The Love of God

It is a quiet morning before I head off to work.

The world is getting ready to face today's chaos.

The world outside my window is moving toward another morning while I find myself sitting here with a cup of coffee that has already gone cold, thinking about something that has occupied my mind more than usual these past few weeks.

Love.

Not the kind we often talk about.

Not the kind celebrated in films or written into songs.

Not even the kind that exists between families or lifelong friends.

I have been thinking about the love of God.

The strange thing is that the older I become, the less certain I feel that I understand it.

That may sound like an unusual thing for a Christian to admit.

Surely years of faith should produce certainty.

Twenty-three years I have pursued the Lord.

Surely maturity should make everything clearer.

Yet I have found almost the opposite to be true.

The longer I walk with Christ, the more I realise how much of His love exists beyond my ability to fully explain.

There are truths I understand with my mind.

Then there are truths that slowly make their way into the heart over decades.

The love of God seems to belong to the second category.

It refuses to remain an idea.

It insists on becoming an experience.

I think many of us spend our lives trying to earn a love that has already been freely given.

Perhaps we would never admit it aloud.

We know the verses.

We know salvation is by grace.

We understand the gospel from an intellectual level.

We know forgiveness cannot be purchased.

Yet somewhere deep within us there remains a quiet belief that maybe God will love us a little more if we finally become the person we think we should be.

If we pray more.

Read more.

Serve more.

Sin less.

Become more patient.

Become more generous.

Become more disciplined.

Clean ourselves up more.

I know that way of thinking because I have lived there.

There have been seasons where I quietly believed God must surely be disappointed in me.

If I am completely honest, my soul is still wrestling with it as I write this.

Not because He had abandoned me.

But because I could still see so much unfinished work inside my own heart.

The strange thing about following Jesus is that the closer you grow to Him, the more aware you become of the places that still need transforming.

That awareness can either lead us toward gratitude or toward shame.

For a long time it led me toward shame.

Not dramatic shame.

Quiet shame.

The kind that whispers instead of shouts.

The kind that tells you everyone else has their faith figured out while you continue wrestling with the same weaknesses year after year.

The kind that convinces you God must eventually grow tired of forgiving the same failures.

Looking back now, I think I underestimated something essential about His character.

I underestimated His patience.

There is something deeply comforting about realising that God has never been surprised by anything I have confessed to Him.

Every failure I have agonised over.

Every temptation I have wrestled with.

Every selfish decision.

Every fearful thought.

Every hidden insecurity.

He already knew.

Jesus knew what He was purchasing on the cross.

Nothing I have ever brought into prayer has caused Him to pause in surprise.

Nothing has made Him rethink His decision to save me.

Nothing has caused Him to reconsider the cross.

Sometimes I wonder if we imagine God discovering our failures one confession at a time.

As though every prayer begins with shocking new information.

But He has always known the whole story.

Not just the parts I am comfortable telling people.

The whole story.

The chapters I still struggle to read.

The memories that still embarrass me.

The decisions I wish had never happened.

The motives I barely understand myself.

The self-hate that still rages within me on many days.

He saw every page long before I ever existed.

And somehow He still chose to come.

Before the foundation of the world.

That thought has become increasingly precious to me.

Because it means the love of God is not built upon discovery.

It is built upon complete knowledge.

Human love often begins with attraction and slowly grows through understanding.

God's love began with perfect understanding before I ever took my first breath.

He never loved an imaginary version of me.

He loved the real one.

That changes everything.

I think about this often while working at the hospital.

Hospitals have a way of stripping life back to what actually matters.

Illness does not care about status.

Pain does not recognise success.

A hospital room quickly reminds you that every human being is remarkably fragile.

We spend so much of life trying to convince ourselves we are in control.

Then one diagnosis.

One phone call or knock on the door.

One unexpected accident.

One set of test results.

One hospital appointment.

And suddenly all those carefully constructed illusions disappear.

What remains is simply our humanity.

I have watched people speak differently inside hospitals.

Conversations become slower.

Priorities become clearer.

Emotions are much easier to read.

The things that once felt urgent suddenly seem strangely insignificant.

There is something about standing close to suffering that changes the questions we ask.

We stop asking how successful someone became.

We begin asking who loved them.

Who stayed.

Who remained present.

Who held their hand when everything else fell away.

Perhaps that is because love is one of the few things that still matters when almost everything else has been taken away.

I suspect that is one reason Jesus spent so much of His earthly ministry among ordinary people carrying extraordinary burdens.

The sick.

The grieving.

The lonely.

The forgotten.

The outcasts.

