The Forgotten Spiritual Discipline: Learning to Receive God's Love

We have a lot of language in the church for what we give to God. Our time. Our worship. Our service. Our obedience. Our tithes. Our surrendered plans. The list is long, and we have refined the art of offering these things, devotionals, prayer journals, volunteer rosters, Sunday attendance, down to a kind of spiritual productivity system.

But here is a question I rarely hear asked: Are you any good at receiving?

Not receiving blessings, though that matters too. I mean something deeper: Are you able to sit still and let God actually love you? To stop doing, stop producing, stop atoning, and simply be loved?

For many of us, the answer is an honest no. And I think it is costing us more than we realize.

The Exhausted Servant

There is a woman in the Gospels whom we have perhaps judged too harshly. Martha opens her home to Jesus, an act of genuine love and hospitality, and then works herself ragged trying to make everything perfect for Him. She is in the kitchen. Her sister is at His feet. And Martha, frustrated and fraying at the edges, asks Jesus to make Mary come and help.

We often read this passage as a lesson about priorities or busyness. But I think it goes deeper than that. Martha was not failing at hospitality: she was failing to receive. She was so focused on what she could do for Jesus that she missed the extraordinary gift of simply being with Him.

And here is the uncomfortable truth: most of us are Martha. We have become so practiced at giving to God that we have entirely forgotten how to let Him give to us.

Why Receiving Feels So Hard

Receiving love, real love, the kind that does not require you to earn it, is actually one of the most difficult things a human being can do. Particularly for those of us who grew up in environments where love felt conditional, where approval had to be won, where rest felt selfish and stillness felt dangerous.

We are also a culture that prizes productivity above almost everything else. Busyness has become a badge of honor. And so even in our devotional lives, we gravitate toward doing, reading, journaling, serving, studying, because it feels more justifiable than simply sitting in God is presence and letting Him love us.

But here is what the mystics and the saints and the quiet ones throughout history have always known: you cannot pour out what you have not received. A giving life that has no receiving life at its root will eventually run dry. The wellspring of ministry, of love, of sustained faith: it is not our effort. It is our willingness to be filled.

What It Actually Looks Like to Receive

This one is countercultural even within devotional culture: try spending time with God that has no agenda. No passage to get through. No prayer list to check off. No worship music to fill the silence. Just you, present before Him, open to being loved. This is not laziness. It is one of the most vulnerable and courageous things a believer can do.

Read the love passages of Scripture as if they were written specifically to you, because they were. John 3:16. Romans 8:38-39. Ephesians 3:17-19. Do not rush past them. Do not analyze them. Let them wash over you. Ask the Holy Spirit: Will you help me feel what I know to be true? Receiving begins when we let truth move from the head into the heart.

Many of us have a habit of spiritually deflecting, turning every moment of grace back into self-examination, guilt, or planning. When you notice something beautiful, when you feel a moment of unexpected peace, when a verse reaches you, practice pausing and saying thank you instead of analyzing it or immediately turning it into something to do. Gratitude is how we receive.

The Gift Is Already Given

Paul prays in Ephesians that believers would be given power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge. Notice that even Paul, who had seen visions, planted churches, written half the New Testament, prays that the people he loves would grasp this. Because knowing it intellectually is not the same as receiving it.

The Father is love is not a concept to master. It is a river to step into. It is vast, unearned, and already flowing toward you with a force that nothing in all creation can stop.

The discipline is not to earn more of it. The discipline is to stop running from it. To put down what you are carrying long enough to let yourself be loved. To choose, like Mary, the one thing that is needed.

He is not waiting for you to do more. He is inviting you to receive more. And that, quiet one, is enough for today.