The Love of GodSample

Day 2 Devotional

The Definition of God’s Love

In 1John 4 verses 8 and 16, the Apostle John defines God’s love by stating very simply and powerfully, that, God is love. He is saying, God doesn’t just have love, He is love itself.

Our human love is often selfish because we love someone because of something in that person that meets our need for affection or affirmation or procreation. So, our modern ideas about love are often very self-serving and self-focused.

God loves us, however, not because of something in us that meets His need. He loves us to meet our need for love. Our ideas and our experience of human love are therefore the opposite of God’s love because God’s love is completely unconditional and unmotivated; it springs spontaneously out of His divine nature of unconditional love.

God’s love exhibited in his original creation is the reason why, in Hosea 6:7, when our first parent’ disobeyed and rebelled against God, God described that sad break in His relationship with our first parents, and us, by declaring that Adam refused His love.

As a result of that break, we see in Genesis 3:10-13 that our first parents’ sense of God’s love was replaced by guilt, shame, and fear which are still very much our sad legacy today as fallen human beings.

Every time we become disconnected from an inner consciousness of the love of God, we are plagued by guilt, fear, and shame. We seek to overcome these with the fig leaves of money, status, achievement, etc., just like we see our first parents doing in the garden, when they disobeyed God and lost their sense of his unconditional love for them. This explains why, here in verse 18 of our passage, John declares that our experience of God’s love casts out fear from our hearts.

God’s selfless and self-giving love for us means that, no matter what happens to us, no matter how much we may not understand it, God has allowed it to happen because it has passed the test of His love for us.

The definition of God’s love is that everything that God does, or does not do, in His world, and in our lives, is based on His unchanging divine nature of love.