Not because they were more valuable than everyone else.

But because suffering has a way of exposing how desperately every human being needs grace.

The longer I live, the more convinced I become that every person is carrying something invisible.

Some carry grief.

Others carry regret.

Some carry disappointment.

Others carry childhood wounds that never completely healed.

Some carry fear so quietly that even those closest to them never notice.

Many of us become remarkably skilled at appearing fine.

We learn how to smile.

How to work and function.

How to laugh.

How to keep conversations comfortably on the surface.

Meanwhile entire worlds remain hidden beneath polite conversation.

I know something about that hidden world.

There have been seasons where I smiled while quietly wondering whether I would ever truly feel free from the things I carried inside.

Seasons where I questioned whether God could really continue loving someone who still struggled.

Seasons where I confused spiritual growth with spiritual perfection.

I no longer believe those things are the same.

Perhaps one of the greatest evidences of God's love is not that He demands instant perfection.

Perhaps it is that He patiently walks with us while transformation slowly unfolds.

Real change rarely happens overnight.

Trees do not appear fully grown.

Neither do people.

The strongest faith I know has usually been formed slowly.

One ordinary day after another.

One difficult conversation.

One answered prayer.

One unanswered prayer.

One act of forgiveness.

One quiet act of obedience.

One lesson repeated until it finally reaches the heart.

Looking back over my own life, I can now see something I completely missed while living through it.

God was never only present during the moments I recognised Him.

He was present in the moments I misunderstood Him as well.

He was present in childhood surgeries.

He was present during addiction.

He was present in heartbreak.

He was present through loneliness.

He was present during questions that seemed to have no answers.

He was present while I believed He felt distant.

Love often reveals itself most clearly in hindsight.

Perhaps that is because we usually recognise faithfulness only after enough time has passed to see the whole picture.

There are chapters I once wished had never happened.

Today I would never willingly relive them.

But neither would I erase them.

Because somewhere within those painful pages I met a God whose love proved deeper than my understanding of it.

Not a love that removed every hardship.

Not a love that prevented every wound.

But a love that quietly refused to abandon me inside them.

That kind of love is difficult to describe.

Perhaps because it is less like an emotion and more like a presence.

Steady.

Patient.

Unhurried.

Faithful.

Always waiting for us to discover what has been true all along.

That we have never walked through a single chapter of our lives alone.

There is another thought that has stayed with me for a long time.

I think most of us spend years trying to become lovable.

It begins in childhood without us even realising it.

We discover that certain behaviours receive praise.

Certain achievements receive attention.

Certain successes make people proud.

Slowly, almost without noticing, we begin connecting love with performance.

If I do well...

If I behave...

If I succeed...

If I become enough...

Then perhaps I will be loved.

That way of thinking quietly follows many of us into adulthood.

It changes shape, but it rarely disappears.

We chase careers.

Recognition.

Relationships.

Approval.

Security and certainty.

Even ministry can become another place where we quietly attempt to prove our worth.

The frightening thing is that we can spend decades trying to earn something God has already freely given.

I wonder sometimes whether Adam and Eve experienced something similar after the fall.

The first thing they did was hide.

Not attack.

Not argue.

Hide.

Then they tried to cover themselves.

That has always fascinated me.

Before they ever heard God's voice calling for them, they had already decided they were no longer acceptable.

Shame reached its conclusion before God ever spoke.

That feeling of deep fracture and shame has embedded itself into every generation since, with devastating effects.

Perhaps that is still one of shame's favourite tactics.

It convinces us we already know what God must think.

It finishes His sentences before He has spoken.

It assumes rejection.

It predicts disappointment.

It imagines distance.

Yet when I read Scripture, I keep noticing something remarkably different.

God continually moves toward people who believe they have disqualified themselves.

He moves toward Moses after failure.

Toward David after adultery.

Toward Peter after denial.

Toward Thomas after doubt.

Toward Paul after persecution.

Again and again He walks toward people who are busy walking away from themselves.

I have often wondered why.

Perhaps because love always moves first.

That thought has become deeply personal for me.

There were years where I genuinely believed my greatest problem was my weakness.

I now think my greatest problem was believing my weakness somehow surprised God.

It never did.

When Christ went to the cross, He was not paying for unknown sins that would eventually appear centuries later.

He knew them all.

Every temptation.

Every relapse.

Every selfish decision.

Every fearful thought.

Every moment where I would choose myself over Him.

Nothing arrived unexpectedly.

That changes the way I think about grace.

Grace is not God's emergency response to human failure.

Grace was His plan long before failure ever entered the story.

