Latest / BECOMING | Biblical Truths, Purpose, Identity in Christ, Grow Towards God / 7. The elusive art of letting yourself be loved by God.
Transcript
- Elly Nelly: Hi friends, welcome to Becoming with Ellie Nelly. I'm your host, Ellie Nelly, and this is the Becoming Podcast where every week we talk about different ways that we can become more like the person that God created us and intended us to be. And this week we are tackling something that has come up in my week in my conversations with my friends a lot, which is the elusive art of letting yourself be loved. Yep, it's crazy. The elusive let me say it one more time for the people in the back. The elusive art of letting yourself be loved, specifically by God. A lot of us like it's what we crave the most, being loved, like to be truly loved is like the desire of our heart. It's what would make our souls sing is to be truly loved. But so often we push it away and we put walls up and we block people and we Hide from love, specifically from God. And so today, just thinking about talking with my friends, friends who have lost people, friends who have had to break off relationships, friends who have had to break off friendships, friends who are struggling with am I even ready to date when I'm not sure I can allow myself to be fully loved by God, let alone fully love myself. Like this is a huge thing that we're all all dealing with in one way or another. And I thought it would be great to talk about in our podcast today. So if you are reading along with us, we're going to be in Romans chapter five, verse eight, which is this. God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And this is actually a very, very sweet passage for my heart to be able to speak on, to be able to speak into, because when I was a junior in high school, my mentor worked at the church. She had the job that I would have in the future. and she took specifically me and one under the one other girl under her wing really sweetly and she met with us every I think it was Tuesdays at five at Starbucks and we would talk through different books of the Bible, read through different books of the Bible. And for a month, I think it actually started in November, which is really cool that this is what, like five days before November is when I'm filming this. most people will probably watch it in November that she was like, I really, the Lord's put on my heart to memorize Romans five. And me and the other girl were kind of like, yeah, okay, that's cool. That's what like really good Christians do, but like we're just in high school, like you can't expect that much from us. And she was like very firm. She was like, No, this is gonna be good for us. It's gonna soften our hearts, it's gonna bring us closer to the Lord, it's gonna bring us together. Like, it's really important that we do this. And We did and it was one of the best experiences of my life in a Bible study because memorizing scripture with people having that accountability, having that relational bond is super, super cool. And it definitely called me up in my own walk We did a verse a day for 30 days and it was really hard. It was really, really challenging. And I did all, I think there's 32 verses. In Romans chapter five. and I did all of it. I think I was the only one who finished all of five when we were doing it in November and December, which kind of crazy months to just throw aside being like, Yeah, we're just gonna memorize this, it's no big deal. But we did, and it was beautiful and it was awesome. So to be able to actually talk through a verse that As a junior, my heart wrestled with and sat in and just I just absorbed so much from it. And yet every time I go back to it, the Holy Spirit just brings something new. And so even when I was looking at verses that I feel like would be good to talk about, about being like letting yourself be loved by God, this verse stood out specifically to me because of my time in Romans. And so to know that God chose his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us, he didn't wait until we were the people that we thought we needed to be or the people that he needed us to be before he loved us, before he sent his son to die for us. But that while we were still sinners, while we were in our mess, while we were still dealing with our junk, while we were rotting in our sin, then at that point in time, God loved us and God chose to send his son to die for us. And that's just it's perfect. It's like everything our soul needs to hear, but taking it from our head to our heart and our heart to our head And actually letting that change us is what we're gonna be talking about today. So let's get into it. Let's get into it. So, Romans 5, God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And this whole passage is so good. So I would like to read for us. If you're reading long, you can read long. If you're listening, just go ahead and listen. Romans 5, leading up to verse 8 and probably through 11, because it's just, I just love this. I love this part of the Bible. And so I just want to share with you if you haven't heard it. Romans 5. Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance produces character, and character produces hope. And hopefully. Hope does not put us to shame because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. You see, at just the right time when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will one die for a righteous person, though for a good person, someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from God's wrath through him. For if while we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we also be saved through his life? Not only is this so, but we also boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. That was it. Romans five, one through eleven. So good. And I love that this. This talks about sufferings. It talks about building character. It talks about producing hope. And I think in order to become the person that we're created to be, the Lord has to have the ability to shape off some of our rough edges. He has to have the ability to prune us and mold us and all of those creative visuals that we are given in the Bible that talks about how the Lord is molding and shaping and refining and piecing back together our broken parts. Like When that happens, that often isn't through the easiest of times. It's usually through the hardest of times that that happens. And to invite that and accept that that's happening to us, and not only to just accept that, but to know that it's producing perseverance, it's producing endurance, it's producing character. And all of those things within us are producing hope. And I I love that it says, and hope does not put us to shame, but because God's love has been poured into our hearts. And so We understand that when we suffer for Christ, when we're allowing ourselves to be molded by Him, it's not going to be easy. But in it, we will have hope. hope is a residual aspect of God's love being poured into our hearts. And so thinking about love, thinking about the way that it's poured into our hearts, God chose his love for us in that. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We can look at so many different verses. God is love. Those who do not know God do not know love. John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believed in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. Like God, God is love. Like those those things are two in one. Like, if we do not know God, we do not know love. And so to fully know God is to fully know and experience love. And something that I've been thinking about this week is I've been struggling with. People who are kind and being a kind person myself and going not just to bare minimum kindness, but trying to go above and beyond and to truly serve people, even when I don't feel like it, even when they're not nice. And like that's something that the Lord's put on my heart of like, I need to truly have a servant's heart that rejoices in serving people because that's what he's called me to. And so to know like that, I have to be at a place where I am being loved by God so much that I just overflow with love. And I wasn't, I wasn't always at this place where I was filled up so much that I was overflowing. I think most of my life I I got it fundamentally in my heart. I know that when I accepted Christ, I was saved. Like if it's if something had happened to me, I would gone to heaven. I know that. But I think coming to terms with knowing that I am truly loved by God. And not having an orphan spirit about my relationship with God didn't happen until I was probably late, late in high school, early college. And what I mean by orphan spirit is With God, we feel lost. We like don't let ourselves be adopted by Him because we don't feel like we deserve it. We feel like we need to earn. We feel like we need to do. We feel like we need to be at a specific place or a specific person or specific versions of ourselves. Or we're listening to this podcast to figure out who we're becoming. And we need to become more like that person before we let God love us. Because we don't feel like we've earned it because honestly, we haven't, like we aren't enough. We haven't earned it while we were still sinners. Not while we were less of sinners, not while our sins were not that bad, not while our sins were smaller in the eyes of God than other people's sins, none of that. It says while we were still sinners, while we were still dead in our sin, Christ died for us. that's how God shows his love for us. It's so beautiful. And so thinking about this orphan spirit, I think, at least for me, when I was in junior high, I was still piggybacking off of other people's faith, right? and maybe this is your journey. If you've grown up in the church a while, I feel like, especially working in youth ministry, I see this a lot, like the same consistent patterns of lulls and then same consistent patterns of like intense growth for students, for young women, for young adults up to my age. And so to break it down, I'd be like, when I was in junior high, I kind of got it. I love Jesus. I love coming to youth group. I love my church friends, but my faith wasn't my own. I was still very dependent on other people's faith to fuel my own faith. And I wasn't making independent decisions about my relationship with Lord. by the time I got into high school, things changed, things were different. High school was hard for me as it is for everyone. Welcome to existing. and I got it more. I would say by my junior year of high school, senior year, between my junior and senior year, it like clicked. And I was like, no, I want this for myself. I don't want. I don't just want this because my