If you asked some people, “What do you want most in life?” a common answer might be “to feel really loved by someone I’m close to.” We can get by without a lot of money, or a big house, or even a job to our liking, but to go through life without being close to someone, and loved—that’s really hard.
It’s not surprising that it’s hard. We were made to be close and loved, and if we aren’t experiencing that, something vital is missing. We feel it.
Starting in our teens, most of us begin looking for that one person who will give us that love. But sooner or later, we end up realizing that no one person can actually do that. Being in a good relationship is great, but our need to be loved is too deep for the finite, imperfect love of people to ultimately fulfill.
God knew this. He knew that we could only be fulfilled by his love. But we couldn’t be fulfilled by a love that was far off—God loving us from a distance. No, we had to be close to him. Really close.
So under his new arrangement, God promised this:
“They will not teach again, each man his neighbor and each man his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest of them.” (Jeremiah 31:34)
The Hebrew word “know” means having an intimate knowledge of, an experiential knowledge of. It’s the word used in the Bible for sexual intercourse, as in “Jacob knew his wife Rachel, and she bore him a son.” That’s intimate knowledge. That’s closeness.
God’s answer to our need to be close to him is to make us close to him—as close as we can possibly be. It’s not something we produce ourselves. It’s totally a gift.
Right before he started his journey to the cross, Jesus asked the Father for two final things. The first was this: he asked that God the Father would make us one with himself and Jesus, just as the Father and Jesus were already one. In other words, he asked that we would have ultimate closeness with God.
God answers that prayer when we put our faith in Christ. He births a new spirit within us, and then he comes to live in us. And when that happens, as the Apostle Paul wrote, we “become one spirit with him.”
We can’t get any closer to God than that. We may or may not feel close at any given moment, but feelings only tell us how we’re perceiving something, not the truth about it. The truth is, we are close to God, regardless of whether we feel it or not.
Why is that so vital? Because it means we aren’t striving to create something—closeness to God—that’s missing. Never again do we have to try to become close to God. We’re already close to him. As close as we can get. Not surprisingly, counting on that reality is the key to experiencing our closeness with God more deeply.
This is how everything works under the new arrangement. God does it, and we learn to walk in what’s already true. The critical thing is not that we feel close to God at any given moment, it’s that we are close to God at every moment.
If you think about it, that makes total sense. You’re in a relationship with someone. But you’re never quite sure where you stand. You always have to put your best foot forward, always have to be on guard to say and do the right thing. You want to be close, but the truth is you’re having to try too hard. You’re still wearing a mask. You’re forcing it. It’s not flowing naturally. Honestly, who wants to be in that kind of relationship? Who could ever get truly close in that relationship?
Unfortunately, this is exactly how so many people relate to God.
But under his new arrangement, God has bypassed all of that. We don’t ever have to worry about any of that with God. We’re already as close as we can be, and that will never, ever change. We can relax, and simply grow in getting to know God.
And what will we discover as we get to know him? We will discover that we are, at all times, being perfectly loved by the one who is closest to us.
God is love. His nature is to love. Always. Perfectly. If the Creator God is our God, it means that we are always being loved perfectly. The Bible says God loved us before we were born—from eternity past. In love he knit us in our mother’s womb. In love he gave birth to us—the new birth his Spirit gives to our new spirit. More than anything, God shows us his love by sacrificing himself for us. God the Father sent God the Son to die for our sins, personally.
But God’s love for us is not an external thing, with God loving us from afar. Just the opposite. Remember how Jesus asked the Father for two things before he went to the cross? The second thing Jesus asked was this: that the Father would put his love—the exact same love he has for Jesus—inside us. This incredible, infinite love that the Father and the Son have shared for all eternity, it’s inside you. And inside me. God himself has come to live in us, and with his presence comes his perfect love.
What does this mean for us personally? In the same way that we can always count on our closeness to God, we can always count on being perfectly loved by God. His love is in us, and he’s not going anywhere! Our emotions may not confirm that at any given moment, and our circumstances may not look like that, but that is the reality. It’s the rock that we can always stand on.
But I still don’t feel close to God or very loved by God, you might say. OK, fair enough, I can totally relate to that. I’ve spent much of my life not feeling very close to God, or loved by God, even though I wanted to.
This is where, once again, Christ in us is key. Because when Jesus prayed that the Father would make us one with himself, and put his love inside us, he tied those two things together. And I have found that, for me, they go hand in hand. As I know, in my actual experience, the reality of Christ in me, the love of God becomes my experienced reality as well. With the total assurance that God himself is the one living in me comes the assurance as well that I am, right now, being perfectly loved. We settle into the reality that Christ is the one living in and through us. And as we do, we settle into God’s love. His love becomes our home, the place we hang out. And that’s an incredible thing.
It’s my prayer that you will come to know the depths of God’s love for you, too—a lot sooner than I did. Ask him to make his love, and him living in you, a daily reality in your life.
Here are some of the places in the Bible where God explains what we just discussed:
We are as close to God as we can: “But the one who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with Him.” (1 Corinthians 6:17)
God is love: “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (1 John 4:8)
God loves us deeply and wants us to know his love: “For You formed my inward parts;
You wove me in my mother’s womb. I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made …” (Psalm 139:13-14a)
Also, “… just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.” (Ephesians 1:4-6)
Also, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8)
Also, “… that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:17b-19)
Christ living in us shows us the fullness of God’s love: “‘… I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me.… and I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them.’” (John 17:23, 26)
