Commissioned: Real Love: Discovering God's Heart for YouSample

God is love

This passage from the first letter of John tells us that God revealed His love to us by sending His Son to save us even when we did not love Him. God sent Jesus to be the “expiation” for our sins: this means that he did away with the guilt for our sin and made us clean before God. He did this “so that we might have life.” He did this for us when we had done nothing for Him. All of this echoes the words of the apostle Paul in yesterday’s reading from his letter to the Romans.

But John outdoes Paul with this significant statement: GOD IS LOVE. The Catechism beautifully comments on this verse, “But St. John goes even further when he affirms that “God is love”: God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” (#221) What an incredible statement: God’s very being is love! The Bible gives us hundreds of statements about what God is like, but very few about what he IS. In fact, there are only three. The first is God’s revelation to Moses: “I AM”—God alone is eternally existent and depends on nothing for His existence. The other two are through the apostle John: “God is light (truth and goodness)” (I John 1) and “God is love.”

The sovereign eternal being, creator of heaven and earth, is love. His purpose in creation was to express love. He didn’t need creation, he chose to create in order to express His love. He loves us not as an afterthought, not just barely after careful consideration of the other alternatives. He loves us because that is who He is. He does not equivocate (He is light) and He does not change. (He is the eternal I am.) And He is love. We can count on His love for us because it is sourced in and flows from His true and unchanging being.

God’s love flows from who he is, and our love for others flows from who we are in Him. John says that whoever is “begotten by God and knows God” loves others. As baptized and confirmed believers in Jesus Christ, we have been made partakers of the divine nature, and we have the opportunity to know Him personally in the holy eucharist, in the sacrament of reconciliation, in our devotions of prayer, and through meditation on Scripture. In these ways, we keep the love of God flowing through our lives. We are not the source of this love; “love is from God.” We do not produce it. We receive it and we pass it on to others. We love others because He loves us. And the more we cultivate a continual experience of God’s love for us, the more we become loving people.

Stop, think and pray:

Let’s begin by meditating on the truth that God’s very nature is love. Are we experiencing God’s love for us at this moment? Are we faithfully receiving the grace of the sacraments God has provided for us? Are there additional devotional practices—prayer, reading, meditation--that we’d like to make part of our lifestyle? Are there any relationships in which we are blocking the flow of God’s love with our judgment or unforgiveness? If so, let’s release those people from our judgment so that the love of God can flow through us.