Overcome By the Love of God

God wants us to comprehend how wide, long, high, and deep the fire of His love is for each one of us. This is not a shallow or easily offended affection. This is, in the truest sense, true love. Children’s stories and fairy tales talk about the power of true love’s kiss, but we have the truest love’s kiss in the extravagant and fiery love of God. In the animated movie, Frozen, the sisters, Ana and Elsa, learn that only an act of true love can thaw a frozen heart. And as it turns out, the necessary act of love is not the kiss of a prince but the sacrifice of a sister. This is an imperfect picture of the true love–inspired sacrifice in which Christ gave His own life to thaw our frozen hearts.

When we encounter and begin to understand love like this, love that surpasses all knowledge, we are drastically changed. As Jesus told His disciples, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). Without an ever increasing revelation of His love, we have no hope of becoming fruitful. Only in His love will we blossom and bloom into the women He has made us to be. Truly His love is no ordinary love. Solomon describes true love like this: Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm; for love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame. Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot sweep it away. If one were to give all the wealth of one’s house for love, it would be utterly scorned (Song of Solomon 8:6–7). That is how intense God’s love is for each one of us. In fact, while Solomon’s song says love is as strong as death, Jesus has shown us that His love is actually stronger than death. Now “neither death nor life…nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). His love has overcome it all. Not only does God have love for us, but the Bible tells us “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). In His nature He embodies and defines love. We know what love looks like by looking at Him. The Bible also tells us, “God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). This is the nature of His love toward us—consuming and fiery.

Consuming is defined as “ardent, deeply felt, possessing or displaying a distinctive feature to a heightened degree, very intense, strongly and urgently felt.” When something is consumed, it is devoured. This is what happens when we accept Christ and “die” with Him so we can be raised with Him into new life (see Rom. 6:3–4). God’s consuming love burns out the negative in us. We are the righteousness of God in Christ Jesus (see 2 Cor. 5:21). We are fearfully and wonderfully made (see Ps. 139:14). He is rooting us in His love and consuming the negative thinking and harmful patterns in our lives so we can live in His fullness. Our roots are growing deeper into the oxygen-rich soil of His love, and now we bear good fruit. God’s love is consuming, and it is a fire. It burns like a mighty flame. Uncontrolled fire is inherently consuming. It burns up whatever stands in its path. Thus, the fire of God’s love burns away anything that should not exist in our lives as new creations. It burns up the lies that tell us we’re not worth much, and it replaces them with the truth of His passion for us and our incalculable worth to Him. It burns up the pain and rejection and fear of our past and replaces them with hope and joy and peace—with the blessed fruit of His Spirit (see Gal. 5:22–23).

I like to tell God, “I am deeply in love with You. You’re deeply in love with me, and I’m deeply in love with You, too.” When He tells me He loves me with an everlasting love (see Jer. 31:3), I reciprocate. I tell Him, “I love you with an everlasting love, too!” And I feel it and think it with all my heart, all my soul, all my mind, and all my strength (see Mark 12:30). I give my love back to Him with all I am. About this, Saint Augustine once said, “Let us love God with the love he has given us.” In other words, we are only capable of loving Him with the love He first gives to us. “We love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). And that is exactly what He wants us to do. He wants us to return His love with all we have. He wants us to be passionate. We don’t have to be afraid of giving Him our all, because He will never reject or ignore us. He is the safest and kindest person we will ever meet, and He is our King, our Creator, our Father. He is the lover of our souls. When we are touched by this flame of His love, we will want to spend time with Him—which is exactly how He feels about us. His heart burns for us constantly. His eyes are always upon us, and His desire is always for us. He will never lose interest in us. His appetite for us will never wane, and we will never be able to exhaust the depths of relationship with Him. That is the nature of His consuming, fiery love. The more we experience Him, the more we want to experience Him. And so, in a glorious and eternal cycle of increase, we will forever go deeper and deeper in love with Him, endeavoring to somehow comprehend the height, depth, breadth, and length of the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (see Eph. 3:18). Our revelation of the love of God never ends; it just keeps growing bigger and brighter and stronger.

While His love for us is constant and the strength of His passion for us never changes, our passion for Him will increase as we encounter His love for us. As we are rooted and established in His love, we will become lovers like Him. And truly we will be transformed into trees who bear His fruit. This is true love. And it is the only love that will truly satisfy the desires of our hearts.