02/03/2025
I often talk about how I feel regarding Jesus and my love for God, but today I am considering the love God has for us, and the reason for the love He feels for us. We know very well that God loves us, and the Bible is filled with scripture to that effect. It could very well be considered a love story between God and man. Do we approach our relationship with this in mind?
“Thus says the Lord: "The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the Lord appeared to him from far away. I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”
Jeremiah 31:2-3 ESV
God loves us, and in the New Testament we are told this in a manner that is reflected in Jesus and His sacrifice. We read references that include this bold and often quoted scripture:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
John 3:16 KJV
If these aren’t the words of a love story then I don’t know what those words might be. But why does God love us? How did this love begin and to what end? First and foremost He loves us because that is His nature; God is the embodiment of love itself. He loves, and has loved us always, because He is love.
“Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
1 John 4:8 ESV
He also loves us because we are His creation... we are His children. We are family to Himself, the Father, and to Jesus, the Son. There are so many references to us as the children of God...
“See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”
1 John 3:1 ESV
He loves us because we are made in His image... we are like Him. In us He not only sees a creation but a reflection of Himself. When we stand before Him, at long last, we will see this plainly as well...
“Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.”
1 John 3:2 ESV
He loves us because He has instilled in us His character and nature, and has even multiplied our understanding and remembrance of this by breathing over us His Holy Spirit. Don’t we see how we are meant to love because He first loved? God loves us because we have the capacity to love Him.
“We love because he first loved us.”
1 John 4:19 ESV
We are humble in nature and maybe that is why we find it hard to understand how we could love Him enough, and how God could love us. But perhaps this is exactly why He does love us... It defines Him. If He loves those who see themselves as undeserving then in that very act, He reveals Himself and His perfection.
“For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?”
Matthew 5:46 ESV
So it is that we search the mystery of God's love for us, but in all our searching, and in every fault we have, we never doubt that He does love us. The question isn’t if… it is always why. We see our imperfect reflection and it causes us to ask this question whose answer flows throughout God’s Word. The Psalmist sings of this mercifully wonderful nature of God's love in beautiful verse.
“It is he who remembered us in our low estate, for his steadfast love endures forever; and rescued us from our foes, for his steadfast love endures forever; he who gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever.”
Psalms 136:23-25 ESV
Yet we see that even in our undeserving state He loves us. He even loved us to the point of sending His Son Jesus to die as a sacrifice for us, and still there are some who can not love Him back... We should be filled to the brim with love for God and yet He waits for us to love Him. We should be singing songs of love to Him, and yet He waits to hear our voice.
If we are imperfect then this is our flaw, and we know it about ourselves. We write about our imperfect love in poetry as Yeats did in expounding upon love unreturned in his poem "Never Give All the Heart", and we read it in novels such as "The Death of King Arthur" by Sir Thomas Malory. It is a weakness we believe we have in which our love is proven imperfect; and yet God loves us despite it. He strives to perfect our love by filling us with His own. Listen to Yeats as he writes of having lost at love, and his inability to love eternally; then ask yourself if this is really the true nature of who we are meant to be in Christ.
Never give all the Heart
By William Butler Yeats
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
Aren’t we meant to be so much more than this? Aren’t we meant to love as scripture teaches us? How sad for Yeats to feel so imperfect. How sad that he doesn’t write of fully realizing the love of God in his personal relationships. Are we prepared to embrace the true nature of God’s love in our lives, and read the truth in His Holy Word about how to love in this way? Isn’t the Bible the ultimate love story? Do we read it as an autobiography? Are we living it every day?
“So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”
1 Corinthians 13:13 ESV
Prayer:
Father, thank you for loving me fully and so completely. Father, teach me to love as you have always loved me. Never let the intensity of my love for you fade; not even when night comes to engulf me in darkness, or I become blinded and cannot see your face. Lord, let me love you always; let me love you unto my passing, knowing that your love surrounds me there, and waits for me without fracture on the far side of my last breath. Dear God, I raise you high above me, but when, in my lowly state of undeserving, I see your extended hand and hesitate to take it for fear I might disappoint you, encourage me to take hold Lord. How great is your love that even in my hesitation your hand is never withdrawn, and you beckon me to take it all the more emphatically. How is it Father that you can love me like this in my iniquity and despite my failures? How amazing is the unfathomable nature of your love. Heavenly Father, I give thanks for your steadfast love that endures forever, and pray that in Jesus Christ, I will please you and be worthy of eternity in your loving arms and presence… embracing you as I am embraced by you and realizing the true nature of love in that moment. Praised be your name Abba, and great are you in all good things, but none being greater than love.
Amen
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.”
1 Corinthians 13:1-3 ESV
“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.”
1 Corinthians 13:7-10 ESV
Rich Forbes