Mosiah 4:11

I was reading Mosiah 4:11 and it mentions that "as ye have come to the knowledge of the glory of God, or if ye have known of his goodness and have tasted of his love, and have received a remission of your sins, which causeth such exceedingly great joy in your soul" it made me think about the glory of God and what He wants most for us. I've never looked at this scripture and thought about how it tells so much about God's goals for us...
It's interesting to think that what God wants most for us is for us to experience and understand His amazing love for us. I think that if He could sit down with us one on one that would be His entire goal- to help us to really internalize His love. I really believe that He would want to open our eyes to the fact that we really can become who we are meant to be IF we can truly understand His love.
Many things in our lives affect the paths we take. We can be influenced by all of the mortal emotions and desires- greed, lust, envy, hunger, ambition, love. We might make small or even sizeable steps toward becoming the person we are meant to be if we feel the love of others in our life. The desire to please a parent can be a powerful force, as can the need to gain the approval of others. But even these influences can only make us reach so far. Even if we had perfect parents who we knew loved us and helped us to see ourselves as worthwhile people, I think we would still feel something lacking. The same goes for those who have great accomplishments according to the world's standards. I don't think that any human can really feel whole and fulfilled without feeling God's love for them.
So when it comes down to it, what is the one thing that motivates us to make the most of our lives? I would bet that it is God's love. If we didn't know God's love, we wouldn't know of our own worth. We wouldn't know the sweet peace that comes from knowing that we have a Heavenly Father who is watching over us, listening to us, and sending blessings to us just when we need them. We wouldn't have the motivation to live a better life or to move on from where we're at. And we certainly wouldn't confront most of our deeply held fears and conquer our weaknesses if we didn't think that there was someone who totally understood what we were going through and would love us regardless of how our efforts turn out. The need to feel loved is a very basic component of being human, and I don't this is accidental. Although we may search for and experience love in many ways on this earth, that love is only meant to direct us to the original and all encompassing love of God. God's love, after all, is the only pure, completely unconditional love we will ever be blessed with. And once we've had even a glimpse of this love our normal response would be to reciprocate it. Our efforts may seem small and worthless (to us), but God blesses us with a greater sense of His love as we try to live our lives for Him. It's astounding- He takes our tiniest efforts and makes something wonderful out of it.
And I think that's exactly what He wants. He knows that every effort to repent and to improve, and every resulting increase in our ability to feel His love will get us to keep moving forward, to become a more loving, kind, generous person. Feeling His love will make us want to repent and as we repent we'll be blessed with more joy in our lives. And as we feel more joy and love, we will want to share that love with others. And so the cycle continues and every person who is touched by God's love is blessed and goes on to bless.