’t believe God could love them. The truth is that God’s love for us has nothing to do with our performance. He loves us because He is love (1 John 4:8), not because we are lovely.
Understanding that God’s love is unconditional will revolutionize your life. It certainly has mine.
Another major roadblock to experiencing God’s love is this: How can a holy God love unholy people? To answer that, I explained how God is a Spirit, and if we are going to truly connect with Him in worship, we have to do it through our new born-again spirits (John 4:24). When I found out who I was in the spirit, it forever changed me. Understanding that is what allowed me to finally accept God’s love.
I am firmly convinced that a lack of seeing ourselves “in Christ” is the root of all unbelief and failure to experience God’s pure love. This is my life message. It’s at the core of all the understanding the Lord has given me, and I believe it has to become a true revelation to every person if they want to experience God’s love in its fullness.
This led to teaching on another major area of wrong thinking. Much of what people believe about God’s rejection of us comes from Scripture. They use Old Testament scriptures as the basis for what they believe, not understanding that Jesus forever changed God’s dealings with mankind.
They don’t understand the difference between the way God dealt with people under the Old Covenant of the Law and the way He now deals with us through Christ.
Second Corinthians 5:19 says,
“To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation.”
Under this New Covenant, God is not imputing our sins unto us. That is the exact opposite of what happened under the Old Covenant. This is explained in detail in the New Covenant, and yet the body of Christ as a whole has missed this truth. The vast majority of Christians are still under sin consciousness, the very thing that Old Testament saints longed to be free from.
They saw our covenant by faith and prophesied about the superiority of the New Covenant that God would make with mankind (1 Pet. 1:10-12). Yet, modern-day Christians aren’t taking advantage of all the benefits of God’s love available in that New Covenant. God’s people truly are destroyed for lack of knowledge (Hos. 4:6).
A woman came up to me the last night of these meeting and said that she had been hearing me teach on this subject for nearly twenty years. She said that she thought she understood, until she heard this series of messages. “Now, I finally get it,” she told me.
The way the Lord had me teach this series was powerful. It brought a revelation of God’s love to her that she had never understood before. Many others were experiencing the same thing. God’s love was becoming real to them.
I want you to have the same opportunity to make this revelation your own. So, to help, I am making this special series from the Gospel Truth Seminar available as a CD album. It focuses entirely on God’s Kind of Love To You.
At our Summer Family Bible Conference this past July, I continued to teach on love, but from an entirely different perspective. In that series, I taught on God’s Kind of Love Through You. Once you understand how much God loves you, it will compel you to allow God’s love to flow through you. However, there are many misunderstandings about what that means and how to do it. This will help you love others with the God kind of love.
The subject of God’s love to us and through us is so important that I have created a special package of messages called the God’s Kind of Love Five Pack. This package includes albums: God’s Kind of Love To You (CD only), God’s Kind of Love Through You (CD only), and God’s Kind of Love, the Cure for What Ails Ya! (CD only). Companion teachings included in this Five Pack are Spirit, Soul & Body (CD album or Book) and The True Nature of God (CD album or Book).
