Chapter 2: When You Have Tasted the Love of God

Once you have genuinely experienced God’s love operating within you, something changes. You know what real love feels like.

Human affection can sometimes contain hidden motives. People can flatter, they can manipulate. People can use charm, and say the right words because they want something.

But once you have tasted (experienced) the purity of God’s love, only then will you truly understand why manipulation and any form of impurity will never produce the character of God in you. You will always be a counterfeit, fighting against your very nature. God’s love does not require another person to earn it. This principle was first established in you when the Lord, out of His love and mercy, saved you. You did nothing to earn your salvation.

That realization gives the believer a spiritual point of reference. You now know: This is what love is. You have experienced something beyond human performance. Now, allow that same God who is now living inside of your Body to extend his love to others. Stop resisting the Holy Spirit. Destroy your pride and judgment of others who are lost and out of the way; as you once were. Allow yourself to feel what God feels for others. This is comparable to the certainty that accompanies a genuine encounter with God. A person who has truly experienced God possesses knowledge of that encounter that another person’s opinion cannot erase.

Someone may dispute your theology. Others may question your testimony. Someone may form an opinion about you. But an opinion cannot erase an experience. The same principle applies when we taste God’s love. Once His love has been experienced within us, we possess an inward knowledge of its reality.

There Is No Righteousness Without Love

I’m not sure I know how to proceed with this section, in the sense that I’m not confident I’ll be able to actually express the severity of this principle.But I do know this: if we do not fulfill the righteousness required by God, we will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And that fulfillment must be manifest in our relationship with God and in our relationship with our fellow man. This is essential.

As leaders in the Body of Christ, it is time for sobriety. Leaders must be able to see as God sees, to know as He knows, regarding the work of the ministry.

Now, the principle that we’re about to discuss—the righteousness being void without love— is the most essential, the most important; the very substance of our salvation. If we don’t understand it, if we don’t embrace it, we will never see God’s face in peace. And justly so, because God has given us all things that pertain to godliness. That’s His Word, and the Scriptures will not be broken.

That means that God has given us everything we need to fulfill the righteousness of God in our relationship with Him and with our fellow man. Now, we have to make a decision as to whether that’s what we’re going to do.

Perhaps if we all embrace what God is truly trying to say to us, if we all just surrendered to the will of the Father, maybe we would experience a power that’s greater than anything that we’ve experienced so far from the Holy Spirit. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about it long and hard, because this might be the last time God reaches out to us to disciple us into His heart and His mind. This lesson goes to the very essence of our being, and the substance of our salvation.

Romans 8:3-6

3 For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh:

4 That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.

5 For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit.

6 For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.

When Love Becomes Life

Eventually, God’s way of loving ceases to feel like an occasional spiritual exercise. It becomes life.

Reconciliation becomes easier because preserving hostility is no longer desirable. Even when another person refuses reconciliation, we can still maintain the disposition of Christ toward them.

We can refuse to participate in conversations designed to destroy them.

We can say: “That is my brother.” “That is my sister.” “Do not come to me to tear them down.” Why? Because God’s love is no longer merely something we are discussing. We have tasted it. We have digested it. It has become part of the life we are living.