One of my greatest desires is to enter authentic communion with God and to become one with Him. I want to know Jesus in me and around me and experience His power. I want to be transformed into the likeness of Yeshua (Jesus) and empowered by His Spirit to ascend through the darkness and walk in supernatural victory.
This is not an experience reserved for a select few but a reality we can all experience. To do this, we must become deeply convinced that our Creator, the master of the universe, truly loves us and wants to bless us. Many of us can quote Romans 5:8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” But I think most of us would admit we haven’t fully internalized the reality of the Father’s love for us, a love so profound it led Him to send His Son to die on the cross for our sins.
The truth is that God has been with you in your worst times, and His love for you has never failed. God’s love for us is unconditional and unchanging, and He wants the best for us. He wants us to become convinced that His favor is toward us, and He wants us to experience His goodness. God is love, and to function in the Spirit, we need to function out of love. That must begin with understanding how deeply our Father is attached to us.
I’ve read biographies of great men and women of God who were cutting-edge pioneers of the faith, and yet at the end of their lives they still hadn’t internalized the Father’s love for them. I’ve been walking with the Lord for 40 years, and I still pray daily that the Lord will help me to understand His love for me. Nothing is more important than this.
Many people have studied God’s nature and know Scripture by heart, but deep down inside, they don’t have an experiential knowledge of how much the Father treasures them. That is such a shame, because to know God’s love for us is the most important thing any of us could attain—not just to read about it but to internalize it. That awareness is transformative.
Some of us have let guilt and shame keep us from internalizing His love. We need to understand that Jesus shed His blood to take away our guilt and shame and cleanse our conscience. We are now holy and blameless before Him (Eph. 1:4). Once we repent, Satan’s accusations can no longer hold us hostage. We must have confidence that God loves us, and nothing will ever change that.
Why does God love us? Genesis tells us He made mankind in His own image and likeness. He did this because He wanted a vessel He could fill with Himself. In other words, He created you and me so we could receive Him. God is overflowing with goodness, love, kindness, victory, splendor, strength and power, and He wants to share Himself with us.
El Shaddai, God Almighty, told Abraham, “I am … your exceedingly great reward” (Gen. 15:1b). Wondrously, God created you and me in His likeness so we could experience the reality of who He is. This is what heaven is about: experiencing God’s glory. To embrace this truth, we must become convinced that He loves us unconditionally, specifically and personally.
Jesus took the sin out of the way. He took the guilt out of the way. He took the condemnation out of the way. He took the shame out of the way. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1a). There’s nothing in the way. All that is left is for us to open our hearts and realize God’s favor is upon us. He’s not angry with you. God loved you during your worst days, and His love will never fail you.
Drawing Near to God
God will never love you more or less than He does right now. The apostle Paul wrote: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39, NASB).
Nothing can separate us from the love of God. In fact, Father God designed the whole world for us, and our ultimate purpose and destiny in life is to love Him in return. God is the beginning, and He is eternal. He has always been. The divine Creator of all does not need anything. But somehow, He has humbled Himself to love and need us. Incredibly, He is drawn to you and me.
If this were not so, would He have sent His Son to experience such agony on the earth and die for us on the cross? God’s Son was whipped. His beard was pulled out. He had nails put through His hands and feet and a spear thrust in His side. He was spat on, mocked and cursed. If God did not truly love us, would He have put His only begotten Son through such horrendous torment?
That is how attached to us He is. That is how committed He is to us. We are the most precious of all His creation! We are unique. He created us in His likeness so we could receive His love and authentically choose to love Him back. In fact, we are destined to what the Bible calls the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev. 19:9).
Despite this, we often feel God is far away. The issue is not that God is off in the distance and does not see us or care. Our real predicament is that we are hesitant to fully open up and let Him in.
Years ago as a new believer, I prayed to experience the Lord more deeply. I had already come to faith in Yeshua and started devotedly reading the Scriptures. I read about the Holy Spirit and had started praying to fully experience Him. One day I was lying on my bed and praying for this blessing when suddenly I encountered the literal and powerful presence of the Ruach HaKodesh (Spirit of God).
But do you know what happened next? Even though I was praying for Him to come, something in me pushed Him away. When the Holy Spirit came near to me, something involuntarily in me rose up, and I rejected Him. He was too close.
We are often afraid to fully let God in to be as close to us as He wants to be because we feel so vulnerable. That type of intimacy makes us uncomfortable. We want a relationship with God, but believe it or not, we sometimes prefer Him to be somebody who lives a few doors down. We do not want Him moving into our own bedrooms. We want to partition our lives. We want God to have access to some areas but then isolate Him from having full possession of us. We do not want Him having free access into our whole lives—to let Him come close and personal. We say we want Him, but the truth is, when He draws near, we feel too exposed, and the familiarity can frighten us.
Furthermore, we are reluctant to let God in to have absolute control. We are hesitant to be that accountable. We want our own freedom. To let Him into the very center of our being would mean having to fully surrender control of our lives to Him. Some of us are not fully ready to do that; something in our fleshly nature resists it.
We must recognize and surrender to the reality of God’s nearness. We need to remove any barriers we have established that hinder His love and involvement in our lives. Beloved one, Father God wants to lift you up. He wants you to experience His victory. He loves us, and we need to open our hearts to internalize our Father’s love for us.
