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3. God who is Love
   

A. The Need to Consider ‘Love'

 

•  To consider the commandment to love, requires us to think about what love means.
•  To us love is an attribute; one characteristic of our being, but what we are, in essence, is human.
•  1 Jn 4:8 ‘ God is Love' - means love is the very essence of God; it is what He is.
•  How do we understand this?
•  We are made in God's image, and although that image is distorted by sin, it may give us some insight into love, as God understands it.

    

B. Three sorts of love to be considered

 

Eros : sexual love;

•  The act of marriage speaks of complete union.
•  Gen 2:24 ‘ a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife and they become one flesh' .
•  Paul comments that marriage is a reflection of the relationship between Christ and His church. (Eph 5:32)
•  Perhaps this helps us to understand Jesus' words in John 17: ‘ that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (v.21)
•  God's aim is that we should be totally and absolutely united with Him.

 

Filial : this love connects us to those with whom we have some blood relationship.

•  We are connected to them by birth. ‘Blood is thicker than water' we say.
•  We care about our families. We might not like them that much but we care!
•  Latest example of this is those who give kidneys so that a relative may have one.
•  This kind of love is natural. We speak of acts of cruelty by parents to their children as ‘unnatural'.
•  However, sin sometimes results in this ‘natural' love breaking down, but as Isaiah says, with God this love never breaks down: ‘ Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Yea these may forget, yet will I not forget you' Isa 49:15

 

Agape : self sacrificing love – the total giving of oneself for the good of another.

•  Humanly we know little of this kind of love, although as Paul says perhaps for a good man one would even dare to die (Rom 5:7).
•  Some have identified the love of a mother for her child as this; and certainly parents have been known to go to great lengths of self sacrifice for their children.
•  God loves, sacrificially, just because He can't help loving!
•  Rom 5:8 ‘God shows His love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us'
•  1 Jn 4:10 ‘ In this is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the expiation for our sins'

•  What a blessing this is!! You can never lose God's love by anything you are or do.
•  When we fall in love, there is sometimes that nagging worry, will he/she still love me when I'm old and grey/ wrinkled/ crabby/ or ‘64'!!
•  What security there is in knowing that God's love for us does not depend on us in any way!

•  How is God's love expressed? God does not express His love by tawdry-present trappings, or even honeyed words, but by deeds.
•  Is it too much to say we dominate God's thinking?
•  When people are in love, the loved one dominates their thinking, sometimes exhibited by strange behaviour.
•  Isa 49:16 ‘ Behold I have graven you on the palms of my hands' God doesn't have ‘Mum' as a tattoo, He has your name!!

•  God didn't give a bunch of flowers or box of chocs to demonstrate His love.
•  He sacrificed His one and only Son in a most horrible death, to buy us back from the slavery of sin.
•  Jn 3:16 ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life'
•  1 Jn 4:9 ‘ In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent His only Son into the world, so that we might live through Him'

•  Through this act of sacrifice God makes us His children. (1 John 3:1).
•  Because He is our father we share His life, as a human father imparts his life to his children.
•  We are therefore ‘ partakers of the divine nature .' (2 Pet 1:4) How amazing is that!
•  Not because of anything we have done, any more than we have human life because of any thing we have done. It is imparted to us by our human fathers.
•  So God imparts to us His divine nature, not because of anything we do, but because of what He has done in the cross of Jesus Christ.

 

C. God's Work

 

•  So what does this achieve as far as we are concerned?
•  It gives us a new nature; in Christ we are a new creation. (2 Cor 5:17 )
•  If there are things about you which you don't like, fret not; your Father has it under control.
•  He has given you a new nature and as you go on in the Christian life that new nature will manifest itself more and more.
•  Even when God gives the rules that He has designed that we might get the best out of life, He does not intend those rules to become a burden to us. (Matt 11:29-30)
•  He Himself gives us the power to obey. We are not on our own. God is at work in us to will and to work for His good pleasure. (Phil 2:13)
•  He has worked out in advance what He wants of us. (Eph 2:8-10)
•  Whatever happens in this life, we have the promise of eternity with Him and the evidence of this is the presence of His Holy Spirit in our lives. (Eph1:13-14)

•  In this life He has promised to provide all we need (Phil 4:19 ) and is anxious that we should live our lives without anxiety!
•  How great a gift is that in this world of economic turmoil and threats from terrorists etc. (Matt 6:25 -33; Phil 4:6-7)

 

1 John 4:15 – 21 summarises the effect of realising the love of God for us:

•  We abide in Him; knowing His presence and His teaching and guiding.
•  We have confidence looking forward to death and the day of judgement.
•  We have no fear in this life.
•  We are filled with the love of God towards others.

What an inheritance!

A Final Comment   

Over the past decades I have come to see that apprehending, knowing and experiencing God's love is probably THE all-important issue for a Christian. Realising that He loves me just as I am, and yet loves me so much He has got a better 'me' to come, has been truly releasing. In fact grabbing the simple truth that God IS love is also life-changing - that He is always love and whatever He thinks, says or does is an expression of love. It may be that we don't understand that love, or at least expressions of it, but once you do grab it, it totally transforms your understanding of the whole of the Bible!

There is probably more in the paragraph above that needs grappling with, than in the rest of these series of messages. I am utterly convinced that most Christians really just haven't got to grips with the things I have just written above and yet they are simply a reflection of what we find in the Bible.

The problem for many of us is that the ways of this sinful world have treated us badly in our earlier years and as we look around this sinful world and the affairs of sinful men, we have had these truths distorted by lies of the enemy. It becomes, I suggest, a lifetime task to regain them. Read that first paragraph again and then set out on that task.