31 Days of Love Letters: Searching Scripture for How God Loves

By Christine Hoover

Sometimes I want to erase everything I know about God that I learned from church, other Christians, Christian culture, culture in general, movies, songs, and t-shirts. I want to fill that blank slate with rich biblical truth, with what is actually in the Bible and what it actually says about God. I fear that I am too often unaware of how He actually is. I have become especially interested in how He loves.

So I went on an exploration for God in the Bible, inspired by A.W. Tozer's words in The Pursuit of God:

"For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers [or readers] find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard [or read] the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts."

As I read, I asked, “What does this tell me about God and who He is?” I looked for clues about His character, His likes, His dislikes, His way of acting. I didn't look for rules, principles, or bullet points, but for the living, feeling, thinking, acting Person of God.

To my delight, I found that the mute, bleak, boring, incomprehensible Bible I plod through each day suddenly exploded with color, life, meaning, and even deeper wells to explore. God revealed Himself to be One with dimension and complexity and beauty and power and gentleness. And, most of all, One who loves.

Do you wonder how God really is too? Do you read books filled with definitive statements about God and wonder if He is really like that? Join me in my exploration through "31 Days of Love Letters: Searching Scripture for How God Loves". The book guides your own search for facets of God’s love through a devotional reading on 31 different books of the Bible. Each reading begins and ends with passages of Scripture for reflection and response.

In 31 Days of Love Letters, you will discover that:

•God loves.
•God loves you personally.
•God's love is plastered all over the Bible, even in the little-read or little-understood parts.
•Although mysterious, God’s love is not a complete mystery. It is available to everyone who seeks Him.

As we explore the Bible, book-by-book, we are not looking for knowledge or special insight or anything else other than God Himself. We are looking for the Person of God. We are looking for how He loves so that we can love like Him. We are looking to know Him. Because we can! Jeremiah 29:12–13 says, “Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.”

The books of the Bible included in the devotional are: Proverbs, 1 John, John, 1 Kings, Lamentations, 1 Peter, Ruth, Jeremiah, 2 Thessalonians, Colossians, Nehemiah, 2 Samuel, Hebrews, Matthew, Obadiah, Habakkuk, 1 Chronicles, Ecclesiastes, Revelation, 2 Chronicles, Psalms, Esther, Job, Leviticus, 1 Thessalonians, Mark, Ezra, 1 Corinthians, Exodus, James, and Philemon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christine Hoover
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476014807

Christine Hoover

Christine Hoover is the wife of a church planting pastor and mom to three boys. She maintains a popular blog, GraceCoversMe.com, where she encourages women to apply gospel truths to their honest thoughts and feelings. She is a regular contributor to Desiring God, For The Church, and Flourish. In addition, her work has appeared on The Gospel Coalition, In(courage), iBelieve, Send Network, and Christianity Today. Christine and her family live in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Book preview

Introduction: Looking for Love

This past year has been one long barren winter.

Spring birthed the cherry blossoms lining the city’s main thoroughfare, summer delivered a blanket of humidity, fall dazzled with oranges and yellows and ambers, but still, winter remained. A heart in winter—my heart—knows well the thin, bare tree limbs, the snow-capped silence, the bitter cold, the longing for new life.

I am frozen, pleading in prayer, waiting and watching for a beloved friend. The story is hers to tell, but the grieved, winter heart is mine. My friend is gone, hearts are breaking, and only questions remain.

Is this an endless winter?

Has God been defeated?

Is He strong enough to change a heart?

Is He strong enough to change my heart?

Because mine is just as needy as hers. I need winter to thaw into spring. I need hope and restoration, true and beautiful. As the prodigal’s brother, I need the Father’s heart. Most of all, I need a renewed picture of love. Not fleeting, shifting, romantic love, but love that withstands the burdens and pressures and failings and needs of the entire world. Love that holds up. Perfect Love, unadulterated by a limited human perspective.

There is only one Love like this.

Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

This is the Love I need.

I know the words by heart, having sung it since childhood. I know about God. Certainly, I can list His attributes and state facts about how He acts —all the things I know I should believe about Him. But do I know Him? Do I even know the simple truths of my childhood?

Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.

What is this love? How does this love act? How does this love respond? How is this love expressed? How is this love experienced? Do I know this Person, Jesus, who thinks, wills, feels, and acts love toward the world, toward me?

I need to know. Desperately and passionately, I need to know. My heart cries out for God’s deep and abiding love to come and transition my heart from winter to spring.