That is difficult for the human mind to grasp.

Because our love usually follows merit.

We reward kindness.

We admire discipline.

We celebrate loyalty.

We naturally move toward people who make loving them easier.

God seems to operate entirely differently.

Romans tells us that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Not after we improved.

Not after we understood theology.

Not after we cleaned ourselves up.

While we were still running.

That is extraordinary.

Perhaps too extraordinary.

Maybe that is why we struggle to believe it.

We know ourselves too well.

We know the conversations nobody else hears.

We know the motives we rarely admit.

We know the private disappointments.

The quiet envy.

The hidden fears.

The recurring temptations.

The dark thoughts that haunt us during the dark night of the soul.

The prayers we promised we would never have to pray again.

We know how unfinished we remain.

And because we know ourselves so intimately, we quietly assume God must eventually become exhausted with us.

Yet He never speaks that way.

When I read the Gospels, I am struck less by the perfection of Jesus than by His patience.

How many times did the disciples misunderstand Him?

How many times did they argue over status?

How many times did they fail to grasp what He was teaching?

Yet He continued walking with them.

Teaching them.

Correcting them.

Loving them.

Patiently.

There is something profoundly comforting about a God who is not hurried.

We are.

We rush almost everything.

We rush healing.

We rush grief.

We rush forgiveness.

We rush sanctification.

We become frustrated when change takes months instead of days.

God never appears anxious about the timetable.

That does not mean He is passive.

It means He understands growth better than we do.

Every gardener knows that forcing growth usually destroys what is growing.

Roots develop long before fruit appears.

Much of what God is doing inside us cannot yet be seen.

Perhaps that is why faith sometimes feels so ordinary.

We often expect transformation to arrive dramatically.

Lightning.

Mountaintops.

Extraordinary experiences.

Sometimes it does.

But more often it arrives quietly.

One ordinary morning you realise your anger no longer controls you the way it once did.

One ordinary afternoon you discover forgiveness came without forcing it.

One ordinary conversation reveals you are responding differently than you would have five years earlier.

Growth usually whispers.

It rarely announces itself.

When I look back over my own life, I can see that God's love has almost never appeared the way I expected it to.

Sometimes it looked like unanswered prayers.

Sometimes it looked like closed doors.

Sometimes it looked like waiting far longer than I thought reasonable.

At the time those moments felt confusing.

Occasionally they even felt painful.

Only later did I begin seeing what He had quietly been protecting me from.

Or preparing me for.

Or teaching me within.

That has changed the way I pray.

I still bring God my requests.

I still ask Him to open doors.

To heal.

To provide.

To guide.

But I find myself trusting His timing far more than I once did.

Because every year I live, I discover more evidence that His perspective reaches further than mine ever could.

Love is not proven by giving someone everything they ask for.

Sometimes love protects by saying no.

Sometimes love prepares by making us wait.

Sometimes love reshapes us before changing our circumstances.

A child rarely understands why a loving parent refuses certain requests.

Only maturity reveals what love was quietly accomplishing.

Perhaps much of our spiritual journey is learning to trust the heart of God before we fully understand the hands of God.

That may be one of the hardest lessons faith asks of us.

Not believing that God exists.

Believing that He remains good when life becomes difficult to understand.

I have not always found that easy.

There have been prayers that seemed to disappear into silence.

There have been seasons where answers felt painfully absent.

There have been moments where I wondered what God was doing.

Looking back now, I realise something remarkable.

Even when I questioned His plans, I never completely doubted His character.

Somewhere beneath the uncertainty remained a quiet conviction that the God who carried me through childhood, through illness, through addiction, through loneliness, and through countless failures would not suddenly stop being faithful now.

Perhaps that quiet confidence is itself one of the greatest gifts His love has given me.

Not certainty about tomorrow.

But confidence about the One already waiting there.

If there is one truth I continue returning to, it is this.

The love of God is unlike any other love we will ever experience.

Not because it is simply greater.

But because it operates according to an entirely different foundation.

Human love, as beautiful as it can be, often carries conditions we never intended to place upon it.

We become disappointed.

We become tired.

We misunderstand one another.

We withdraw.

Sometimes we love generously.

Sometimes we love selfishly.

Sometimes we confuse love with control.

Sometimes we confuse love with possession.

We all carry limitations because we are limited people.

God does not love like that.

His love is not dependent upon His mood.

It is not strengthened by our successes.

It is not weakened by our failures.

It does not fluctuate with our emotions.

It does not wake up one morning feeling uncertain about us.

That thought has brought me tremendous peace over the years.

