Day 22

5 Stages in Growing in Love with God:

• Becoming a Mary of Bethany or a student of the emotions of God
  
  • This is primarily expressed through a life of pursuing obedience to God
    
  • Studying Scripture to learn what God is like
    
• Receiving increased revelation of God's love for us
  
  • John 15:9: Jesus loves me the way that God loves Him
    
  • John 17:23: God loves me the way that He loves Jesus
    
• Growing in our affection for God
  
  • Matthew 22:37: I love God with all of my heart, with all of my soul and with all of my mind
    
• Growing in confidence of who you are or loving yourself
  
• Growing in our love for others
  

This was part of our lesson with Clay Edwards for the Life of David class. He summarized these stages this way:

1. Look at God    2. God loves me    3. I love God        4. I love myself        5. I love others
   

We work on all of these at the same time. If I find that I'm lacking obedience, then I probably need a greater revelation of God's love for me. If I don't like myself, then I probably need to spend more time looking at God and finding out how He feels about me. (If He is truth and wisdom and He says that His "delight [is] in the sons of men" (Proverbs 8:31), of which I am one, then who am I to disagree with Him?!) If I am having a hard time loving others, then I probably need to go back and look at God. Basically, no matter what is happening, I probably need to go back and look at God!

I really liked this and it made a lot of sense to me. I want to love God wholeheartedly, but I think that God only loves me a little bit. (I know that He loves me because He loves everyone, but I am not sure that He really enjoys me or likes me because of my sinfulness. I feel ashamed that I am still weak and fall into sin. I am afraid that God will reject me…) As a result, I only love myself a little bit and I only love others a little bit. Now on the outside, it appears as though I love a lot more than this. But, a lot of that is coming out of my own strength and that's why I eventually burn-out and become unloving.

The other thing that I love about this model is that the solution is really simple: the 1^st commandment. I go back to looking at God through meditating on Scripture, praying it back to God and receiving His love for me. I commit myself to obeying Him. This stirs up my love for Him, makes me more confident because I hear who He says I am and I have so much love in my heart that it overflows towards others around me. So, once again, I set my heart to love and obey God today. J