God Is Love
What better way to close out a year of reflection regarding our discipleship than to consider the topic of love?
Throughout times and cultures, there has been a great deal written and discussed about love. The definition ranges from the often complicated love shared by families to the passionate love that burns brightly early in a romance but fades over time to be replaced by either a deeper connection or a loss of interest. Sometimes writers contemplate the need for love in the world in order to settle differences and solve social problems. The reality is that the world has always known that love is the answer to many of the moral ailments of humanity, but because those of the world don’t know God, they have no idea how to define what love really is in its purest form.
In 1 John 4, the apostle who speaks more of love than any other biblical writer tells us not only where love originates but also what it looks like when it is reflected in our lives.
If we use 1 John 4 beginning at verse seven as an outline, we get a full-view of what love is and how it should bear fruit in our lives.
John writes,
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 9 In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. 10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
I want to take a moment to consider two important ideas which present themselves in verse seven. One is that love is of God - He is its origin. It doesn’t come from any other source. We either know God and therefore know love, or we don’t. The second is that God is love. Love not only has its origin in God, it is the very essence of who He is.
If that is true, then nothing outside of the will of God can be defined as love. We live in a society that treats love flippantly. The slogan “Love is Love” comes to mind, suggesting that any lifestyle, godly or ungodly, is acceptable because of love. Here’s the problem - if it’s not in alignment with God’s laws, it isn’t love. We have a tendency to take this verse - “God is love” - and then define God by our own human understanding of love. When we do that, we have it all backwards. Our understanding of love doesn’t define God - our understanding of God’s nature defines our ideas of love.
In difficult situations, it’s easy to decide that the “loving” thing to do is to avoid directly addressing sin. While it may be unpleasant and fraught with conflict and sometimes contention, addressing sin is love. It’s what God does, and He is love, so our avoidance of difficult conversations isn’t love. Keeping the peace isn’t always loving. Not taking our children to task when they are arrogant or lazy or defending them when they are in the wrong is not love. Not dealing with sinful behavior in our congregations or among the brethren is not love. It can’t be if love exists only within the will of God.
In verse 8, we are told that love manifests itself in some sacrificial way. The result of love is selfless action. God’s love manifested itself in action when He sent His Son into the world so that we could “live through Him.” Because He loved us, God did something. In fact, He did something that we didn’t even know we needed done. He did something that benefitted only us - not Him. God didn’t need Jesus to make recompense for His sins. For our good alone, He separated Himself from His Son. He gave something for us that was a sacrifice the magnitude of which I don’t think we can appreciate. I don’t pretend to understand the trinity of God, but what God offered was a part of Himself. He sacrificed a “togetherness” that I don’t even comprehend in order to redeem us when we had made ourselves enemies of God through our sins.
Christ coming to Earth was the only time God was separated from the Son in this way. The sacrifice of their union must have been monumental. And although they communed through prayer while Jesus was on earth, the moment on the cross when Jesus takes on the sins of the world would have meant total separation. The suffering must have been immense, and it was all done on our account. God sacrificed His unity with His Son, watched His Son suffer and die at the hands of His own creation, for the sake of the creature. It’s mind-boggling, really.
God withheld nothing from us. He sacrificed His only begotten Son. There isn’t another like Him. God couldn’t just create another. He didn’t send an angel; He sent His Son - the best heaven had to offer.
Furthermore, we were undeserving. We had made ourselves enemies of God (Rom. 5:8). If God’s love was so lopsided in its benefits, shouldn’t my love be dispensed without consideration of whether or not people are, in my opinion, deserving? Shouldn’t I love where there’s nothing in it for me? In fact, shouldn’t I love when it’s going to cost me something?
If you tell people you love them, but you never do anything for them, then you don’t love them. Sometimes doing things for people means talking to them so that you know what needs to be done. I’ve heard Christians say, “Well, I would have been happy to help, but they never asked me.” Did you ask them? Did you take time to get to know them so that you could anticipate what they may need? Or is your love just words - passive with no momentum? If that is the case, then whatever you are experiencing isn’t love at all.
God’s love wasn’t just words, and our love can’t be either. We need to love those around us well enough to anticipate their needs. We can’t decide who is deserving and who isn’t. We can’t serve those who we’ve decided we like and ignore others. Or more often, we serve those who have served us or who we think could serve us. The people who we don’t see being any use to us, we overlook or deem unworthy of help. That’s not love. There wasn’t and isn’t anything you can do for God that He can’t accomplish for Himself, and yet, He loves you. Sometimes I don’t know why He bothers with me at all because I feel so useless. It’s a marvel to me, but I’m so grateful for His love. He thinks I’m useful even when I don’t!
This passage is so rich and full of lessons on love that I’ve had a hard time narrowing down what to focus on, but one final point is important, I think. We are called to love people in such a way that we have their best spiritual interest at heart. God’s love was spiritual. I’m sure that’s not shocking to anyone, but His love’s focus was only our spiritual well-being. Jesus didn’t come to fix society or heal diseases. His purpose wasn’t to end poverty or cure earthly ailments. It was solely to fix the problem of sin. No other issues mattered.
For us, that’s important as we deal with the manifestation of our own love to those around us. It must be spiritually focused. We can feed, clothe, and nurse those around us, but if we aren’t offering them the gospel, then our love is only physical actions, and it is without a spiritual focus. This is where many churches get things wrong. There are community outreach programs designed to bring people in, and in many cases, people come. However, they come for the wrong reasons, and they leave without any spiritual admonishment at all. That’s a product of defining God and His will in our own physical terms through our shallow understanding of love. Every single thing that God has ever done for us has been in our own spiritual best-interest…because He loves us.
In the final verses of I John 4, John says that no one has seen God; we don’t have knowledge of God in a physical way. Yet, if we love one another, we will have the assurance that God dwells in us and we dwell in Him. And the world will know it, too. They will “see” God in us and the love we show each other will be a light in an otherwise dark, loveless world.
If we only define love in the way that we can experience it as people, then we will never know love. We won’t move past the idea that it is an intense fondness for someone who can return that affection to us.
That’s not spiritual love. Love functions within God’s will and demands sacrificial action. If our love doesn’t look like that, then we are forced to question whether it is love at all. By God’s definition, it’s not. And if we are to love each other as God loves us, then we need to figure out where we can love sacrificially, where there is no benefit to ourselves other than to be pleasing to our Father and to show what He has done in our lives to the world around us.
