6. As I grow in my relationship with Jesus, what I will most often hear from Him and the Father is how much they love me.

(Before looking at the questions below, take a few minutes to think about this statement. Invite Jesus to speak to you about what He would like you to notice.) 

Think of a time when you had a feeling of being alive, or a time when you experienced deep peace. Consider the possibility that this was God telling you how much He loves you. If that were true, how would that make you feel?

Can you remember a time when you were deeply aware of God’s love for you? What did it feel like? Were there words?

If God’s deepest desire is for us to receive His love, how would that affect the things God wants to speak to us about?

If changing your questions for God would mean that you could hear Him better, would you be willing?

Consider asking God to speak to you about how much He loves you.

We live in a world of uncertainty. Because of this we often look to God for answers, guidance, direction and provision. And this is good—God wants to guide us and give us wisdom. But God wants so much more for us than just to answer our questions.

What God wants most is to tell us how deeply He loves us. This love might be expressed in words, but more often it will simply be a feeling, assurance, understanding, or sense of His presence. Or, God may choose to communicate His love for us in a sunset exploding with beauty, the grandeur of a mountain, a loving community of spiritual friends, a still small voice, an explanation-defying supernatural embrace, or a personal revelation of the depth of love expressed through the gift of His Son Jesus.

The love that He communicates in these nonverbal expressions is more than words could convey and brings a peace that nothing else does. It is not that Jesus doesn’t want to guide us and speak to us about our questions and problems, it is just that the starting place for any conversation, for any relationship, must be surrounded by God’s love.

Until we learn to hear and receive this love from God, hearing answers to our questions will be difficult, even impossible. When we surrender our need to hear specific words and answers to specific questions and invite God to love us and communicate with us however He wishes, that is when we will most clearly hear from God.

We may experience God’s loving embrace without knowing it is God. Some people experience great peace when they are alone in the forest. Those good feelings could well be God’s voice of love. Others have a similar experience during a vigorous workout or while running. Some may attribute this feeling of “aliveness” to nothing more than a feeling.

God has created us to experience abundance—“aliveness” —and when we do, it can be that God is speaking to us about His love for us.