Poured into our hearts
The love we did not generate
Paul is explaining why a Christian's hope does not collapse under suffering, and his answer turns out to be about love — but not, at first, our love for God. He says our hope does not disappoint because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
Poured out. The image is not a trickle but a flood, not a fact filed away in the mind but a love that floods the interior, felt and warming. And notice it is something done to us, not by us: God himself, by his Spirit, pours his love into our hearts. We do not have to manufacture the experience of being loved by working ourselves up. It is given.
This is the difference between believing God loves you and feeling it warm you from the inside. The first is true whether or not we feel it; the second is the Spirit's gift, a love poured in until the head-knowledge becomes a heart-flood. And it is a flood we can ask for.
“Hope doesn't disappoint us, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”
— Paul, to the church at Rome — Romans 5:5 (WEB)
Ask the Spirit to pour the love of God into your heart, until what you know on paper floods you from within.
“He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, from within him will flow rivers of living water.”
We make a strange peace with the distance between believing God loves us and feeling it — settling for love on paper as though the warmth were simply not for us. The interior work is to refuse that settlement: to want the felt love of God enough to ask for it outright, positioning yourself under prayer and lingered-over Scripture, since this flood is the Spirit's to pour and ours only to receive.
This week, pray Paul's reality back to God daily and directly: Holy Spirit, pour the love of God into my heart. Then linger in his presence and over his Word, receiving rather than working it up.
A dry, dutiful heart is its own quiet captivity — and it stays dry mostly because we never think to ask the One whose work it is to flood it. Yet the love of God is on offer to be felt and not merely believed, and a heart soaked in it stands unshaken when suffering comes.
Some of us know all the right doctrines about the love of God and have rarely felt them. We can recite that God loves us and still live with a cold, dry heart, loved on paper but not in experience. Paul says there is more available than mere intellectual assent — a love poured into the heart by the Spirit, an inner flood that can be asked for and received.
We cannot manufacture this feeling by effort, but we can position ourselves under the spout — through prayer, through Scripture lingered over, through asking the Spirit directly to make the love of God real to us. If your knowledge of God's love has stayed in your head and never reached your heart, ask the One whose job it is to pour it in. Lord, pour your love into my heart, and let it flood me from within.
- Has the love of God stayed in my head and never reached my heart?
- Have I asked the Spirit to pour his love into me?
- What keeps me from positioning myself under the spout?
Holy Spirit, pour the love of God into my heart. Let what I know on paper become a flood I feel from within, warming all I am. Amen.