Awakened To Love

By Nissi Sanders

Awakened To Love is a 21 day devotional with an anointing to breakthrough obstacles in the human heart that prevent it from fully receiving the Love of Christ. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nissi Sanders
• Release date: Mar 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393098126

Book preview

Introduction

You did not pick this book up by accident. My guess is that you, like me, have spent a big portion of your life feeling unloved.  Perhaps you grew up in a toxic home and have had a life plagued by bad relationships.  Or maybe it was loss, grief, abuse or an addiction that made you feel disconnected from God’s love.  When you hear the words God loves you what comes up inside of your heart?  Your answer to this question is what will single handedly define your relationship with God.  Most people know that God loves them intellectually.  They agree mentally with the concept of God’s love, but in reality, their life paints a different picture.

I spent most of my life feeling unloved.  I was conceived out of an adulterous relationship and my dad abandoned me before I was born. My mom despised the fact that she got pregnant so young and never quite found the rhythm of being a mother.  This created the perfect storm for me to feel abandoned, rejected and unloved throughout my childhood.  The wounds of my childhood led me down a path of deep insecurity and self abuse.  For most of my 20s I was trapped in a perpetual audition to convince people to love me.  I spent most of my young adulthood doing anything and everything to prove my worth.  I was stuck in a toxic cycle of shame.  Insecurity set the backdrop for every one of my romantic relationships.  Dating became my testing ground to prove that I was lovable.  The only problem was, I didn’t really believe that I was lovable myself.

We tend to attract people who confirm our beliefs.  In my early 20s, I found myself married to a man who was equally as insecure as me.  Our relationship quickly turned abusive.  He became verbally abusive and started having multiple adulterous affairs.  I became withdrawn and spiraled into a cycle of binge eating.  Our marriage could be summed up in a single sentence; he would cheat, I would eat.

This cycle repeated itself for years.

Then on one random day, in an instant, God radically encountered me with His love.

I will never forget that day.

I was sitting on my couch reading the Bible when I felt led to read Hebrews 10:22, which says "Let us draw near [to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water."  Out of nowhere, it seemed like the words leapt off of the page and directly into my spirit.  The words hit my spirit with such an intensity that I began to weep uncontrollably.  As I wept, I could feel warm waves of liquid love wash over me.  As the weeping lifted, I would read the same verse another time and liquid love would crash into me with a greater intensity, gripping my heart with raw intimacy.   This went on for hours.  At the end of the encounter, I felt fresh feelings of deep cleansing.  A waterfall of renewal gushed inside of me. This caused a well of joy to spring up deep within and I began laughing hysterically.  It felt like my very spirit was being tickled by God. In a single moment in time, God branded me with His love and marked me forever.

This was the start of my journey of truly walking in God’s amazing love for me.  Year by year, the Lord faithfully met me and led me to grow in confidence of His great love. The Lord sovereignly took me through a process of healing by revealing Himself as lover and revealing me as His beloved.  One day, I realized everything about me was different.  I thought differently.  I related to people differently.

New self control had replaced old sin habits without my realizing it.  I was so transformed that I didn’t recognize myself anymore.  The transformation had happened so effortlessly that it made my head spin. I began wondering how I could have had such a drastic transformation without me making it happen.  In the middle of my bewilderment, Holy Spirit sweetly whispered to me, Nissi, you have become the beloved.

Becoming the beloved is a path of renewal that every follower of Christ must take.  Opening our hearts to His amazing, all consuming, fiery love is a process of maturity that the Lord takes us through. The degree that we are stuck in bad habits and constant sin cycles of failure is the very degree that we are weak in the revelation of His love.  The love of Christ redeems, heals and transforms us. You probably glazed over the last sentence because we Christians are always talking about redemption and transformation and love.  But, how well do you actually know the healing, redemptive, transformative love of God?

The Lord’s sincere desire is that we go from having head knowledge of His love to heart knowledge.  It is the heart knowledge of the love of God that frees us from even