Love is God

Love is God.

Nobody loves well, at least not naturally. We have to learn how to do it.  We all come into this world knowing we need it, but not knowing how to do it.  So we look to our parents and our friends, people in our lives who should love us or who we want to love us.

But nobody loves well. Sure, there are moments when that need is met. 

Someone says the exact right thing at the exact right time. 

We get that hug in a moment of real grief. 

Or someone gives us the perfect gift and we feel fully known. 

Deep down, we want to be loved, and we hope we are lovely. But those moments fade. Whether through hurt or insult or simply the passing of time, we always return to the place where we are keenly aware of just how badly we need to be loved. And we will always feel that way because no one loves well.

Love is our god. It is one of the most instinctual, natural desires you and I have. It is talked about everywhere in the culture, and it is a driving force behind almost every decision we make. Every day, you and I do the things we do because we are loved or because we want to be.  

The problem is we are broken people, and we look for love from broken people.  Every person I have ever met has been hurt, insulted, abused, neglected, used, and abandoned. And so we self-protect, withhold, guard, and hide. And even worse, they in turn hurt us.

Another problem is that love is relative.  Or more clearly, there is relativity between how every person thinks about love.  We define what it is. We determine what love should and should not look like.  We mix in our personal preferences and our past experiences. And we decide what is lovely and what is not lovely. 

Love is our god, but each god is different. 

When love is a god of our own making, it is self centered- if it is more concerned with being loved than with prioritising others.  We can confuse our need to be loved with the idea that we deserve to be loved.  And this entitlement further confuses our understanding and experience.  Instead of truly loving someone, we love what someone does for us and how they make us feel.  And we suspect that they love us for the same reasons.

And so, nobody loves well. But where does that leave us?

Will our understanding always be incomplete and confused? 

Will our god of love always be insufficient and conditional? 

Have we all not been given a deep need to be loved? 

Will it ever be met? 

If love is god, then are we destined to worship a god who cannot meet our needs? 

If love is my god... then, yes.

In the Bible, God says that He is love.  So we apply our self-made definitions of love to God.  We are then left to wrestle with the differences between our definition of love and God’s.  This wrestling leads to a bigger question:  Is love god?  Or is God love?

If love is god, then God is subject to us and what we say love is. 

But if God is love, then he is the beginner, creator, and ultimate definer of love.  And God has made a case for himself.  He has presented us with his own definition. He has not only described it, but he has set an example for us in how Jesus lived.

This is God’s definition. Love is patient and kind. It does not envy or boast. It is not proud. Love does not shame others, and it is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered.  Rather, it forgives. Love does not celebrate injustice, but it rejoices when the truth wins. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails.

That sounds wonderful, doesn’t it?  But I know I do not love others that way, and I have yet to find anyone who loves me that completely.

But God says that this is what love is, and he says that this is how he loves us and how we ought to love one another. And he showed us this love through Jesus.

One of my favorite stories in the life of Jesus is the last supper.  Jesus is having the traditional Jewish holiday meal of Passover with his disciples, but upon arrival, there is no one to wash everyones' feet. Commonly, this was the job of the lowliest servants, but there were no servants so everyone's feet remained filthy. Seeing this need, Jesus rose, and taking a basin and a towel he washed everyone's feet.

Why is this so remarkable? For one, Jesus is the master and teacher, the most respectful person in the room.  This job should be anyone’s but his.  Secondly, this is the evening before Jesus was to be arrested, tried, and killed. All of these friends of his will abandon him in the next 24 hours. Before the sun rises, Peter, one of his closest friends, will publicly deny even knowing him.  Another friend, Judas, is the very man who will betray him to his death.

And still, he washes their feet, everyones' feet.

Later that evening, Jesus would go on to tell them, "there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."  The next day he would do that very thing.

John is another of Jesus' friends who was there that night. He is the one who famously wrote “God is love" in the Bible.  Having seen Jesus live out this love for him, he said, “We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us. So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters.”  Jesus’s life defined love for us, and should motivate us to love others the same way,

Jesus is love.  He is patient and kind. He does not envy or boast. He does not shame us and is not self-seeking. He is not easily angered but instead, he forgives us. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes and always perseveres.  

Jesus never fails.

And he loves us whether we are a John or a Judas.

This all causes me to ask myself some questions.  What if I stopped trying to give and receive my own self-defined version of love?  How would things be different if I gave and received the love that God describes?  Could I even do it?

I don’t know that I could, because I still believe that nobody loves well.  Nobody, but Jesus.  And maybe that can make all the difference