This post is based off of the book “The Knowledge of the Holy” by A. W. Tozer.

We sing a lot of songs about the love of God. In fact, of all of God’s attributes it is probably what we sing about the most. We sing about God’s other attributes as well, but not nearly as much as we sing about God’s love. Why is this? Why are there so many songs about the love of God? Maybe because it’s mentioned so many times in His Word. The word mercy appears 124 times in the NIV version of the Bible. Grace 127. Hope 174. Faith appears 422 times, but that is nothing compared to love. Love appears 699 times. God, in His Word, goes out of His way over and over again to tell us how much He loves us. The apostle Paul sums up this fact in his letter to the Ephesians when he writes, “May you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep is the love of God.”

I believe there are two main responses that Christians have to God’s love. The first is people who struggle with the fact that God loves them. These are people who recognize that they are horrible sinners and don’t believe they are worthy of God’s love. This category also contains the people who try to earn God’s love. They feel like they have to do a lot of really good things in order for God to accept them, and when they eventually fall short they walk around feeling defeated and assume God is angry with them. Either way both groups struggle to believe that God actually loves them.

On the other side you have people who almost feel like they deserve God’s love. If both your parents were Christians, you went to church your entire life, you were saved before the age of ten, you didn’t do anything terrible in college, now have a Christian spouse and take your kids to church, you might fall into this category. Overall you’re a pretty good person, and that is what keeps you from understanding God’s love. That is tragic. It’s tragic because understanding how much God loves us is essential to worship. Gratitude is the heart of worship. Christian worship is the heart’s response to the overwhelming realization of how much God loves us and if you aren’t overwhelmed you don’t have much to be grateful for. To understand God’s love we have to understand how evil we are in God’s sight. John Piper says that we must understand that God finds us loathsome in order to grasp how awesome salvation is. Until then we won’t be as stunned by what He did for us. God finds our sin reprehensible just like we find murderers, rapists, or Adolf Hitler reprehensible. Christ died for all of us including the Adolf Hitlers of the world, and we are not any higher in God’s sight than Adolf. Even if we are the least sinful people on the planet, we still don’t get into heaven. We are no closer to being worthy of eternity with God than anyone else on this earth.

To be worshippers and worship leaders it is essential to understand how much God loves us, because that’s where worship comes from: a grateful, forgiven heart. We ought to be stunned by the sacrifice that Christ made, and when we reach that point our hearts are truly engaged in worship. After reading this chapter, I believe one of Tozer’s main points can help us realize how stunning God’s love is. One characteristic of love is that it takes pleasure in its object. This is true of God’s love because, as the apostle John tells us, God’s purpose in creation was His own pleasure. Psalm 104 says, “The glory of the Lord shall endure forever: the Lord shall rejoice in His works.” God rejoices over His creation; He takes pleasure in His saints. So many of us have the idea that God is constantly angry with us. Part of this feeling comes from our own personal experience with our earthly fathers. Fathers have a big responsibility. The way we view God, who is our heavenly Father, is based a lot on the relationship with our own fathers and how many times did you do something wrong as a kid and hear your mom say, “Just wait until your father gets home?” That was the worst! The whole day was filled with dread. That is not an accurate representation of our relationship with God. In the book of Zephaniah it says that God “rejoices over us with singing.” Singing is both an expression and source of pleasure. In our few glimpses of heaven from the book of Revelation, what is it filled with? People singing. Hell is not a place of singing. No one will be singing while they’re burning in a lake of fire. But God rejoices over us with singing. He’s not mad at us. Love takes pleasure in its object, and we are a source of God’s pleasure because we are the object of God’s love. That’s an interesting thought isn’t it? You are a source of God’s pleasure. I find that to be absolutely stunning.

Categories: Paul Austin The Knowledge Of The Holy

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