What is God’s Love

Is February truly the month of love?  If the shops are anything to go by, we are already into the buying season for Valentine’s Day when we can express our love with someone else’s idea of the ideal card or gift.  Popular media gives a picture of love as feelings of attraction and pleasure, feelings that can come and go like the changing of the seasons. The word love is used so frivolously that such exploitation has made it meaningless.  Today’s love can be selfish, either when we give our love only on the expectation of having it returned or we hold back our love until someone proves worthy of it.

But this is not the love our Bible, God’s Word, shows us.  So what is God’s love?

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4v7-12a

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. 1 Corinthians 13v4-7

It is hard to talk about God’s love without wanting to quote verse after verse of the Bible because there is so much in there about His love, true love.  It talks of how much God loved us even before we were born and the sacrifice His Son, Jesus, was prepared to make to bring us eternally home. (John 3:16, Psalm 139:13-14)

The overriding theme, however, is that real love is not fleeting, it is not conditional, and it is not dependent on supporting emotions such as desire, sympathy or even malice.  To understand real love, we need to understand God’s love.  And to understand God’s love, we need to know who God is and why He cares so much about us.  In His grace, God has given us His Word, the Bible.  There you will find its pages full of poetry, prophecy and history, hiding nothing from us.  He has also given us strong Bible preaching pastors with the knowledge to help guide and teach us.  It seems God knew what to provide us with even before we knew we needed them.