God's Goal For Us: Unhindered Love

About a month ago, in my prayer time, I asked the Lord to speak to me about the next three months. He had some things to say, and I took notes so I would remember. For those of you who are new to this blog, when I say God said something, I mean He made Himself known. Just as our physical body has senses, we also have spirit and soul receptors. To be human is to have three woven together parts: body, soul, and spirit. We have senses in all of those parts. Many of us are more in tune with the senses for our body, since we spend the majority of our consciousness in the natural realm, where the physical body dwells. God knows how to make things known to His children. I go into the ways God speaks and makes Himself known in this blog.

Unhindered Love is God's Goal for each of us

I asked Him to speak to me about the next three months, and I felt Him say:

“I love you. Focus on my love for you. Let My love sink into your bones, into the deepest parts of your soul, let me shine more light into the deep parts and corners. There is more hiding in there behind walls and corners. Unhindered love. My goal for you is unhindered love. Unhindered love flowing to you, through you, and from you.”

At first, there was a little part of me that was bummed. I was hoping He would tell me some top-secret strategy, or bring me into the War Room of Heaven and let me scamper around the table looking over everyone’s shoulder and stealing their notes. I’m fairly skilled at conversing with God, so I realized that even though I was a little bummed, His message was still profound. I do know that God loves me. But, if I know that and He is still saying it, there’s more He has to say about it. He will repeat it until I understand. So I leaned in. Curiously, I asked Him about unhindered love, and what it looks like for me to focus on His love. When I quieted myself, leaned in, and started to allow Him to talk to me about sitting in His love, He started sharing with me about unhindered love.

What is Unhindered Love?

Unhindered love is love that can flow to me, through me, and from me to another person. I have been on a journey of dealing with some inner healing in my heart, so I understood that sometimes God is pouring His love on me, but I don’t have any way to receive it because of hurts, walls, boundaries, scars, or things I’ve built in my belief system that I sometimes don’t even realize are there. For the longest time, I didn’t believe I was worthy of love, and that belief acted like an umbrella that kept God’s love out of my inner being. Until I dealt with the lie my heart believed, I wasn’t able to receive what God was freely and liberally pouring out on me. Little by little, brick by brick, my heart exchanged the lie for His Truth.

The Lie: I’m not worthy of love.

His Truth: God loves me, and I can’t do anything to earn it. He just does, because that’s who He is. There’s nothing I can do that can ever make Him love me more, and there’s nothing I can do that can ever make Him love me any less.

He’s great at identifying places we need help. Sometimes, our thought processes are so familiar to us, we don’t notice there’s a problem. In another instance, God helped me identify a pattern in my life that wasn’t healthy. When I asked Him to show me what I believed that was causing that pattern, He showed me that I had a belief that I wasn’t worthy of people telling me the truth. After that, with the help of someone who understands heart healing, I was able to identify the time in my childhood that belief was formed (I was shocked, I had no idea the event produced a lie hiding in my belief system), with the help of the Holy Spirit we dismantled the lie and replaced it with His truth, (I am worthy of knowing the truth. I am trustworthy. He trusts me with His people, with His secrets.), and heal my thought processes. Now, with little effort, I no longer struggle with that particular unhealthy pattern. Belief Rehab: You Are Enough has some strategies to help us identify lies, replace them with truth, and walk in His purposes. Our mindset is a set of a beliefs that predetermines responses. When we reprogram our beliefs, we reshape our lives.

Back to unhindered love: The Lord started showing me how each of us is a pipeline, and we, every believer, are all interconnected. God is the source of all love. “Dear friends, let us love one another because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8 CSB) God is the source of the pipeline, and in the picture He showed me, love was flowing from Him, to us, through each of us, and on to the next. Then, He zoomed in a little bit and I could see there were little valves in each pipe. The pipeline was a close-knit intricately interconnected system with lots of bends, splices and Y-connectors. Each segment of pipe represented a brother or sister in the body of Christ, and each of us had the ability to close the valve either before it got to us, inside us, or to stop the flow leaving us and going to the next.

Can Hinderances Be Removed?

I asked the Lord, and He confirmed there are three places the flow generally gets stopped. In the spirit, He pulled back the edge of a curtain to show me some of the hinderances. To illustrate: when we feel unworthy, the valve gets closed before His love can reach us. Remember, the love belongs to and comes from Him, but it flows from a person (a segment of pipeline) to me, then through me, and then to another person (another segment of pipeline). God always uses people to accomplish His purposes. “Surely the Lord GOD does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets.” (Amos 3:7 NKJV) From using Moses to deliver His people to using Ananias to lay hands on Saul to restore his sight, the whole bible is full of God using ordinary people to accomplish His purposes.

Another example: when we intentionally remain in addiction (where we know we should but we don’t want help), whether it’s food, social media, porn, or drugs, we don’t ask, allow, or invite Him to come into our inner being and have His way. When we are too busy having our own way, we turn off the valve in our pipe. It can also happen when we are stubborn and think we know everything (prideful), or if we have ignored the nudging of God for a period of time, so we end up with eyes that don’t see, ears that don’t hear, and hearts that don’t respond to Him anymore. We can unintentionally find ourselves in situation where we can receive the love of God initially, but it doesn’t have a chance to do any sort of transforming work because it isn’t allowed access to our inner depths.

The last type of hinderance the Lord showed me was the one where we turn off the valve after we receive it, it has permission to do a transforming work, but before it can flow out to other people. God showed me this last hindrance has to do with fear, judgement, and lies we believe. It can happen when we have made judgements about others. When we put ourselves in the judge seat and decide someone doesn’t deserve God’s love because ___fill in the blank__, we turn off the valve of His love that flows to them. When we have traumas in our past that have caused us to believe that any love has to be earned, therefore it can be revoked, we turn off the valve that is supposed to flow towards someone else. Remember, all love is from God. If we believe human love has to be earned, we probably believe we have to earn God’s love, as well. We don’t even realize we do it, but we cut people off from receiving His love because we don’t agree with their political party, their sexual orientation, their voting behaviors, their tattoos, their addictions, their pasttimes, or a million other things. When fear takes over, we self protect and self promote. When we self protect and self promote, we close that valve of love that God intends to flow to us, through us, and from us to others. These are just a few of the hindrances God showed me when He pulled back the curtain.

It’s a lot to process, and I’m still unpacking it myself. I know God wants to do a work in His church, and we have the opportunity to say Lord, start with me. He wants to teach us to recognize when we have those valves closed or at a reduced flow. He wants to heal us and help us be the flourishing, loving, reaching the world with the Love of Jesus that He created His Church to be. We are living stones, being built together. We are His Bride. I believe that He is walking us towards His commandment to “Love one another.” (John 13:34, John 13:35, John 15:12) Jesus said, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” (John 13:35) This is still His heart, but I think sometimes we get a little off track.

Prayer

Lord, thank You for not giving up on us and walking us through how to love one another the way You want for us to love. Help us to be unhindered vessels, wide open pipelines for Your love to flow to us, through us, and from us to one another. Walk us out of the lies we believe and into Your truth. Help us to value one another and allow ourselves to be intricately interconnected with one another by Your beautiful design.