The Source of Love
This time of year for some is a wonderful reminder of what they have and enjoy in relationship with another person. For others, it can be a challenging reminder of the loss of what was beautiful and special at one point, but has now degraded to something far from the initial reality of what was. Yet, for others still, it can be an unsettling reminder of what has never been able to be enjoyed or entered into for one reason or another, often outside of one's control. Love is complex, layered, and beautiful, yet at times, it is broken. Even at its best expression, when it is most abundant and full of all that it can be, love can be fraught with danger and opportunity for hurt and pain. Even with that in mind, love is worth the risk, and requires such risk in order to experience the beauty and wonder of the gift that love truly is. That is the nature of love, the nature of relationships in general. In order to experience and fully enter into love, there is an inherent vulnerability and trust that must be offered and received.
We were created for perfect love, by the God of love, so that we may know and experience His love. God is the source of pure, unadulterated, unaffected love that is not corrupted or tainted in any way. This perfect love flows from His presence like an unending river that He calls and invites us to enter into, so that we may experience the fullness of love that He created us as humanity to know, experience and embrace.
"The irony is that while God doesn't need us, but still wants us, we desperately need God, but don't really want him most of the time." – Francis Chan
Our lack of interest and reception of God’s love is often due to our lack of proper understanding and experience of God and His love.
The love that most of us think about when we imagine God’s love is a far lesser version of the love that God is and offers to us in relationship. We put on God a vision of love that is affected by the ways that we have experienced love, understood love and have embraced love, painting a functional picture for us of what we imagine his love to be like. Even our best representation of this is at best incomplete and on almost every other level is a version tainted and marked by our sin nature and our wrong identifications of what we feel love is. This kind of love is often dependant on our performance and acceptance, our behaviour and agreement with a defined or undefined set of rules or understandings from another who is also incomplete in love.
God’s love for us is not dependent on us, or who we are in relationship with Him. His love is dependent on His character, who He is, not on our behaviour, attitudes, awareness of, or posture towards or away from God. There is no deficit of love with God; there is no beginning or ending to his love. When God loves, He is being Himself, without any mustering or limiting of feeling or emotion.
"Love is not something God has... His love is the way God is, and when He loves He is simply being Himself." – A.W. Tozer
Love is God’s character disposition, rather than an emotion, feeling, or momentary state of being. With that in mind, our failures or victories do not and cannot alter His love for us. That would somehow make His love conditional, fickle and contingent on our performance. God is not a human like us who is affected in the way that our love is affected by outward influence, circumstance, or another’s behaviour towards or against us.
Love from any other source, apart from the God who is love, will always be influenced by our brokenness, fears, hang-ups, sin-nature, and selfish prideful preoccupation with self. All of this affects the motivation and source of love. What is upstream in a river will always affect the clarity, purity, flavour and quality of the water that you drink. Some rivers should not be drank from. Some rivers need to be filtered or treated first.
You never need to do this with God because He is the source of all love. GOD IS LOVE
If you want to know Love at its purest form, go to the source of the Love. To see Love in action, look at the life of Jesus and how He loved His Father, how He loved others, and how He modelled appropriate love of self.
What we experience from others in love always requires that we settle for something less than the best. It always comes with limits, expectations, wrong identifications and partial expressions of what is love.
At times we allow our experience of love from others to inform our understanding of the love of God. WE NEED TO FLIP THIS. We need to encounter and experience the love of God and come to understand what true love actually is. From this place we can more accurately and adequately love God, others, and self.
This is a new way of living and and new way of loving people. We need to, in some cases, re-learn what love actually is.
A number of years ago, a man, who has since become one of my dearest friends, but at the time was unknown to me, came up to me and told me that I “did not know what love was.” I didn’t like what he had said, honestly it rattled me and even made me a bit mad. But when I stopped and thought about it for a while I realized that He might be right. I had a lot to learn. I needed to return to the source of love.
If you are identifying with this thought, perhaps feeling like you may be ready or needing to learn about love, I offer you what was offered to me: an opportunity to learn about love in the master-class of the life of Jesus in the Word. Enter the river of the love of God and go to the source of His love. Look intently at Jesus in the gospels and learn from Him by how He loved others, how He embraced the love of God, and also how He lived as having experienced and understood perfect love.
We are available to process this conversation with you and to help you encounter and embrace God’s love if you are feeling stuck in this area. Contact us though the email listed at the bottom of this page.
From one, who is learning about love and is embracing love, to another: you are loved.
