If you love Me, keep My commandments. --- John 14:15. We must be careful not to define loving God according to our own ideas. Loving God is not to be defined according to human sentiment. We must define loving God as God defines it. Any other definition of love is a deception. We can only truly love God within the boundaries of pursuing to obey Him. Pursuing obedience is not necessarily the same thing as attaining obedience. The may still be areas in which we fall short, but if we are pursuing 100% obedience, our love is still genuine. When we love God as He defines it, God will release the manifestation of His presence and of His love in our life. While it is true that God has love for the believer and the unbeliever, only believers can enter into the fullness of God's heart for them. The unbeliever must respond to God before they are able to experience the full manifestation of His heart for them He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him. --- John 14:21. When we live in agreement with God's heart, we are not earning His love. We are simply positioning ourselves to receive the love He already desires to manifest to us. There are areas of blessing that God will only release as we live in unity with His heart. God will always stay true to His own character. His attributes of love, holiness, justice, etc. do not change. Therefore, to experience them we must live in agreement with Him. When we were born again, we became the habitation of God's Spirit. The Holy Spirit will help us and teach us as we pursue a life of obedience. We can talk to Him, ask Him for help, and ask Him for insight. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. --- John 14:26.     CONFIDENCE IN GOD'S LOVE FOR US AS WE MATURE God desires deep partnership with His people. He runs His Kingdom through cooperation. We cannot do God's part, and God will not do our part. We must not neglect to pray, to grow in faith, to obey, etc. If we were to be negligent in these ways, we would be trusting in God's sovereignty in an unbiblical way. Only you can love God with all your heart. God cannot do it for you. We must watch over and guard our heart with all diligence. No one else can guard your heart, but you; God will not do it for you. He will help you guard your heart, but He will always honor your free will. Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life. --- Proverbs 4:23 It is important for us to know the truth about how God feels about us, particularly when we see areas of darkness in our lives. Our hearts must be anchored in the reality of His love. This is what God has communicated to us through His word to equip us in our times of weakness. The devil wants us to lose sight of God's love because he wants us to shrink back from God. Without confidence in God's love for us, we will run away from Him instead of to Him in our weakness and brokenness. When we sin, God wants us to stand before Him, ask for forgiveness, repent (turn from) our sin, and declare war on it. We declare war on sin by purposing in our heart not to give ourselves to sin in any way. We may fall in an area of sin many times; yet still declare war on it by hating it as our enemy and determining within ourselves to love God. When we turn away from sin to God, He wants us to be confident that we stand before Him as a first-class citizen in His family. We must take confidence in the fact that He has given us the gift of righteousness in which we can now walk. He wants us to have the confidence that He loves us in the same way that He loves Jesus. The only way we can mature is by having the confidence that God loves us while we are growing. If we do not know He loves us in the process of maturity, we will not continue coming to Him when we stumble. Weak love is not false love. Weak love is sincere, and God desires us to be confident in His delight over us while we are maturing. God sees the cry of our spirit to love Him. When our heart is reaching and making determination to obey, it moves God. The longing to obey is the beginning of victory over sin. Spiritual immaturity is not the same thing as rebellion, though outwardly they may appear the same. The difference is that when a sincere believer sins, they are grieved over it. When a person in rebellion sins, they are unconcerned as long as they get away with it.     CONVICTION VS. CONDEMNATION The conviction of the Holy Spirit, also called guilt, is something that we feel when we sin. It tells us that what we have done is wrong. When we sin, we grieve the Holy Spirit by coming into agreement with darkness. We feel this grief in our heart. This guilt is the gift of God to us without which we would be unrestrained to our deaths. Repentance is the turning point. Once we have turned from our sin, turning back to God, we should no longer feel this guilt because the Holy Spirit is no longer grieved by it. The guilt is removed by the blood of Jesus. How much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God? --- Hebrews 9:14. The discipline of the Lord is not rejection. God brings light to areas in which we are not living in agreement with His leadership because He desires for us to grow into full maturity and takes delights in the process. God convicts and disciplines us in order to remove all that hinders our ability to receive His love and to love Him in response. My son, do not despise the chastening of the LORD, nor detest His correction; for whom the Lord loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights. --- Proverbs 3:11-12. Condemnation, also called shame or accusation, does not originate with God. Condemnation sometimes remains after we repent and tells us that who we are as a person is wrong and that everything about us is bad. Shame makes us want to give up. It leaves us without hope and prompts us to run away from God instead of to Him. Satan accuses us night and day, wanting us to believe that we are hopeless hypocrites who struggle to love God, when in fact we are lovers of God who struggle with sin. …the accuser of our brethren, who accused them before our God day and night… --- Revelation 12:10. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God--through Jesus Christ our Lord... --- Rom. 7:22-25. The mercies of God are new to us every single morning. If we declare war on our sin and cry out for the blood of Jesus to cover us, we are first-class citizens in the family of God. Through the Lord's mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness. "The Lord is my portion," says my soul, "Therefore I hope in Him!" --- Lamentations 3:22-24.     FOUR EXPRESSIONS OF THE LOVE OF GOD IN OUR EXPERIENCE Therefore I say to you, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little. --- Luke 7:47. As our experience of God's love for us grows, the other expressions of His love in our lives will mature as well. As we experience God's love towards us, we are empowered to love Him in return. We can only love God to the measure that we receive His love. We will never love Him more than our revelation of His love for us. We love Him because He first loved us. --- 1 John 4:19. As God's love towards us overflows, we begin to love ourselves as God loves us. We do not love ourselves in a worldly, selfish way. Rather, we love ourselves for God's sake, seeing ourselves as He sees us. Then, the love of God empowers us to love others well. We can only love others to the measure that we have a godly love for ourselves. Jesus said to him, "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." --- Matthew 22:37-39.