parents want this. I want this because I want Jesus. Like, I want to love Jesus and I'm going to love Jesus. And in high school, I would get up at 5:30 or 6 in the morning to read my Bible before I went to school. Not every day, but the days that were exceptionally wonderful, that's what I did on those days. And I like made that a priority for myself. Not because my parents were saying, Hey Ellie, you need to get up early, read your Bible before school. Not because it was something I had to do. And for two years I went to a private Christian school. I was reading the Bible in class, but I just wanted more of the Lord. I wanted more. When I was reading Romans five, that's when I was like going crazy reading my Bible every day for like forty-five minutes. Would just sit in my little reading nook, my little cup of coffee, and I would read, read, read, read, read my Bible so long. It seriously. It was like, this is on me. If nobody else is standing up for my faith, if nobody else is making this happen, if no one else is telling me to show up to church on Sundays and invest in my Christian friends, I'm gonna keep doing it anyway. And I think that's when my faith really started to blossom because it was all on me. And I had taken that accountability and that responsibility, and I saw a lot of growth in that season. And then in college, college is where I think I got a little messed up. I I knew about God, conceptually. We talk about this word, like the word to know, you can know formally and then you can know personally. And those are two separate to knows that we've talked about in previous episodes. If you've listened to those, it's in the Hebrew and the Greek, has those two forms of to know, to know someone or to know something. And I knew God formally. I knew about him, I knew about his word. I'd done Bible studies through the whole New Testament. I was learning about the Old Testament. Like I knew things. And so I thought I knew what it meant to be loved. I thought I knew what it looked like to love other people. I thought I knew about love. And I just ran with that. I was like, love is when I feel good. Love is caring for people. not all of my thoughts about love were incorrect because many of them were formed by the Bible, but they were also formed by my broken worldview of the Bible, not God's perfect truth that we can read in the Bible and isn't eroded and distracted by my personal experiences. So I got a little bit messed up thinking, well, when I love people, I should feel good all the time. And if I don't feel good, then it's not always love. and I started to think this way. And I thought I like walked around proud because I'm a Christian and I work at the youth group and I help with students and I know what love is and I know God and I know this and I know that. And I started to make my relationship with God all about me and not about God. And I got kind of messed up in my way of thinking. And I don't think that's I don't think that's true for all college students, but I think a lot of times when you do go to college, you're Thinking is tested, like what you believe is tested. And I think for a lot of people, just thinking about the context of going to college, that era of life, of moving away from your hometown, being plucked up and put somewhere else. Like in the Bible, we read about these quote unquote wilderness seasons that people go on, like the people of Israel in their wilderness season, out of Egypt in their wilderness season, Jesus in the in the wilderness for 40 days in his wilderness season. Like, and it's a time of Testing, what do you really believe in? And I think college is that time for a lot of people where you get plucked up from your roots, from your hometown, from everything that you're comfortable with, and you get tossed out into the wilderness and you're tested. What do you really believe? What do you really think when all these other things and these wild ideas and the dark comes? And what do you think then? Like, what are you truly standing on? And I was standing on the Bible, and I was also standing on my my own. good graces, if you would say, or my own ability, my own knowledge. And it kind of messed me up. And I think as a young adult, the Lord has used journey, he's used people in my life. He's used definitely my husband Jacob, who was my boyfriend and then my fiance and then my husband to help teach me what it's like to be loved by God and to love others out of the love that we're receiving. And I think that's where we're supposed to end up is in this place of ownership, responsibility, where we make things our own. And every once in a while we do get thrust into a wilderness season. And I think it's easy to see these cycles and these rhythms, especially in our youth when things are predictable, when things have structure. And then you become an adult and then you're like young, adult, adult, old. And it's all just kind of in one rushing motion. And you could fall anywhere into that. And it's not as predictable. And I think that's what I'm personally struggling with now is like I don't like I can't see the quote unquote next step or I might be falling into a wilderness season, I might be in a great pattern of growth. Like I don't know what this looks like, and it's scary and it's new and it's wonderful, And so thinking about truly learning to be loved from