Here’s a guest post from the inestimable Heather Fellows.
God is love. He gives love to us. We give it away to others.
I want to share some of the ideas I was meditating on when I went away on my retreat a few weeks ago. I have drawn particularly on Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, God is Love. You can find a copy for free online if you want to read it.
Introduction
Christianity has been transforming societies across the world for the past 2,000 years. The positive impact of the Church cannot be overstated: guided by the teachings of Jesus, Christianity has touched virtually every part of life. Over the centuries, the Church has founded schools, hospitals and orphanages. Christians have campaigned for prison reform, better housing and an end to the slave trade; they have helped to establish a huge number of charities to support the poor, the underprivileged, prisoners and their families, the homeless and those seeking justice. Churches run marriage courses, thousands of parent-and-toddler groups and provide support for the bereaved. The people of this church make sacrifices day in and day out for the good of others.
Research in the UK in 2015 for the Cinnamon Network calculated that the time given by churches and faith groups to their communities through social action was worth more than £3bn a year.[1] I imagine that figure is much higher now, if only through inflation.
And that is staggering, isn’t it? So, what has, and what continues to motivate the Church to reach out in these kinds of ways day after day, century after century?
Love.
Love is at the heart of it all. Jesus says that God is, Himself, love. He defines what love is. And Jesus ultimately demonstrated what this love looks like by laying down his life for us on the cross.
Today I want to spend a little time dwelling on the love of God. What does it mean to us and for us? And what is its impact upon us?
I’m not going to quote long bits of the Bible here. But if you want to dig into where this comes from, you can look at 1 John 4: 7-16 and Mark 12: 28-31.
God is Love
When looking at the subject of love, we must begin with God himself. Only after that can we begin to think about what love means for us.
What does it mean to say that God loves us?
We love, John tells us, because God first loved us. God is the source of love.
We all need to be loved. We know that if a child is deprived of love when they are an infant, it has huge implications for their life. It leads to attachment problems, anxiety, insecurity and many other things.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise to us that the Bible and especially the New Testament, is laced with references to love. We need it like we need air to breath and water to drink and food to eat. And so God, in his great mercy, came down to earth, to meet our greatest need.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Our sin separated us from God and this was a big problem. From that point on mankind has been restless.
I think we can sense that in the world around us, can’t we? People are always seeking and searching for something and yet there is a sense that it is always slightly out of reach. And God’s answer to the problem is love.
Love looks like God himself taking the form of a man and coming to the earth to live and die in our place, bearing the weight of our sin upon his shoulders and paying the price we can never pay, so that we might be united in love with him.
God loves man with a personal, elective love. He chooses Israel and loves her, but precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God gives her the Torah, the Law, opening Israel’s eyes to man’s true nature, his sin, and showing her the path leading to true life. And man, through a life of fidelity to the one God, comes to experience himself loved by God, and discovers joy and truth and righteousness – a joy in God that becomes his essential happiness:
“Who do I have in heaven but you? And there is nothing upon earth that I desire besides you…for me it is good to be near God” (Psalm 73).
How beautifully the Psalmist captures the heart of one who has come to know something of the depths of God’s love. There is nothing that matters more.
Our society is obsessed with love, but there is something distinct, something unique about God’s love. If you know your Greek, you might know that the most commonly used word for love in the New Testament is agape. This is the kind of love demonstrated by Jesus. It is a kind of love whose concern is not primarily for oneself, but for the other. The kind of love we often seek is more of an eros love. This kind of love is a desperate, and hungry longing that desires to be filled for its own sake. It says, I need something and you can give it to me. But what God does is to intervene in man’s search for love in order to purify and perfect it. He unites our eros desire with his agape selfless love and creates something beautiful and powerful.
Jesus sums this up so well in Luke 17:33 when he said, “Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it.” The essence of love and life itself is found in giving it away, just as Jesus himself so perfectly modelled.
But as well as there being a hunger in each of us to be loved, so too God loves. God’s own eros desire for man, his passionate love for us, is also totally agape, totally self-giving. God’s love is unmerited, we have done nothing to deserve it, in fact we rather deserve death for turning our backs on our Creator. But God loves us with a passionate and forgiving love. So great is God’s love for man that by becoming man he follows man even into death, and so reconciles justice and love. The Song of Songs describes God’s relationship with man and man’s relationship to God. It is a love poem and pretty erotic in places:
I belong to my beloved, and his desire is for me: (Song 7:10)
The essence of biblical faith is that man can indeed come into union with God. Our search for peace has a true destination.
In Jesus we see that it is God himself who goes in search of the lost sheep – the lover in search of his beloved, culminating in his death on the cross – giving himself in order to save man – love in its most radical form.
When we take Communion we remember that Jesus has given his body and blood as the new food from heaven.
