Who Taught You What God's Love Looks Like?
Stop Measuring God by the People Who Hurt You.
By Pastor Garrett Black
Who taught you what God's love looks like? Stop and think about that for a moment. The truth is, there probably isn't one answer. You learned it from many people over a long period of time.
Many of us remember making papier-mâché in grade school: newspaper clippings mixed together and plastered into some kind of shape. If you handed that project to someone and asked them to figure out which edition it came from, they'd pull it apart and find a headline from a Tuesday in November 1996, then another from September 11, 2001. They'd say there's no way these all came from the same paper on the same day. And they'd be right.
Your view of God is a collage. Your perception of how God sees you and loves you is just like that. It's a mixture of people who have had influence in your life, events that shaped you, and thoughts you've entertained and believed as true. For some of us, some of those clippings came from pain, even trauma. And they've shaped our picture of our heavenly Father.
Here's my promise: no matter where you are on that spectrum, we all need a better picture of God's love. Jesus can and will reveal where that picture has been distorted, and he will teach you how to approach the Father the way he approached his Father. Jesus is perfect theology. He had no cracks in his understanding of his Father's love. And because God is invisible, we need the visible to understand the invisible.
How the picture gets warped. We're wired to use visible figures in our lives to build our idea of love. Sometimes that helps. Sometimes it hurts. If love felt conditional in your home, if it was withheld when you did the wrong thing, that shapes how you see God. The same is true of a home driven by perfectionism and legalism, constant criticism, or promises that weren't kept. And one that's rarely talked about: growing up in a home with no discipline or correction at all. All of it can create a distorted understanding of who God is, and we end up projecting those experiences back onto him.
For me, it had nothing to do with my household. It had everything to do with my height. From grade school through high school, I was consistently one of the shortest people in my school. People who didn't even know my name would make fun of me in the hallway. I came to believe a subtle lie: people won't accept me for who I am. So I compensated. I became the class clown. I was disruptive and rude, and I picked on other students, because if I could get a laugh at someone else's expense, maybe I'd actually be liked.
Right after I got saved, the Spirit impressed on me so strongly that I needed to make things right. I texted people I hadn't talked to in years to apologize. One guy walked into the Starbucks where I worked, and I apologized to him right there at the bar while he waited for his drink.
But the lie underneath was this: to be accepted, I need to perform. And when I became a Christian, I brought that lie straight to my heavenly Father. If I fell short that day, I'd better not walk into his presence. I'd better not ask him for anything. That's how what happens in the natural gets projected back onto God.
Jesus is the image of the invisible God. The good news is Colossians 1:15. Jesus "is the image of the invisible God." Where visible examples have fallen short, Jesus became visible to bring healing and a complete picture of the Father's love. When I studied how Jesus related to his Father, especially in the Gospel of John, it shocked me. Jesus loved submitting to his Father's will. He loved obeying his Father's commands. He loved stewarding his inheritance. He loved laying down his life for those the Father had given him. That doesn't sound much like the Disney version of God's love we often sing about.
The orphan spirit picks and chooses. The orphan spirit is selective. It loves the Father's comfort but rejects his correction, because correction feels like rejection. It wants provision but resists authority. It celebrates God's promises but ignores his commands. It wants Jesus as Savior but resists Jesus as Lord. Usually that's because someone in our life corrected us without love, or used authority like a tyrant. So here's the hard question: do you love the Father in his fullness, or only the parts you like?
In Matthew 7, on the mountain, Jesus keeps saying, "You have heard it said… but I say." Sometimes before Jesus can be your teacher, he needs to be your un-teacher. In Matthew 7:7–11 he un-teaches three lies.
Lie #1: Distance keeps me safe. Jesus says ask, seek, and knock. The only way to knock is to get close. When pain says distance will keep you safe, Jesus says distance is what's keeping you where you are. Healing comes through drawing near. Theology matters, but we need experience too. When you experience the Father's love, you start seeing it in Scripture, because your experience testifies to what was always there. And God heals with gifts: his presence, his voice, his kindness.
Lie #2: I have to approach God as a fearful outsider. Jesus didn't just call God Father; he taught us to call him Father too. The way you speak to God reveals what you believe about him. And he sent the Spirit who cries out, "Abba, Father!" You don't come as a slave or a servant. You come as a child.
Lie #3: God must be like the people who let me down. Jesus taught us to measure earthly fathers by God, not God by earthly fathers. When you flip that paradigm, you begin to heal. And I love his question: how much more? It's open-ended. It's an invitation to find out.
Here's a practice I learned through First Loved Ministries. At the end of each day, take your experiences and ask, "How much more does my Father love me?" If my job knows how to provide, how much more does my Father provide for me? Do this and you'll start measuring everyone by God's standard, and seeing God for who he really is.
Key ideas
Your picture of God is a collage. It was pieced together from people, events, and beliefs over time, and some of those pieces came from pain.
Jesus is the visible picture of the invisible God. Where human examples fall short, Jesus shows us the Father's love clearly (Colossians 1:15).
The orphan spirit picks and chooses. It wants God's comfort, provision, and promises while rejecting his correction, authority, and lordship.
Healing comes through proximity, not distance. Ask, seek, and knock all require drawing near, and we need both theology and experience of the Father's love.
Measure people by God, not God by people. Jesus' question "How much more?" invites us to stop defining God by those who hurt us.