God. how do we do that? How do we I can talk about it and say, well, while you were sinning, like who you are right now, God loves you. And if you've heard it once, you've heard it a thousand times. And so I wrote down just a little bit of a different, a specific way that I think changed my opinion, having these attributes. So accepting, these are verbs, accepting, which is an action. You have to accept love. You actually have to take action to receive something. Can't be passive, you have to put work in. Accepting with humility and gratitude the unearnable and unlosable love of God. I think that's that's the art of the elusive art of letting yourself be loved, is accepting with humility and gratitude the unearnable and unlosable love of God. Now, why I think we need humility is because If we have pride in our love, then it makes it about us. It it I would fall back into the trap of I'm so great, I know so much, I'm so wonderful, and then it makes it about me. And love, I am not capable of perfect love. I am not capable of sharing perfect love because I'm broken. And sadly, you're not capable of perfect love, and you're not capable of sharing perfect love either because you're broken. And so to have the humility to say, I can't on my own, but I can. when God's in charge and to to kind of laying down your pride at the feet of the Father and saying, Lord, in my humility, I would relish the experience of your love. And the second thing, going to the Lord with gratitude, because we can try to earn and earn and do and do and we cannot, like the unearnable, unlosable love of God. And what I mean by unearnable is there's nothing we can do to earn it. There's nothing we can do to deserve it. We deserve to go straight to hell. We have earned the death penalty, which is to be excluded from the love of God forever, which is hell. that's what we deserve. That is the trajectory that every single person you see every single day, eight billion people on this planet. That is the way everybody's life should go, except for the people who encounter Jesus, have a heart change, and that completely turns their life around. I think people can get worried, like really going all in, really letting down. your pride and your expectations and the things that you're putting on yourself, really just showing up as you are. what if I think you may be thinking, what if I wasn't good enough that I could lose it? I think it was one of the pastors here at our church and he was asked Can you lose your salvation? And he said, if you don't have anything to do with earning it, you can't have anything to do with losing it. And God's character in the Bible shows that that's not something that he's about. And I really like that. If I don't have anything to do with earning my salvation, if I can't accumulate enough things, then I can never unaccumulate enough things to lose it. You can never, there's nothing that's out of your control, you know. I think we have these worries and these big questions about. God's character and it comes down to the fact that God is love, and while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And that's how God shows his love. God shows his love to us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That's it. It I we so overcomplicate the Bible. we do, but God just wants to love us. And until we're loved, how could we possibly expect to be loved by others? So Not to get into our growth work, but to explain some things that I want. I hope you guys have the time and the margin to think through today is are you in? Like, are you 100% in on your faith? If nobody else ever asked you about Jesus, would you still be reading your Bible? Would you still be praying? Would you still be seeking out discipleship and evangelizing and loving the Lord and having joy in all circumstances? Like, would you still? If no one was there? Would you still, if no one was asking? Would you still if no one was showing up for you in the ways that they are right now? would you still? That's what it means to be 100% in. Would you still? If you're past that stage, then are you in the stage of wrestling with letting go of your version of love and grasping onto the Bible's version of love? Like it tells us love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, love does not boast. Love does not rejoice in wrongdoings. I can't say that I truly love someone and then be praying on their downfall, which is something that I've had to learn to let go of my imperfect version of love to understand what love can truly be. And sometimes it's hard. Love is hard. I think dying on the cross for us out of love was hard, but It's worth it and it's beautiful and it's the most life giving thing to experience the love of God and to be able to share that with other people is I don't know, it's just filling for your soul. Your soul just sings when you experience love. so if you are still holding on to your own idea of love or like being well, everyone else is held to the Bible's, you know, rules, quote unquote, or the Bible's ways of love. But I hold myself to a different standard, slightly different. You know, like are you not playing by the own rules you hold other people to when it comes to love? Because if it's not these rules, Not gonna go well. Sorry to say, but it's not gonna go well. And then the last one is are you accepting and offering