What Does It Really Mean To Be Fully Loved?

Ever since I was little I’ve had to split my heart in two. Two places, two families, two worlds that I worked hard to ensure would never collide and create the catastrophic WWIII that everyone whispers about.

While I deemed this mental and physical differentiation necessary at the time, it only became a detriment to my emotional growth as I became older. I always felt like neither side fully knew me, they couldn’t after all, and how was I supposed to share stories with these sides that would only bring back repressed nostalgia and incur a hampered walk down the dreary memory lane that existed even before I did?

My parents are special. All of them. All four of them. All of my family is beautiful — from the West Coast where I call home to the big, boisterous, family who are also my good, life-long friends on the East Coast. But that beauty alone wasn’t enough to bridge the gap between the two worlds I categorically separated within me.

Yesterday I was walking around praying for people on the streets with a great ministry started by a friend of mine called Go DC. The heart behind this mission is to train and equip ordinary Christians to pray over and heal people, and let the Holy Spirit direct us to whomever needs prayer (which, by the way, is everyone. Everyone needs prayer. It’s how we talk to God, and God wants to talk to us, through his creation ~us~, and so everyone always needs prayer, and should want prayer! I know I do, physically, mentally, emotionally, all of it), and amazing miracles happen on top of prayers for blessing and encouragement.

While I was walking around with one of my newfound friends, Lori, we prayed for a woman who was in her 60’s. She had knee pain, so we prayed over her knee but couldn’t tell if it was fully healed because she says it comes and goes. But then she opened up more to us, and told us that she had long suffered a separation from her family, specifically from her children. When we prayed over her, God told me to tell her a simple word: “reconciliation.” She received it ordinarily in my opinion, but I didn’t know her heart and her mind, only God did.

But that’s one of the biggest points of love, isn’t it? It’s reconciliation. According to Merriam-Webster, “reconciliation” means: “to be reconciled,” and to “reconcile” means “to restore to friendship or harmony//to make consistent or congruous//to cause to submit to or accept something unpleasant.” Jesus’ love for us is to reconcile us with God — to restore us to friendship and harmony with our Father in heaven.

I guess this begs the pointed question — what does it mean to be loved? Fully loved. Truly loved. Unconditionally, irrationally, absolutely loved?

There can be no true love without the love of Jesus. There are many examples of artificial “love”; “love” for a time that satisfies until something turns out unplanned and you give up and move onto the next “love”; “love” you thought was full and heartfelt until a person or a group of people decide you are no longer good enough and abandon you; halfway “love” that you can’t fully commit to; being on the other end of a halfway “love” and expecting rejection around every corner; “love” based on lies only to see it dissolve like sand beneath your feet; “love” for something that turns out to be fleeted passion, quickly becoming abandoned and forgotten; strong commitments based on quick decisions without pillars of defense, strength, and understanding to hold them up; immediate passions satisfied in the name of “love” only to burden you for years to come… The list could really go on, but in the Gospel of John, Jesus said, “The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them.” He says in the very next chapter (15), “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you.” And of course, I could not forget to showcase one of my most favorite verses in the Bible when talking about God’s love for us: “We love because He first loved us.” — 1 John 4:19.

If no one has told you this, it is my honor to be the first, or if someone has told you this then let me have the pleasure of reminding you — true love has priorities, and love does not set them aside. Real love is not something you buy at a cheap discount. If that’s the case, then it’s not love at all. It’s a manipulated, fake attempt at trying to garner your attention and emotional connection. Real love is full and honest and comes with a set of standards that cannot be ignored or diminished. Love fully knows you, and does not seek to hurt you. Love has your best interest at heart and will always stand by you when you need it. Love will never lead you to depression, love will never lead you to despair. Love will never lead you to doubt, hurt, insecurity, confusion, pain, questioning, uncertainty, or anything like it. Love is pure and honest and true and leads you to live your life to the fullest in the way our Father in heaven has created you to be, and to love others through the gifts, both spiritual and physical (yes, everyone has both spiritual and physical gifts) that God knew we would have even before we discovered them for ourselves.

1 Corinthians 13 has been coming up all over the place in my life lately. Verse 12 in the NIV version reads, “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” We are FULLY KNOWN — praise JESUS! I know I can give thanks so, so much for this fully, undeserved, but freely given love that Jesus gives. Dissecting my life into two halves of me and hiding both sides from each family certainly made me feel less than full. The worst part of it all is that the enemy (if you’re not familiar with the “enemy” in Christian lingo, it means the devil and his cohorts, and yes these kinds of lies are going on all around us. If you’d like me to write on this more, let me know and I would love to!) convinced me it was normal to live this way. I was living half full for a long time, trying so hard in everything else to feel full without tending to my own limping spirit and allowing Jesus to fully step in and fill it with his own presence in my life.

There are so many times in the Bible that God tell us he loves us and fully knows us. The word “love” appears in the King James Version of the Bible more than 300 times!

If you are still wondering how deep and personal God’s love is for us, in 1 Chronicles, God tells us, “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good. His love endures forever.” FOREVER! Meaning, His love doesn’t give up when it gets tired of you. It doesn’t forget you. In fact, it pursues you, because it has to, because that’s it’s nature. It pursues you and loves you deeper than it did before, even though it’s always loved you as deeply as it could but you personally discover more of that love for yourself when you realize this love is free and available. Even more, 1 John 4:7–8 says, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

I was at a great conference one night this weekend, and the speaker was one of the main guys from the healing rooms at Bethel church. He described a particular verse in a way that I had not heard before, and it was beautiful because this verse has been on and off my mind for the last few months. “Be still and know that I am God,” it says in Psalm 46:10. The speaker, Chuck Parry, said in the original Hebrew text of this verse, that sentence is only three words, and they literally mean to “quit and be intimate with the whole God.” To expand on this idea, it means to quit trying to figure out everything in your own personal and human strength, and to sit and just receive personal and intimate knowledge and share that communication with Elohim, the plural majesty of God. In this verse, God is telling us to let God love us. It may be easy to love God at times and to do things, but it might be hard to simply let God love us. And so he wants to do that — he wants to just love you! He wants to just love me too. Remember, 1 John says, “God is love.” He IS love! Literally, he embodies it. So he just wants to take you in and love you, pursue you, and never give up on you in a way that you cannot find elsewhere but only in God since he actually is that love we want to feel and know and are looking for.

Be secure in the love that Jesus has for you. After all, “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Can you believe that? God loved us SO much that he couldn’t stand us being in anguish anymore and sacrificed his son, his ONLY son that he loved and cherished, who had been with him from before time and who shared his heart, so that we as a people could be reconciled with Him, and so that his original plan for humanity to walk with him and be close with him and share in his presence could be restored. And guess what guys — that’s not a life for after this life. That “life” that God talks about in that verse, that’s our life right NOW! This love is yours and he loves you so much. There is nothing like kneeling before the Lord before you go to bed and just asking for his love, and telling him that you love him because he is good and knows you fully and knows your hurts and desires and your aspirations better than anyone else can because he specifically placed those good things in your life and wants to and can fix those pains and hurts and questions that you are dealing with. Jesus isn’t a figment of your imagination. He is real, and he is here. He is your friend — he is my friend. And above all, He is my greatest love. And that love is reciprocal, because we only love since He first loved us and created all of us, our unique personalities and roles in life, out of that love.

This is what it means to be fully loved. Nothing else can compare with it. “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find,” it says in Matthew 7:7. “Knock and the door will be opened to you.” It is so good to know this guys, even when we doubt the love God has for us and seek it elsewhere. Ask for this love — and receive it freely, because like God told us, it’s already ours.