I imagine you do, too. I imagine that you know about God, and you can roughly paraphrase the main points of Scripture and/or theology. I imagine that you are a dutiful person, trying to live life right. You take your friends meals when they have babies, and you make sure your kids have clean socks. You go to church, you pay your bills, and you give to the needy at Christmas. A few times a week, you sit down to read your Bible because you know it’s good for you, but you often desire more out of that time. Late at night, when you can’t sleep, you wonder if you’re just going through the motions, if there is any of the promised abundance in all this rote, mundane, religious life. Mostly, you struggle to relate to God. You wonder if He truly loves you, if you are good enough for Him, or if you’re doing enough for Him. More than anything in all the world, you long to know God, have a deep relationship with Him, and comprehend His approval.

I know you.

I know you because I know me.

I know that I have assumed way too much about Him without truly trying to know Him. I have made the primary mode of knowing Him—the Bible—a chore and an obligation, a dry, shallow, purposeless endeavor. Yet I have endured on, meandering through a series of unconnected stories, occasionally checking in with the experts on the meaning of this or that. I have kept things safe, assuming God is far off and unapproachable rather than affectionate, gentle, or actively at work in every corner of my life.

And I want out. Rather, I want God out—out of the religious, dutiful cage I have assumed for Him.

So I’m going on an exploration, and I want you to join me.

A.W. Tozer, in The Pursuit of God, describes the map we will use for our exploration:

For it is not mere words that nourish the soul, but God Himself, and unless and until the hearers [or readers] find God in personal experience they are not the better for having heard [or read] the truth. The Bible is not an end in itself, but a means to bring men to an intimate and satisfying knowledge of God, that they may enter into Him, that they may delight in His Presence, may taste and know the inner sweetness of the very God Himself in the core and center of their hearts.

With only the Bible as our guide, we will search for how God loves. Because sometimes I want to erase everything I know about God that I learned from church, other Christians, Christian culture, culture in general, movies, songs, and t-shirts. I want to fill that blank slate with rich biblical truth, with what is actually in the Bible and what it actually says about God. I fear that I am too often unaware of how He actually is.

Do you wonder how God really is too? Do you read books filled with definitive statements about God and wonder if He is really like that? We should. Gary Ezzo says, Idolatry is defined as claiming that God is something that He is not or by pronouncing that something is God that is not. We must never be idolaters, so we must cautiously step forward in our search for God. We must test everything we think, read, and hear next to the standard of Scripture. In the end, I believe if we hold to that standard and are honest about what Scripture says, we can gain an accurate and truthful picture of the Person of God and we can relate to Him.

In the following pages, we will search for facets of God’s love in 31 different books of the Bible. I will guide the exploration with a short devotional, as well as give verses to read and responses to consider. It is my hope that we will learn that:

God loves.

God loves personally.

God's love is plastered all over the Bible, even in the little-read or little-understood parts. 

Although mysterious, God’s love is not a complete mystery. It is available to everyone who seeks Him.

As we explore the Bible, book-by-book, we are not looking for knowledge or special insight or anything else other than God Himself. We are looking for the Person of God. We are looking for how He loves so that we can love like Him. We are looking to know Him. Because we can! Jeremiah 29:12–13 says, Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you. You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart.

As we read, we will ask, What does this tell me about God and who He is? We will look for clues about His character, His likes, His dislikes, His way of acting. We won’t look for rules, principles, or bullet points, but for the living, feeling, thinking, acting Person of God. I am anticipating that the mute, bleak, boring, incomprehensible Bible we plod through each day will suddenly explode with color, life, meaning, and even deeper wells to explore. I am also expecting God to reveal Himself to be One with dimension and complexity and beauty and power and gentleness. And, most of all, One who loves.

It is not humanly possible to describe the fullness, the out-working, and the complexities of God's love because His love is so completely unlike the imperfect love that we share with one another. I certainly do not think that I will be able to sum up the love of God in this book or even create a simplified working definition.

But I believe that God's love (and anything about Him, for that matter) has facets, much like a skyscraper. If we try to look at it as a whole, it is difficult to take it all in or to see the details that make it what it is. But if we explore the details, go floor to floor, and look at the building from various angles, we piece together an accurate picture of the skyscraper. We know the skyscraper.

As we explore, our eyes must remain on Him. His love says nothing about us—that we are somehow loveable or worthy—but everything about the graciousness