Before Jesus, the Jews understood that God’s Word was man’s real food – the Old Testament says that man cannot live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. But this same ‘Word’, the word become flesh as John puts it, now truly becomes food for us as love in the person of Jesus.
When we take Communion, we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus’s self-giving. And in taking this meal in communion with each otherwe remember that union with Christ is also union with all those to whom he gives himself. I cannot possess Jesus just for myself. We become one body with Christ, together. And so we see how the love of God and the love of our neighbour are now truly united. Communion includes the reality of both being loved and loving others in return.
But this love doesn’t stop there. As we accept and receive it, as we receive Jesus into our lives, God’s love is poured into us, saturating our hearts and minds and transforming us from the inside out into the very likeness of Christ. God’s love fuels and enables our Christian life.
In Romans 5:5 it says: “… God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
It’s the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in John 7: 37: “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” If we want our lives to be characterised by love, then we need Gods love first.
There is one God who is the source of all that exists, and we need to come and drink from him if we are to know love and life as he intended.
Jesus himself tells us that the focus of our lives should be love. When Jesus is asked which is the most important commandment, he answers by uniting into a single precept the commandments to love God and love your neighbour. The two are intertwined. And this echoes the passage we read in 1 John; we cannot truly love others, without first experiencing the love of the Father. It is a response to the gift of love with which God has drawn near to us.
That same love which prompted Jesus to lay down his life for us, God’s love, has been given to us if we have received Jesus into our lives.
And so as we have considered something of the nature of God’s love for us, we must now look at what it means for us. Because the very nature of God’s love is that it was designed to be given away, to impact the ones to whom it was given, to impact us.
And how does his love impact our lives?
We know from the well-known parable of the Good Samaritan told by Jesus that our neighbour is everyone and anyone. Love for others should absolutely characterise the church family and it is the place where no-one should go without. But loving our neighbour is a much wider calling. It is a call to love everyone we meet.
And Jesus had a particular heart for the poor and the least in society. This is what he said in Matthew 25:31-36:
“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Jesus identifies himself with the least.
The love of God and love of others are inextricably bound together. He is the stranger, the prisoner, the who is hungry and naked.
Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me. (Matt. 25:40)
In the least in society, Jesus tells us, we will find him. And we know that in Jesus we find God.
God is, of course, everywhere and we all bear his image, but Jesus says when we show love to the least, we are especially loving him. God’s love is taking a hold in our hearts, we are beginning to love with a God-like love in response to his love for us. And in doing so our own appreciation of God’s love for us grows.
When Gods radical, self-giving love is poured into our hearts, something happens. If you are a Christian here today, perhaps you can identify with this. As we receive God’s love, we find ourselves feeling a love for others that we cannot explain and didn’t previously experience. Sure, was a nice enough person before I was a Christian and I was, mostly, hopefully, kind to my friends and polite to people I met. But God’s love goes far beyond niceties. God’s love extends to the poor and the stranger and the outcast.
Putting Love Into Action
First, let’s ask God to help each of us to know more deeply and fully his love for us.
Why not spend some time this week chewing over some of the verses we have looked at today?
God loves you so much. His desire is for you. Do you know that? If you aren’t a Christian, perhaps you are hearing this for this first time. Perhaps this speaks to you and there is a deep desire in your heart to be loved. Then God’s word to you today is this ‘I love you so much that I gave my only son for you, so that by believing in me you might not perish but have eternal life.’ Come to me, he says.
And second, if you have received Jesus into your life, then do you know that his transforming love has been poured into your heart by the Holy Spirit? Perhaps you have experienced hurt and your heart has grown a little cold. Ask God to reveal his love afresh to you today, invite him to pour his love afresh on you, to warm your heart.
Finally, Jesus’ s love for us was never meant to be kept to ourselves, but to be given away. In fact it only truly finds completeness as it is given away. Why not ask God to open our eyes to the people around us to know how we can love them today?
Who are your neighbours? Who is at the school gates or in the office? Where are the poor near you? I once prayed a prayer asking God to show me the poor in Hersham and he did just that, which is another story. It was a ‘take me deeper than my feet could ever wander moment’. It’s a powerful prayer to pray. But in seeking to love others, God has moved powerfully in my own heart too.
Who needs to know God’s love this week? We could do worse than just ask that question each day.
With all those we encounter in everyday life, we are called to reflect God’s love by seeking to see them as Jesus does, attending to their practical needs, but also keeping in need their deepest need of all, for Jesus himself.
God is love. He gives love to us. We give it away to others.
[1] Cinnamon Faith Action Audit, May 2015, p.4; Louise Ridley, ‘Could The Staggering £3bn Social Contribution Of Religious Groups Be The Antidote To Austerity Cuts?’, HuffPost, 20 May 2015 <https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/05/20/church-groups-community-social-contribution-tories_n_7321288.html> [Accessed 17 May 2024]
Deep Church 