love? Like are you humbly sitting at the feet of the Lord, accepting his love, and then offering it back to him so that he can use it to bless other people? and I think this kind of where I've shied away from talking about dating and dating things, but in the world that we're living in, relationships are real. And Paul says, don't get married if you don't have to. And I think marriage is pretty great. So I'm very pro-marriage. But I think about dating and all of my friends who are either single or dating or married, or my young friends who aren't even dating yet, like this is a lot. And the Bible, like dating wasn't a thing in the Bible, but like God chose us how to love each other. And I think we can look at that and get a very clear picture about what dating should be. To think about love. before we even think about is he or she capable of loving me the way that I want to be loved, we have to look at ourselves and go, Am I receiving the love of God? If you are not receiving the love of God, stop. Stop where you are. And if you're not receiving the love of God, then you have nothing to love someone else with. Like if you want to share with them deeply broken, deeply imperfect, deeply tragic, deeply harsh, deeply misunderstood love, then you can you can will and muster up something that kind of looks like love on your own. But you can't honestly create within yourself love because God is love and he is perfect and we are not. And so we cannot create this thing within ourselves to share with other people. We can't. And so we have to be receiving love from the Lord and over And in in such an abundance that it's not taking out of our being filled up, but that we have so much that it's overflowing out of us. And that's what is loving other people. And thinking about dating, like, are you in a good spot to be dating someone? And are they in a good spot to be dating you if you both aren't being filled up by the Lord with overflow? Like, I think that can answer like. Almost every dating question of should we be dating? Is this the right person for me? I don't know in this season, are you being filled up by the Lord enough that both of you are overflowing with the love of God? If you are, then you will have enough love to to share with the other person. Like someone said when I was getting married, it's not a hundred, you aren't loving to a hundred percent because if someone's less than a hundred percent, if I'm only able to give 30 and Jacob's only able to give 30, then we're still not at 100%. Like you're loving up to 100% each. That way, if a one of you is lacking a little, there's still an abundance of love in your marriage. like in dating, are you being so filled up by the Lord? Are you accepting an offering? Are you accepting an outpouring so much that you could genuinely fill another person's cup just with the overflow? It's a great question. And then the the second part of that question is, is the person that you are interested in dating, the person that you are interested in being in a relationship with, are they in the same spot? Because if they aren't, they're gonna love you so imperfectly that you're gonna have to leave. I know that's probably not what you want to hear, but if they're not loving, being loved by God enough and in a way that's overflowing, they actually cannot will themselves to create love inside of themselves that is perfect enough to share with you in the way that the Lord calls us to love each other. the Lord says that if someone asks for your coat that you give them the shirt off of your back too, like that's loving. That's going just above and beyond. the worldly standards of love. So if we aren't capable of even giving the coat off of our back for someone else and we're called to give our shirt too, how can we will that up inside of ourselves to do that for someone else? we can't without the Lord. all that to say, I hope that you're able to pray about and honestly. Look up verses. First of all, identify where you think you are. Are you 100% in? Are you wrestling with letting go of your own version of love? And are you accepting and overflowing your love to other people? identify that and then just sit in verses that talk about God's love. Like the more I read about the Lord's love for me and my life, the more I get fired up on the fact that I can walk around with confidence, knowing that I am completely loved by God. Even if my husband is having a hard day, even if my friends are having a hard day, even if my parents are having a hard day, if other people are only giving me imperfect love, I can wake up every day filled with a smile on my face, ready to serve, ready to be kind, knowing that I have been fully loved, filled with the love of God, and that is more than enough for today. And so I hope that as I'm learning to do this, that you guys can learn to do this too. As we grow together to become more like the person that God has created us to be. So I pray the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you and be gracious to you this week. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, notes, or nuggets, feel free to DM me. I am at Becoming with Ellie Nelly. That's with the Y, Ellie with the Y, Nelly with a Y on Instagram and TikTok. I'm on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube. That being said, I will see you all next week. Bye.