Descriptions of God's Boundless Light and Love from Near Death Experiences

May you have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully.
— Ephesians 3:18–19

When people who have a near-death experience find themselves in God’s presence, they experience an overwhelming, immeasurable, incomparable love—a powerfully brilliant love, exploding with radiant light, that they struggle to describe with limited human words.

Imagine being in the presence of this supernatural love—too amazing for our minds to fully comprehend!

Sarah, a young teenage girl who died in a car accident, experienced God’s boundless, extravagant love during her NDE. Prior to the accident, Sarah had suffered abuse throughout her entire childhood. As the ambulance raced her to the hospital after the crash, Sarah remembers thinking she was going to die and realizing she did not have even one happy memory in her fourteen years of life.

Yet during her NDE, she felt the deep and overwhelming love of God. She describes it this way:

“In a flash, the light was coming right at me. . . . I put my hand in first and it felt so incredible. One’s mind can’t express in words the feelings of immense LOVE. I put the rest of what I sensed to be my body into the light, and I was in LOVE! I became ONE with the light. I was held immediately so close and tight. It felt like someone was hugging me. I was thinking I never wanted to leave the light. . . . I allowed my walls to come down for the first time in my life. I allowed myself to get lost in the experience. I danced in the light and spun around. I was so happy to have felt good for the first time in my life. . . . I can’t tell you my feelings through all this. I wish I could download it and send it to everyone. Like every particle that is making up who you are is bursting with LOVE and BLISS.”
— Sarah¹

Erica McKenzie describes the same unfailing love of God during her own NDE. After years of battling with an eating disorder and diet pills, Erica’s heart started failing one night when she was alone in a hotel room. As a registered nurse, Erica recognized the signs and ran out into the street below, looking for help.

A driver pulled over and took Erica to his nearby church, where her heart stopped as the pastor called 911. Erica recalls experiencing God’s love that night as she never had before:

“I went up and up, and I knew I was going to Heaven. It seemed as if I rose infinitely past the stars and farther into the all-encompassing light until I had finally reached the end of the tunnel. Once there, the most all-encompassing feeling of love overwhelmed me. My human words cannot accurately describe the enormity of the feeling that filled each cell in my body with more love than imaginable. This love was so tangible I could touch it. While I could not see a physical image, I distinguished this brilliant Presence as the voice I had heard all my life. . . . It was God. This Presence was so powerful and intense.”
— Erica²

Psychiatrist Dr. Ron Smothermon, who was attacked by a man having a psychotic break, remembers the love of God washing over him so powerfully during his NDE. Since that time, he has been filled with a driving passion to share God’s love with others.

“All his qualities are contained in his love, for love is his overarching nature. And his love is not an enhanced version of human love. . . . It is a love beyond our experience, simply overpowering. . . . It fills you with his essence, and you know him intimately. . . . When your time comes, and it will, it is you and God, and no one else, swimming in an ocean of love. It is hard to describe what happens—you become his love, and you are together in his light. . . . Confronting God’s love person-to-person inspires an intense desire to make his love known to every life form in the universe.”
— Dr. Ron Smothermon³

Scripture says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). In other words, God is the very definition of what pure and genuine love actually is. Yet it is often hard to fully grasp what this means and how God’s supernatural love can revolutionize our lives.

Understanding more about God’s love and the power it contains is important in experiencing the fullness of life God desires for us.

As humans, we tend to define love based on our own personal experiences of the love we show one another, which we know is fallible and flawed. We must remember that God’s love is perfect, and he loves every person with relentless and extravagant love to which no human love can compare!

There is nothing God does or could ever do apart from his love, for love is the essence of who God is. God’s love is radiant and brilliant, steady and unchanging, solid and firm, complete and whole. God’s love cannot be contained or restrained; when we are filled with it, we are compelled to love others as he does.

Imagine being loved with such boundless love—because you are! Today, meditate on how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is for you, and allow it to fill every part of you. Right now, God’s radiant light of unfailing, never-ending love surrounds you. Feel the warmth of his light and love as you draw near to him today.

Prayer:
Dear God, thank you for loving me with such relentless, perfect love. Help me to feel the reality of your love more and more as I draw near to you. Please fill every part of me and radiate your love through me to bless others.

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Footnotes
1. Sarah’s story adapted from The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences by P. M. H. Atwater.
2. Erica McKenzie’s account from her book Dying to Fit In.
Dr. Ron Smothermon’s testimony as referenced in Imagine Heaven by John Burke.

 

Adapted from Imagine the God of Heaven Devotional: 60 Reflections on the Heart of God from the Bible and Near-Death Experiences by John and Kathy Burke, published October 2025. Published with permission from Tyndale House Publishers.