God is a God of love. How many times have we heard that phrase and just let it pass through our ears or pass over our tongues without a second thought? How many times have we sung, “Jesus Loves Me,” and never taken a moment to ponder the reality of the magnitude of that statement? How many times have we sported buttons that cry, “God loves you and so do I,” yet lived a life void of love?
Our society does not understand love. Not real, forever love. In a nation where more than half of all marriages end in divorce, where the word “love” is thrown around like a baseball, and where 12 year olds are “making love,” it is important to get back to a foundational understanding of this concept.
God is a God of love. How can we truly understand this when our own view of love is broken and distorted? If a woman hears the words, “I love you” every night, and every night her body is used only as an object, her heart tossed around like a ship at sea, that is what she views love as: unreal, un-touching, unfeeling. If a boy hears his father whisper, “I love you,” before he goes to bed, but is never read to, is never played with, is never seen for the great young man that he is becoming, then that is what he views love as: distant, un-relatable, cold. If a woman is told “I love you” by her husband but is physically beat down, verbally abused, and sexually harassed, then that is what she views love as: painful, angry, hurtful.
God is a God of love. But if all that love is to us is a one-night stand, a distant father, an abusive husband, then love is not what we want. We want more than that. We need more than that. We need a God who will hold us when we are broken, when we cannot see through our tears, when there seems to be no way out. We need a God whose arms refuse to let us go, even when we struggle against Him. And even when it seems that we have escaped His embrace, we need a God whose arms are open to run to when we realize we cannot do it on our own. We need a God who cares about the deep scars that we bear inside our souls. Hidden. Dark. Secret. Shadows of our former selves that hurt to think of but are a burden to carry around. We need a hero; A God who will heal us, save us, rescue us from ourselves. We need a God who is a love that is far beyond all that we could ever imagine. A love that is unlike anything we’ve ever known.
We need a God who says “I love you” with a silent stare as He faces His accusers; a God whose love pours from His head in drops of blood and is torn from his back with nails and glass. We need a God who takes each painful step toward that fateful hill with a thought for you, for me. We need a God who struggles beneath the weight of our sins, because we cannot bear to carry them any longer. We need a God who was nailed to a tree, hanging there for all the things that we have failed to do, and all the things that we did do, that spat in the face of the One who made us.
The God we need died for love. His love for us was what nailed Him to the cross, and it was that same love that rose Him from the grave three days later. God is a God of love. Not a shaky, unsure, temporary kind of love, but a cross-bearing, blood-pouring, forgiveness-showing kind of love. The kind of Love that is worth living for, because it was for this that He died.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 1 John 4:10
