Let's talk about love

1 April 2020

Where does God fit into the conversation? 

Love is all around us. We encounter the word incessantly, pouring out of our televisions, our radios, splashed across newspaper headlines and peppering social media. There has never been so much love, nor so much talk of it.

Only, I’m beginning to think that our obsession with the word belies the fact that we have lost track of what it means. For many people, the answer to that question would be, ‘love is love’ — inferring that it comes in many forms and that it can be anything we want it to be. It is yet another example of where absolutes have been removed, making it impossible to have any kind of definition at all. 

We don’t need to despair, however, because a proper definition does exist; it just happens not to be to everyone’s taste: God is love.

The instant you bring God into the conversation, of course, the eye-rolling starts. He’s a known killjoy. Funnily enough, the least biblically literate of unbelievers know, almost instinctively, what God disapproves of. And, when you know he disapproves of what you want, then the best thing to do is write him off as irrelevant or, even better, imaginary.

That, however, doesn’t mean that believing ‘God is love’ sorts everything out either. It is more than a mere fridge-magnet sentiment to be parroted in every tight spot and awkward situation. A few years ago, I sat in church as our then minister thundered that many people had gone to a lost eternity believing God is love. He was right. There are those who think that, because God is love, he would not let a basically decent person, who has lived a civilised life, suffer eternal death.

Neither he would; he has made provision for us to avoid that eventuality, but some of us will it for ourselves by failing to accept his gift.

Which brings me back to that definition of love: God is. That’s really no help though, if you don’t know anything about God.

So, go to 1 John chapter 4 in the Bible. Here is a complete definition of love. It tells us that love is from God and that God IS love. Whether we like it or not, and whether we accept it or not, we cannot understand love apart from him.

We live in a country that makes it increasingly hard to talk about God without being mocked, pilloried, silenced or hated. So why do Christians share the Gospel; why do they intervene in debates where God’s name is trampled underfoot, when they know that the chances of being listened to are slim, and the chances of being jeered at and derided very great?

The answer is ‘love’. We love because he first loved us. Having that love in us now, we cannot contain it; it has to flow outwards to others where we once were.

We see you, walking through the storm of life, head bowed against the onslaught. Watching, we remember how it felt to be there in the cold, buffeted this way and that, our peace and happiness subject to every prevailing wind. And we are moved, by the Saviour’s love for us and in us, to catch you and pull you in where we are, beneath the shelter of his wings.

That, my friends, is love, which comes from Jesus and through him, and depends only upon him. God is love and, therefore, when he is the foundation, love IS love.

Catriona Murray blogs at posttenebrasluxweb.com