God is love…

I’m a sucker for a Hallmark movie. We all know the appeal for the Hallmark movie has nothing to do with the complexity of the plot, suspense or the unraveling of deep truths. They draw us into the same plot expressed creatively in countless movies because in the end love wins!! We embrace each new movie anticipating the exact same ending.

But what if I told you…Hallmark has hijacked love?

Heresy you say! How can it be? It feels so good to see them together in the end. It seems so good to witness love triumphing over all the hurdles placed before it. It even tastes good when you pair it with popcorn.

The truth is if we take what Hallmark is peddling (what this world is peddling) as love and hold it up against the Word of God we might be shocked. Hallmark might display periodic elements of love, but love itself has been twisted, turned and flipped upside down until it is unrecognizable.

So, I ask how do you define love?

And therein lies the issue. I’m guessing we could ask 100 people to define love and I’m not sure we would hear the same answer twice. It has become vague, elusive and subjective.

Did you know the Bible clearly defines love? Gives an exact definition.
You know what is shockingly absent from God’s definition of love…E-M-O-T-I-O-N.

Inconceivable!! I know!!

1 John 3:16 spells it out for us.
God is love.

To be fair, I believe God has emotion. Jesus displayed emotion. But Jesus was not defined by His emotion. His choices were governed by His WILL not His emotions. (Matthew 26:36-46)

That said…I love that there is a period at the end of that sentence. That one, three-word sentence has the power to flip your thinking upside down.

But before we dig in and unpack the verse. Before we find corroborating scriptures, lets think about what advantage it might serve our enemy to hijack the term love.

Peddling love as an emotion—fickle, fleeting and non-committal–greatly diminishes it value and security. It expunges one of the responsibly to stay, serve or remain faithful when the feeling is absent. Peddling love as an emotion makes love self-serving and cruel. Anyone in a relationship operating under the pretense that love is defined as a feeling will experience the painful realties of heartbreak.

And then when someone tells the poor soul that just experienced the devastating realities of a relationship forged on love as emotion is told that God loves them, they shutter. Why would anyone want to serve a God that is fickle, self-serving, unfaithful and demanding?

Now, I know you are not so naïve to strictly define love as a feeling. But I caution you against giving the emotion of love any credence in your definition of love. Hopefully, by the end of our six-post series together you will better understand what would lead me to make such a seemingly crazy statement.

I have a deep-seated affection/desire for God. But my desire for God has been the by-product of my choices not the sole impetus for them. Living that equation in reverse will leave you frustrated and getting no-where. Waiting until we feel like doing something. often leaves us waiting forever.

Two times in 1 John 4 the disciple plainly states God is love. Multiple times throughout scripture God’s love is described as an action…Christ dying for our sins. (I John 4: 9, 10; John 3:16; Romans 5:8, John 15:13)

God is love. Look at God and you will understand what love is. See what God does and you will see what love looks like. Understand the character of God and you will get a glimpse of how wide and long and high and deep His love is for us. (Ephesians 3:18)

The most inconceivable reality of His love is its fidelity.
If we are faithless,
He will remain faithful,
For he cannot disown himself.
2 Timothy 2:15

God will always love us because love is who He is. The radical part about His love is it has nothing to do with us and everything to do with Him. That’s why it is so extravagant, so unconditional. It also exposes the deception the enemy plants in our minds when he tells us we are unworthy of God’s love. He is right…we are unworthy. But God remains faithful in His love for us because He is love. He cannot disown Himself.

When you get to that place where you realize your utter inadequacies, when the world has laid rejection at your feet, God will lift your head with His love. There is nothing as life changing as realizing God loves the unlovable. He loves you with all your faults, blemishes, wrinkles, emotional junk and scars.

It doesn’t matter what you have done or will do. You cannot earn His love. And to the degree you witness others loving so extravagantly, so unconditionally is to the degree you see God at work. So yes, Hallmark may periodically display elements of extravagant, unconditional love. But only God unconditionally loves us without end.

That said, there is a variable in the equation of love. God’s love is the constant, our love for Him is the variable.

I’ll leave you with this illustration. Two years into our marriage, we suffered our first miscarriage. At the ten-week check up the baby no longer had a heartbeat. We had not told anyone I was pregnant, but I knew at this point I needed to confide in Jennifer. I dropped by her apartment and sat on the couch. I took a deep breath but found I was unable to articulate the loss. Instead, I began to weep. Head down sobbing, Jennifer passed me tissues. When I finally looked up, I found my friend weeping with me. Puzzled I said…” Why are you crying?” She said, “Because you are crying.”

There was no greater love my friend could have demonstrated in that moment. I have never forgotten it. I walked away experiencing the depth of her love and assured I would spend the rest of my life faithfully loving her as she did me in the moment of my great need.

I think we must get to the same place with our Lord. I want to spend the rest of my life faithfully loving my Savior who loved me extravagantly in the hour of my great need.