Transforming Through Trials
Yet being loved by God doesn’t mean we will go through life pain-free. Many people wonder why a loving God doesn’t remove all our problems and challenges, or why He let Adam and Eve fall into sin in the first place. After all, the difficulties we experience today—the thorns and thistles of life—entered the world because of the fall. If God cares so much, why didn’t He prevent Adam and Eve from sinning? If He knew they were going to disobey Him, why didn’t He take a different course?
It’s because we need the challenges; we need the hard times. By overcoming painful and difficult things in our lives, we benefit and grow. This is part of God’s plan. With each victory, we are transformed into the people God wants us to be. Every obstacle becomes a steppingstone that leads us to our ultimate place in Him, which is being conformed to the image of Christ.
The Lord declared in Deuteronomy 30:19b: “I have placed before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. So choose life in order that you may live.” We cannot confuse our temporary reality, which involves discomfort, struggle and pain, with the ultimate reality that God loves us intimately. Our present challenges are the starting point from which we cultivate a deeper sense of who God is.
In fact, all our obstacles are God’s gift to us. They create the opportunity for us to turn to the Father and overcome. As we read in Revelation 2:7b, “To the one who overcomes, I will grant to eat from the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.” God uses our obstacles to shape us into the people He has called us to become: partners with Him in love. The Father created each of us to receive His love and then to find pleasure in choosing to love Him back. His eyes “roam throughout the earth, so that He may strongly support those whose heart is completely His” (2 Chron. 16:9).
The Father is looking for us to respond to Him. If everything were automatic and we didn’t have to choose to love Him, we would be like puppets or robots. Our love wouldn’t be real.
We are safe and secure in God. He will never let us be tested beyond what we can endure. God will never put us in a situation that we cannot handle with His help, mercy and grace. The Bible says, “No temptation has overtaken you except something common to mankind; and God is faithful, so He will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it” (1 Cor. 10:13).
“Our momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison,” Paul says in 2 Corinthians 4:17. God is right here. He is just waiting for us to open our hearts wider to Him. And as we do, He will give us all the power we need to overcome everything we face and enter into His fullness.
Without the Lord, we are so fragile and vulnerable in this world. But with Him, we overcome. All we have to do is open our lives to God. We must talk to Him all day long, sharing everything with Him. Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me” (Rev. 3:20). Yeshua didn’t say He was going to plow the door down and come in. He said He was knocking, and if we open, He will come in. The more we open up to Him, the more He will come in.
“Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man the things which God has prepared for those who love Him” (1 Cor. 2:9b, MEV). God is with us, and He is for us. Be strong in the might of the Lord and in the glory of His power.
Pressing In to Jesus
So what does this this mean for us practically? What is God asking us to do? It is essential that we spend time with God. We often fail to understand what is happening in our soul because we are so busy and distracted. Whether through work, relationships or social media, we are so connected to the outside world that we are often not in touch with what is going on inside.
When we spend time alone with God, allowing Him full access, we are forced to face what is going on inside our hearts. Sometimes this can be painful, but we need to allow ourselves to feel our exhaustion, fear and hopelessness and lift them to the Father. He will come in and fill those places so we can arise. The Spirit of the Lord will fill us, and we will live in His power and presence.
Let us give ourselves completely to those things that will bring us into a deeper relationship with Father God and keep out of our lives those things that will take us away from Him. Jesus said, “If anyone loves Me, he will follow My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him” (John 14:23, NASB).
If you want to receive more of God, join me now in inviting Him to come in and make Himself at home in our lives.
Father, right now, in Yeshua’s name, I pray that You would soften and open our hearts so that we would create a place of intimacy for You within us that is deeper than we have ever experienced. Father, I pray that You would expand our hearts. Help us to embrace the truth that You are not somewhere else; You are right here with us. Father, give us the grace to not be afraid of You and to trust You enough to give You control. Unlock the door of our hearts to not fear intimacy, to not push You away. Help us receive You into the depths of our souls so You can fully make Your home within us. In Yeshua’s name, amen.
Beloved one, open your life to Him. So many people are looking to the world to satisfy them. They seek the comfort of material things, the applause of their peers, or likes and follows on social media to meet their deep need for connection. But Yeshua said, “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water that I shall give him will become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life” (John 4:14, MEV).
To fill the void in our souls, we must enter God’s presence and experience His reality. The great news is there is always more of Him to discover. This is my heart’s passion. I want to get a tighter and tighter hold on the Lord and know more and more of His reality in my life.
Father God wants to connect with us in our kishkes, the depths of our insides, and empower us to live out our divine purpose and destiny from that place of intimacy. Yeshua said, “He who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, out of his heart [or out of his innermost being] shall flow rivers of living water” (John 7:38).
Jesus wants to become a well of living water springing up from within us to eternal life. This is the truth that should mark our lives. We can know God and His love for us. We can feel His glory and experience His power. We can walk in supernatural oneness with our Father and Creator as we keep pressing in to Jesus.
Rabbi Kirt A. Schneider is the host of the popular TV and radio broadcast Discovering the Jewish Jesus. For over 30 years Rabbi Schneider has been teaching people how Jesus fulfilled Messianic prophecy and completes the unfolding plan of the Messiah. Schneider is the author of several books, including Rivers of Revelation, The Lion of Judah, The Book of Revelation Decoded, Awakening to Messiah, and his two latest releases, Messianic Prophecy Revealed and Entering His Presence, which releases May 2, 2023.
