When God grants you the privilege of participating in godliness—which is to say, when you receive the love and goodness of Jesus Christ—the experience is spiritually supersaturated. God fills you with something beyond your soul’s capacity to hold, and you “from all the borders of [yourself], / burst like a star.”1 It is so exalting that you instinctively know it is from God—no, it is God.
For a while, I wondered if I could be sure God loved me. I felt and believed He did, but a nagging doubt said, “He can do anything He wants; He’s omnipotent. Why bother loving us?”
God gave me an answer as I sat in a testimony meeting at the end of FSY counselor training. I looked at the dozens of people in the room with me, and unexpectedly I was overwhelmed with love for them. Inseparable from the love was a piercing, powerful joy. As the love and joy rushed into me, this thought rushed in with it:
If God knows about love—and obviously He does—why wouldn’t He want to feel it? Why wouldn’t He want His entire existence, His entire being, to be defined by this glorious light? There is nothing that makes life more exciting or more meaningful than love—it is the greatest, happiest, most beautiful experience there is—and so, yes, of course God must love like this.
By feeling God’s love myself, I no longer needed evidence of it; I knew its nature firsthand, and it was impossible to deny its inherent divinity, its inherent supremacy over all other ways of being.
When Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee, Peter requested, “Lord, if it be thou, bid me come unto thee on the water.”2 In other words, Lord, if it be thou, don’t just tell me—make me like Thee so I can know for myself. Peter was asking for the greatest evidence Jesus can give of who He is: if He shapes you into His likeness, then the experience, by its transcendence, shows itself and its Creator to be divine.
Consider the soul-expanding joy of showing unexpected mercy.
The transcendent peace of being in sync with the universal web of all good.
The sturdy confidence accompanying a principled life.
The majesty and wonder of seeing the universe through the lens of faithful hope.
The creativity that arises from striving to be a light in others’ lives.
In all these, though you are imperfect, you tap into perfection. God “reaches [your] reaching.”3 Your heart soars, and you realize this must be what God is like, because nothing could be greater.
When Peter stepped out of the boat, it must have been the most exciting and terrifying moment of his life so far. He was laughing and trembling, clutching the other disciples for dear life and shaking off their grip—and when he felt the water solid under his feet, his heart must have leaped like no heart ever has.
How could he step back into that boat and wonder who Jesus was? How could an experience so awe-inspiring, beautiful, and elevating originate from any god but an awe-inspiring, beautiful, elevating One?
When you do as Jesus does, you get to know how it feels to be like Him, and the experience is so divine, you know He is divine.
This is how Lehi describes his first thought upon seeing the fruit of the tree of life, representing the love of God manifested in Jesus Christ, in his vision:
I did go forth and partake of the fruit thereof; and I beheld that it was most sweet, above all that I ever before tasted. Yea, and I beheld that the fruit thereof was white, to exceed all the whiteness that I had ever seen.4
Next, Lehi describes the effect eating the fruit had on him:
As I partook of the fruit thereof, it filled my soul with exceedingly great joy; wherefore, I began to be desirous that my family should partake of it also, for I knew that it was desirable above all other fruit.”5
These sequential moments reveal that Lehi gained two pieces of knowledge from eating the fruit of the tree of life, that is, from partaking of the love of God in Jesus Christ.
First, just by seeing the fruit (“I beheld that…”), Lehi learned how the fruit compared to his previous experiences: It looked sweeter than anything he had ever tried, and it looked whiter than anything he had ever seen. That seems a fair enough conclusion, one reachable by observation.
But the second conclusion, which Lehi reached only after tasting the fruit, was far bolder: He claimed to know the fruit was sweeter than “all other fruit.” Here, the reader does a double-take; how could he possibly know that?
Declaring a fruit sweeter than any other fruit he has tasted is one thing; declaring a fruit sweeter than any other fruit in existence is quite another. How could he know he would never in the future taste a sweeter fruit? How could he know no one else ever had? In that single moment, did he survey all possible human experiences, compare the experience of eating the fruit to each one, and ascertain that it was the best of them all? He cannot have. His claim is inexplicable, it is irrational, it is indefensible.
Yet it is true. There was something about the fruit of the tree of life—there was something about Jesus. It made Lehi certain, once he tasted it: neither he nor anyone else would ever taste something sweeter. Lehi tasted what I tasted at that FSY training; he felt what Peter felt as he walked toward his Savior on the water. He felt God’s powerful love, which is inseparable from the awareness that it is the essence of the Most High God.
Heeding Jesus’s call to come unto Him by allowing Him to make you more like Him fills you, as a side effect, with a miraculous-because-irrational certainty that you have found the sweetest experience anyone can ever have. You have no right to such knowledge; tens of billions of people have lived lives you will never see. How can you have any confidence they’ve never experienced something better? Outside observers cry foul, but those at the tree know: this is it. This is happiness. This is the purpose of life. This is the only thing I want for myself and my loved ones. Jesus is real, Jesus is God, and God is love.