John Piper on the love of God:
Now think about this. Is the love of God demonstrated to us historically for us to study and think about and know as objective fact (verse 8)? Or is the love of God poured out in our hearts by the Holy Spirit for us to feel and be assured of in the face of doubt (verse 5)? Of course, the answer is that Paul will not let us break these things in two. We dare not choose between them or make them antagonistic to each other. The love of God is experienced in the heart. And the love of God is demonstrated in history. There is fact, and there is feeling. There is knowledge in the head and there is affection in the heart. There is truth and there is Spirit.
The key question is, How are they related? On the basis of the relation between verse 5 and verses 6-8 I say, the Holy Spirit takes the historical facts of Christ’s death and opens the eyes of our heart to see the all-satisfying divine beauty of the love of God in it. And thus, by the spiritual sight of God’s love in the work of Christ, he pours that love experientially into our hearts. It is not an experience like electricity. It is a mediated experience. It has factual content. And therefore when it comes, it isn’t like some vague, new age, out-of-body experience, or some hypnotic state, or some ecstatic condition produced by emptying your head. It is being filled with the glory of the love of God demonstrated in the God-man Christ Jesus, who died because of our sins and rose because of our justification.
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