David Benner writes (Surrender to Love, p. 85): “The point of God’s love is to remake us in his image of love … God wants us to make his life ours, his heart ours, his love ours. He wants us to be—like him—characterized by love … Love is the acid test of Christian spirituality. If Christian conversion is authentic, we are in a process of becoming more loving. If we are not becoming more loving, something is seriously wrong.”
In Eph. 3:14-21 Paul encourages us to pray so we can experience God’s love and in praying we get to know God better, thus not the other way around. So how we pray, how often we pray, and the depths of our prayer reveal how much we know or experience God’s love in our lives.
It’s a love that empowers us to surrender all to Jesus with the enabling of the Holy Spirit.
It’s a love that helps us to understand the magnitude of God’s sovereign goodness, i.e., He knows exactly what He is doing, and our faith is therefore strengthened in His good purposes and plans for this life and the life to come.
It’s a love that nurtures and matures us so that others will see God’s presence and power in our personal lives as well as in our corporate gatherings.
