I was writing a blog post for Valentine’s Day when I stopped mid-sentence. The words I had just typed without hesitation startled me. Confident? Me confident in someone’s love for me? I chuckled at myself but simultaneously, my heart filled with gratitude. Receiving faithful, steadfast love had produced a new type of confidence in my heart.
In my Valentine blog post, “Don’t Give up on Love,” I had contrasted the difference between a romanticized “True Love” with the “Real Love” that originates from the God who is love. I wrote:
“…As confident as I am today in my husband’s love and as much as I love him, I know that there is only one Real Love. That is the love that rescued me, sustained me and continues to sustain and energize me.”
Although that simple statement is a great compliment to my husband’s faithful, nurturing love, it is an even greater tribute to the sacrificial, steadfast, transforming love of God. It was refreshing to look back and realize how my growing knowledge of and relationship with God through my faith in Jesus Christ has affected all my relationships. In the process, confidence in love was replacing neediness for love.
Doubtful versus confident love
Why is it easier to be doubtful than confident in love?
- past experience, and perceptions
- present experience, and perceptions
- expectations and neediness
- lack of experiencing God’s faithful, steadfast love
When we encounter relational discord, doubt’s why list grows longer. “If he/she loved me…then…” Our confidence in their love is linked to their behavior toward us; and their ability to meet our needs. It shapes our perception of the quality and availability of their love.
Unfortunately, sometimes there are solid reasons not to be confident in just anyone’s love. Human love falters and fails. We would be foolish to maintain confidence when unfaithful behavior reveals deceitful love.
However, when our confidence in love falters due to our expectations of love, what should we consider? What we fail to account for in that situation is our neediness. Neediness easily presents as demands. Demands often get met with resistance instead of compliance. Consider what the basis is for your expectations of love. Are they fictional or realistic, based on grace or desires?
I learned the hard way that my needs for love, acceptance, and approval would not be satisfied at the human level of love. God did not design another person to do what he alone intended to do for me.
The effect of experience and knowledge on confident love
How a person has experienced or failed to experience love in their lifetime (if not addressed) will influence how they perceive other’s actions, attitudes, and words, especially close others. We all filter the input from our environment (physical and relational) through our unique perceptive screens. We vary in awareness or denial of those filters. Cultural, mental, and emotional perception screens diminish or inflate the words and actions and infer others’ attitudes during interactions with them. Your perceptions alter how you receive and experience love from others. If your negative perceptions of honest love limit your present experience of love, how will you become confident in love?
Knowledge is a key factor in growing our confidence in experiencing, receiving, and giving love. How can we profess to love someone or believe that they love us if we know little of their true character?
Do you love the persona or the person?
In the younger version of yourself (especially for women), we may have been more in love with love than with the person before us. Instead of the person, we might focus on a substitute image and profile for the person we wanted to love and be loved by. We latched on to hopeful love in the person we thought they would be or become when they were more mature. The next step is easy: we project our desires attributes for our ideal mate onto him or her. The step that follows is failure!
Later, when we gain experience and deeper knowledge of that person, we will live with disappointment in an unhealthy relationship.
We can know and learn a lot about a person but still err on knowing who they are at their core. Their track record matters too. It isn’t that people can’t change, but too often, change is temporary or vacillates as circumstances change.
Our neediness factor versus confident love
Having an intense desire to be loved can ramp up our neediness factor and deflate our confident love potential. On the flip side, being too confident in how loveable and loving we are can translate as proud, insensitive, or inconsiderate. But being too wary of receiving love leads to a lonely future. What if you are too quick to shower love and commit to a relationship? I see a painful future ahead.
Yes, those are generalizations and warnings. My two-fold reason is this: I have listened to the stories of women (and men) where it has proven to be true. And I admit that I lived through it as well.
So, what made the difference for me?
I had acquired plenty of personal data points during my life that should have kept me solidly in the ‘needy’ and ‘wary’ categories (at least in human relationships). I was not raised to be trustful of others. Gratefully, I was raised to trust God and his word, the Bible, as infinitely reliable. My relationship with God through Jesus Christ made all the difference. I have acquired an abundance of personal data points in that relationship over the years to now put me solidly in the “confident in His love” category.
I had as much unlearning to do as I did learning.
My secure base in God’s love was the springboard to grow in love. I have spent most of my life learning to know his character (knowledge) and see his hand in my life (experience). Some of those experiences have been very difficult. Change is not easy. Yet, He never proved untrustworthy, unfaithful, or unavailable to me.
Good days, bad days, all days He truly is sufficient. His love is absolutely satisfying. It allows me to be confident in receiving his love. Plus, it allows me to give to and receive love confidently from others with awareness and openness. God’s love forces me to look at others differently. It models how I should consider others’ interests and not just focus on my own interests.
