Receiving Gods Love

I take inspiration for this write-up from a very special man, Trevor Hudson, who's message on a sunday always manages to fit directly into my life.
Again, Its so easy to walk in our daily lives and ignore the small things.
We know 2 things:

• God loves us
• God will never stop loving us

OK, so what does that mean? Well to me, apparently not very much.....until I sat for 30 minutes and thought about what it really means.
I always thought, "Oh well, someone loves me....that's great....so what! Doesn't really change my life does it?"
What changes it for me though, is how much God loves us and that His love will never stop. As humans, we choose to love, and sadly, our love for others varies on many things. If someone hurts us, our love quota for that person may drop. We still love them but often we choose to change towards them.
God is not like this. His love for us is always constant, ALWAYS! It doesn't change from day to day. God is love. So no matter what we do, Gods love for us is constant!
But how does this effect me? Well for the first time in my live, it has actually made me believe that I have a purpose here on earth. A purpose that was decided before I was born. Now when I say this, I know I have a purpose to lead my family (Another topic which I would like to write on at a later stage) and I know I have a purpose to be someone to look up to for my kids -- But I am talking about here is in the spiritual realm.
What is my purpose here on earth spiritually?
Trevor mentioned it so beautifully yesterday. Basically , it is to spreads Gods love to others as well. God loves us so much and we should be displaying that love to others. Not some people that we may know, but everyone that we come across.

We cannot give love if we haven't received it!
This is something I am very bad at.

So how do we receive love from God. We know that Gods love is always there for us to receive, but we need to actually do something and receive it.
Because we are so  busy in our daily lives, we tend to not give time to God or spend time actually receiving His love and we end up missing what is so readily available for us to have and ultimately, give to others.
What happens then is that tend to be quite cold to others (I am generalizing) and seem that we don't care what they say or do, when in fact we actually do.

Point 1 - Hurry. We need to slow down. Have the time to spend with God in His Word and listen to Him through quiet and prayer. In a hurry, we see people as a blur and we don't get to actually know them as we should. If we don't know people, it is very difficult to love them!

Point 2 - Prayer and Imagination. This can be done anywhere. imagination is something that we all have, so why not use it effectively. Imagine yourself laying down your prayer to God or spending time with God on a beautiful summers day walking by a stream or whatever. What this does is allow us to take our eyes off our daily rushed routine and listen to what God has to say.

Point 3 - Being defensive, meaning that its never us! As soon as someone says something to us and we don't believe them or don't like what they are saying because its a direct attack at us, we become defensive. Often we don't actually listen to others in what they have to say and as they open their mouth, we attack back in defensiveness. Its all about standing back and listening. I feel like a hypocrite here because I am very bad at this...but this is the reason I write here is because I think as I write and hopefully this will become set in my mind to actually do this more often (Actually shutting up and listening!)

Often by listening to God, we can receive His love for us. It also allows us to slow down, get away from the rush of life and actually spread the love of God as we receive it.

Blessings