Lately, I’ve been really contemplating and seeking to understand what it means when we say God is love. It almost seems idiotic to think about such things because the logical and easy answer is rooted in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one an only son.” And that would not be an incorrect response. God did give his son because of his love for us.
Here’s the thing though. I’m coming to understanding that when we say God is love, we often think of love as a verb. God is always in the action of loving us. Again another true and valid statement, but what happens when we begin to look at the word “love” as a noun. God IS love. The simple words become something entirely different. Something that offers more hope than ever imagined. God IS love. Love is God. The two are inseparable. God’s very being is love. Love does not exist without God and God does not exist without love. Love is not just a quality God possesses, it is his very being!
Every moment of his being, every movement, every thought, every piece of God is at its core an expression of love because God IS love. At every turn he’s reaching out for us. He is looking for us. He will go anywhere to find us. He loves us, he wants us home, he cannot rest unless he has us with him.
What I love about the Church of the Nazarene is that we have a belief that the love of God can so thoroughly penetrate and fill our hearts, souls and minds; that it cannot help but, like a gushing waterfall, overflow from our being to others. This belief is the doctrine of holiness – becoming conformed to the image of Christ and not just for ourselves, but for the sake of others. God/Love can pour himself into us, conforming us and molding us to the very image of himself and the natural expression becomes our becoming love.
When this happens, when we are so filled with God/Love, condemnation is gone. We aren’t able to dispense something that wasn’t given to us. And I’m left wondering, when we find ourselves in those moments that we can judge and condemn, have we found a piece of our heart that we haven’t given to God? If we had given it over to him, would it not be filled with Love? In Christ there is no condemnation. In Christ there is love and that love is meant not so we can become trophies on God’s shelf of “won souls,” but so we can freely and openly give that love to others. That is holiness – becoming conformed to the image of Christ, becoming Love, becoming whole and all for the sake of others!
We are meant to love the Lord with all our hearts, souls and minds! We are meant to love others! These are the two greatest commands and flow directly from God’s very being. God IS love!