God’s school of love is open for our life-long learning. Love is the central theme of the Bible from cover to cover, from Genesis to Revelation. There we are told and shown that God is love. It was His purpose behind creation and His plan in redemption. He loved us first, loves us best, and loves us always. Who could dream of love better than that?
Confidence in God’s love is never risky.
In fact, it is protective.
The more we trust, receive, and experience His love, the easier it is to trust Him during times of change and difficulty. As we grow in knowledge and love of Him and with Him, the more confident we become of His love. We then begin to understand His ways of doing things and overarching plan for all life. We find our place in His plan for this universe, humankind, and eternity. Life makes sense.
How we manage relationships and experience love will alter as we are changed. Life is too short not to be loved and loving others. Eternity is too long not to be redeemed by God’s love. His love is described as a perfect love that casts out fear and provides a way to come to Him in confidence to receive compassion, forgiveness, mercy, grace, and help to meet our needs.
Before I leave this topic, I would like you to consider a little twist in confident love dynamics.
Question: What causes confidence in love to diminish?
Answer: When I know that I don’t deserve it!
The oddest thing is that when a person has done something wrong (actions and words that offended, hurt, failed to keep a promise, etc.), it affects their ability to love well. In fact, it can deceptively alter their perception of the other person’s love for them. They lose confidence that the other person could love them if their wrong words and actions were revealed.
The guilty person begins a rationalization process. Initially, they feared: “if they knew what I had done, then they would never be able to forgive me or continue loving me.” Now it warps into: “if they weren’t so ….,” or “if they just were more….,” then I would never have done “it.”
The offender builds a case against the offended. They find fault in the other person to vindicate their own indiscretions and begin to pull further away. Part of the struggle is the shame and fear of facing the person that you have wronged. It takes a tough person to pull off deception face to face successfully. So, this adage gets employed: “the best defense is a good offense.”
Human nature excels in self-deception.
Consider this simple example from childhood. As a child, did you try to avoid your parent when you knew that you had disobeyed? When your disobedience was discovered, did you avoid eye contact?
Like Adam & Eve, when they disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, we go into hiding. Who did we blame as teenagers when we broke the rules? Mom & Dad, of course! After all, wasn’t the problem that they were just too restrictive, unreasonable, and outdated in their standards?
As adults, we easily fall into the same trap. We just can’t blame immaturity or our parents anymore.
As a result, we also lack confidence in God’s love
Even a casual look within ourselves reveals that we don’t deserve God’s love.
What responses do people give when asked to consider the depth of God’s love for them? Most people like the general concept that God loves them.
Reactions are varied when asked to consider the way God demonstrated his love for humankind through His son, Jesus Christ, coming to earth as God in human form to be murdered on a Roman cross to pay for their/man’s wrongdoing?
- Many make excuses for their behavior.
- Others feel offended that they should be considered so flawed that someone had to die to make them whole.
- Some judge God by saying he has no right to judge them/humankind.
- Another may take the opposite stance, saying that they have done things so bad that God could never forgive them.
The common factor is an excuse for our wrong that is used to justify rejecting God’s love and forgiveness plan. We hate to admit being wrong!
Beware – believers and followers of Jesus can fall into the same flawed patterns of thinking and behavior.
Even professing Christians can struggle to believe that God could truly, consistently, and persistently love them. We know too well our failures in living out our faith, including our failure to love and honor God as we should.
That brings us back to an earlier question and the link between knowledge, experience, perceptions, and confidence in love.
How can you experience confidence in the love of someone you don’t know well?
God has revealed much about his character through the universe he created. But, he has revealed much more in the story he has written about himself, the Bible. From cover to cover, it is the greatest love story ever conceived of and lived. I never get tired of reading it. It is where I learn to experience the depth of God’s love and understand his flawless character. There is no need to seek some other revelation or secret knowledge reserved for a privileged few. I don’t have to wait for a divine lightning bolt to morph me into a greater being. Knowledge and insight are waiting for me when I open the pages or scroll through the app on my phone. Line after line, I find a record of God’s greatness and goodness extended to me and all he created.
My choice is to believe and accept it or not believe it.
One of those lines, in particular, has lodged in my thoughts for the past several months:
“…God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
When I read that, I can’t help seeing a mental picture of a pitcher above me pouring out a stream that never stops, of his love. And, not only do I feel loved, it makes me want to love others more.
That is why I can be confident in love today.
Bible References:
“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces hope, and 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.” Romans 5:1-5 (ESV)
“But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:8 (ESV)
“If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” 1 John 1:9 (ESV)
“Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Hebrews 4:16 (ESV)
“…perfect love casts out fear.” 1 John 4:18 (ESV)
