Infinite Love and the Human Condition

[stuart]

Infinite Love and the Human Condition
Copyright 2010 by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved

The answer to the entire existence which we have found as Christians is found in this great truth: that, through saving faith in Christ, we have received the love of the one Being in the universe who loves both perfectly and infinitely. The nature of this perfect and infinite love is such that we need not continue to fear its loss, as we have the loss of human love. There is nothing we must do to make or keep ourselves “lovable”. God the Father’s love for us, His children, is sure and certain. He is the only father who can be absolutely counted on to be ever-loving in the deepest sense of that term.

Yet many believers struggle with the nagging sense that they have not “fully received” the love of God in Christ. They sometimes equate this sense of not feeling deeply loved by their Lord with not being loved by Him at all. This is the tormenting lot of many a struggling, but authentic, child of God today. Such individuals have known divine love but fleetingly and their lives never seem, to themselves anyway, as being truly or wholly given over to Christ in a satisfactorily profound way.

Perhaps part of the problem with this distressing set of mind and heart comes from a lack of real understanding about the nature of love between the infinite and the finite. One does not have to perfectly and fully take in all of God’s love to know he or she is loved. In fact no human being can do so in real time in our present frame. The very nature of infinite love makes it not completely knowable by finite, fallen creatures such as ourselves at any given moment. This is the human condition at present. Even when we are caught up in the highest spiritual rapture, experiencing the ultimate “mountaintop experience” with the felt affection of the Lover of our souls we have not yet fully known that affection. How could we? Our hearts are not large enough to ever exhaust the supply of love God lavishes upon us.

But, thankfully, just because that love cannot ever be fully received and contained by us here on Earth does not mean it cannot, and has not, been taken in by us at all. Actually it can be taken in deeply, deeply enough to be both sufficient to our present need as well as superabundant beyond that need.

Some of us have a tendency to be “all or nothing” kind of people. We want it all now or we think we are being somehow cheated of what we obviously “need”. The danger in this kind of faulty thinking is that we will minimize the blessing of God when it comes because we are convinced we should be constantly overwhelmed by blessing. The truth is that while God loves to bless His children He cannot give us more than we are ready to receive at any given time, and only He knows the proper measure of blessing at that time.

Furthermore we will never know the full extent of God’s love for us in this time and place. We are, in fact, destined to know it in ever-increasing measure throughout eternity and then only because we have crossed over from this world to the next and been “completed” in Christ. It is in this glorified state that the love of God will become known to us in a measure and quality we never dreamed of on Earth as it now is and as we now are.
For now it is enough that we have come to know the love of God in Christ to the extent that He has made it known to us. His love, like His grace, is sufficient onto the moment. There is always more to come. We can learn, over time, to rest in that fact and know we are the object of the affection of the One true Father whose love has no beginning and no end.