Because if God's love depended upon my consistency, I would have exhausted it long ago.

There have been days where my faith has been strong.

There have also been days where my prayers felt weak.

I have sat in the wilderness and climbed the highest mountains.

Days where worship came naturally.

Days where I struggled to find the words.

Days where Scripture felt alive.

Days where I read it simply because I knew I needed to.

The remarkable thing is that God remained exactly the same through all of them.

His faithfulness has never depended upon mine.

That does not make my faithfulness unimportant.

It simply means it is not the foundation of the relationship.

He loved me first.

Long before I understood His love.

Long before I deserved His mercy.

Long before I even knew I needed saving.

John writes that we love because He first loved us.

I have read those words many times.

Yet they seem to become deeper every year.

Even my ability to love Him is itself a response.

Everything begins with Him.

That changes the way I think about the Christian life.

Perhaps discipleship is less about climbing toward God and more about learning to live from the reality that He has already drawn near.

So much of my younger life was spent striving.

Trying to become enough.

Trying to prove something.

Trying to earn what had already been freely given.

It is exhausting trying to deserve grace.

Because grace, by definition, cannot be deserved.

Otherwise it would simply become wages.

I think many Christians quietly carry that burden.

We know we are saved by grace.

Yet we somehow believe we remain loved by performance.

If we pray enough.

Read enough.

Serve enough.

Give enough.

Perhaps God will smile a little more warmly upon us.

Yet the Gospel tells a completely different story.

The Father did not wait for the prodigal son to clean himself before embracing him.

He ran toward him while he still smelled like the place he had come from.

That detail has always stayed with me.

The father did not embrace a cleaned-up version of his son.

He embraced the son who had finally come home.

Sometimes I wonder how often I still try handing God a polished version of myself.

Not because He asks for one.

Because I assume He prefers one.

Yet every time I read the Gospels, Jesus seems strangely uninterested in polished people.

He is drawn toward honesty.

Toward brokenness.

Toward those who know they need Him.

The Pharisees spent enormous energy appearing righteous.

The tax collectors simply cried for mercy.

One impressed people.

The other found grace.

There is a lesson in that.

Perhaps God is not looking for impressive people.

Perhaps He is looking for truthful people.

People willing to stop pretending.

People willing to admit they are tired.

People willing to confess they cannot save themselves.

People willing to receive what pride keeps trying to earn.

That is where I increasingly find myself.

Not pretending I have arrived.

Not pretending temptation has disappeared.

Not pretending every question has been answered.

Simply learning, little by little, that I am deeply loved in the middle of becoming.

Not at the end of the journey.

In the middle of it.

That has changed the way I see other people too.

When you begin believing God loves you despite knowing everything about you, it becomes much harder to withhold grace from someone else.

You become slower to judge.

Quicker to listen.

More patient with weakness.

More aware that everyone you meet is carrying battles you cannot see.

Everyone has chapters they rarely speak about.

Everyone has prayers they have whispered through tears.

Everyone has disappointments they are still trying to understand.

Everyone has memories they wish had unfolded differently.

Love begins seeing people that way.

Not as projects to fix.

Not as problems to solve.

But as image bearers carrying both incredible dignity and deep brokenness.

That is exactly how Christ looked at people.

He saw Peter's denial before it happened.

Yet He still called him.

He knew Thomas would doubt.

Yet He still welcomed him.

He knew Judas would betray Him.

Yet He still washed his feet.

That kind of love almost feels impossible.

Because it is.

At least for us.

It is the kind of love only God possesses perfectly.

Perhaps that is why Scripture describes Him as love itself.

Not simply loving.

Love.

The source from which every genuine expression of love ultimately flows.

As I sit here tonight reflecting on all of this, I realise that the greatest evidence of God's love in my own life has not been the absence of suffering.

It has been His presence within it.

He did not promise I would avoid heartbreak.

He walked with me through it.

He did not promise I would never know grief.

He promises He will sit with me in all of it.

He did not promise life would become simple.

He promised He would never leave me nor forsake me.

Looking back across the years, that promise has quietly held together more of my life than I ever realised.

Not because I have always been faithful.

But because He has.

And perhaps that is why I find myself loving Him more today than I did yesterday.

Not because I understand Him more completely.

But because, year after year, I continue discovering that His love has always understood me completely.

Even before I understood myself.

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About the Author

Dylan Verdun Sullivan is the founder of Refined by Fire Press and an Australian author indexed in the National Library of Australia. As a Level 7 Local Guide with over 3.9 million views on Google Maps, he documents the intersection of faith, recovery, and the light found in ordinary places.

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