The Love of God
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son,
that whoever believes in him should not perish
but have eternal life.”
John 3:16
Time for true confessions. When you recognized the familiar verse above, did you slow down to treasure it, or did you breeze through it to get to the article? I hope you slowed down. But if you didn’t, you’re not alone. I memorized John 3:16 when I was a little girl in Sunday school, and I’ve breezed through it ever since.
Even so, it was this Sunday school doctrine of God’s love that kept the door to repentance propped open until the day I got saved at age forty. If I’d never heard that God loved the world, I would never have had the courage to run to Him with my truckload of sin and shame. Once I did, I was so overjoyed by his love and acceptance that I wanted to share it with the world. I told anyone who would listen.
I made my way back to church and drank up whatever I could about the God I now loved. I learned about his many attributes and about many biblical doctrines. But the focus of what I was taught seemed most often to be on the hard teachings of the Bible, the unpopular doctrines. Those are important things to focus on. Everything God has revealed about himself is essential to knowing him.
However, in breezing past the love of God, I lost the basis for my salvation. Without love, his holiness, sovereignty, omnipotence, judgment, and wrath spell nothing but damnation for sinful humans like you and me. Without love, the hard teachings chipped away at my confidence in God’s tender care for me, chipped away at the assurance of my salvation, chipped away at my love for God’s people and for the lost people he came to save. I no longer talked about him to anyone who would listen.
At church one Sunday morning, not long after the death of my mother, I heard two men mocking the kind of people who like to hear about God’s love, implying that they are stupid people who don’t care about the meat of God’s word or about serious doctrine. What these men failed to notice was that there was a grieving woman standing nearby listening to their scoffing, a woman steeped in “meaty doctrine” but who desperately needed to hear about that love herself.
God’s love is not just a doctrine for children, and it does much more than hold open the door to repentance. We will never outgrow it; it’s the eternal source of our eternal life.
“[H]e chose us in him [Christ] before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved” (Eph. 1:4-6).
Today I am more convinced than ever that we can never get too much of God’s love or understand it too fully. The apostle Paul was even more convinced, which is why he prayed so fervently that the Ephesian church, “being rooted and grounded in love” would “have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God” (3:17b-19). Have you ever considered this, that we need God’s strength to grasp the love of Christ and that we need to grasp that love if we want to be filled with the fullness of God?
God’s love is the foundation of our salvation. It’s the source of our confident hope and it’s the only motivation that leads to a truly holy life. From it flows our love for him as well as our love for each other. It’s the love of God that makes us want to talk about him to anyone who will listen; and his love will lead them to trust him too.
