I felt the love of God before but over the years those feelings seem to have disappeared. Where has God gone? Is He still with me?
Answer:
If you are a Christian, God is always with you.
Let’s start with the easy question. Will God ever abandon you? Jesus’ promise to us is that he will ‘surely be with us always to the very end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20). The Bible says that ‘God has said ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ (Hebrews 13:5) Therefore, if you have put your faith in Jesus to save you, God’s promise is that He will not abandon you or leave you. In other words, God is with you. He is still with you. He has not gone anywhere. He is as close to you as He possibly can be.
Your question might be—if God claims to be with me why can I not feel Him or His love?
The Bible gives a straightforward answer to this in Romans 5:1-5: ‘Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in hope … And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out His love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom He has given us.’
Very simply this passage states a number of facts: (1) I have already been justified and made righteous in God’s eyes (2) I have peace with God (3) I have access into the place of God’s grace (4) In the light of understanding (1) – (3) I rejoice and I am not disappointed (5) God has already poured His love into my heart (6) The Holy Spirit (who is God) is the agent of God’s love.
You cannot arrive at points (4) and (5) by avoiding points (1) – (3). You already have God’s love. If you reconcile yourself with the fact that God sees you as righteous, that you have peace with God, and that you have access into the place where He is, it will produce hope, rejoicing and an experience of God’s love in the Holy Spirit. Concentrate your attention on what God has done for you through Jesus and you and it is inevitable that you will feel His love in your heart.
Other reasons why people feel that God is distant or not talking to them include: 1) Unrepentant sin – Harbouring unrepentant sin causes us to pull away form God in order to maintain the sin. Sometimes such sin is not even acknowledged by the sinner. Ask God to reveal sin in your heart and empower you to put it away. 2) Misunderstanding God’s character – if you have the wrong concept of who God is, it will be very hard to realise that He is in fact talking to you and close to you. Learn more about God’s true character from this article. 3) Misunderstanding how God loves us and relates to us – some people expect, hope or demand that God show Himself miraculously or in a certain way. When God reaches out to such people by other methods, they think that He is distant. 4) Misunderstanding what love is – some of us think that love is just a passionate feeling, or an emotion. Therefore when we don’t experience these things, we think that we are not being loved. 1 John 4 tells us what love truly is. God does indeed love His children all the time.
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