Love is not God

In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us first. We confess that God is love, but if we are not careful, we can soon arrive at the horrific heresy that love is God. And there’s a sense in which the closer our love gets to mimicking God’s love, the closer to the precipice we come to mistaking our love for God.

So often what we think of as us loving someone is full of selfishness, ulterior motives, and grasping. We tell ourselves that it is for their good, but if we are honest it is more for our benefit, for managing the status quo, or for even darker motives.

This is how we can get to the point where it is considered love to lie to someone about the biological sex God created them with and allow them to harm their bodies. And it is considered hate to tell them the truth and try to prevent them from harming themselves. But you cannot get to this point in a culture without a million smaller compromises, a million other lies propping it up. Did we love our children when we did not correct them? Or did we correct them in love, or merely because they were bothering us? Did we speak about our husband or our wife with respect and deep honor, or did we roll our eyes and deride them to our friends and justify it, saying we were just telling the truth? 

So what are we to do? We must come here, to this table. We must come to Christ. And this must be our pattern for every single day. We come to Christ in prayer, by confessing our sins, and reading His Word. And we must come because if we are honest, we barely know what love is. And the moment we get a glimpse of it, our sinful hearts want nothing more than to commandeer it and claim it for our own. But if God is love, then love is always a gift. It is never ours. It is always His. There is plenty of it, plenty to go around. There is always more. But you cannot have it unless you know you need it, unless you know all of your attempts are like a small child scrawling a picture of her dad. Your Father is very easy to please, but He is hard to satisfy. Because His love is something deeper and richer than we can even imagine. But His love is here in His Son given for You. His love is here for sinners.

So come and welcome to Jesus Christ.

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash