One of our greatest needs as human beings is to be
loved. We all need love. We need to know that we are important to
somebody, that somebody truly cares about us, wants us, and accepts us
unconditionally. When we doubt that we are loved, we may develop
unacceptable behavior patterns to compensate for it.
For example, we may act irresponsibly in a desperate
attempt to get attention. Attention is a poor substitute for love but
it seems better than nothing at all. We may develop physical symptoms
that bring us sympathy and concern. The symptoms cause us genuine pain,
but the pain of sickness is more bearable than the pain of admitting
that nobody cares. We may angrily lash out at those whom we think should
care or we may try to run away from them and hide, but in either case,
we are trying to protect ourselves from the hurt they are causing us by
their lack of concern. We all need to know that somebody loves us.
The good news from God’s Word is that somebody does.
To know Him is to find release from the crippling effects of feeling
unloved. Twice the Apostle John categorically stated that God is love (
1 John 4:8,16).
Love is one of the warmest words in the English language, and that God
is love is one of the most sublime, uplifting, and reassuring truths
known to mankind. Love is His nature. It is not merely a friendly
attitude He projects. It is the essence of His being. He is always going
to act toward us in love because He cannot do otherwise. Love is the
way He is.
No one attribute of God is any more important than
any other, and all His attributes are expressed in conjunction with each
other. Yet some believe that love may be the most powerful motivating
force in all of God’s being. It deeply affects everything else God is
and all that He does. Knowing God’s love could well be the believer’s
key to a well-balanced, satisfying life of peace, productivity, and
power. It would be rather presumptuous to assume that we can exhaust the
subject of God’s love in one brief chapter, but let us try to scratch
the surface and begin to explore this fathomless truth. Here are eight
characteristics of God’s love.
God’s Love Is Self-Giving
Love involves action. It is expressed in the giving
of oneself for the good of another, so it always demands an object.
Whenever we talk about love we are suggesting that there is more than
one person involved. There must be at least two—the one who loves and
the one who is loved. If God has always been love and love demands an
object, we may wonder how God demonstrated His love before He created
angels or men. Jesus answered that question. He revealed that there was a
love relationship between the persons of the triune Godhead from
eternity past, when He said to His Father, “Thou didst love Me before
the foundation of the world” (
John 17:24).
We have seen that God is complete and sufficient in and of Himself. He
has no needs which must be met by others outside Himself. He did not
need to create other beings in order to express His love. It was
perfectly expressed between the persons of the Trinity from all
eternity.
Yet He did create. Why? He wanted so much to
manifest His love that He first created the angelic hosts and later the
human race so that he might communicate Himself to them, give of Himself
for them, and bestow His very best on them for their benefit and
blessing. Our love is often selfish and demanding. God’s love is pure.
Because He is love, He loves to give. Jesus said He gives good things to
those who ask Him (
Matthew 7:11). James went so far as to say that every good gift finds its source in Him (
James 1:17). Since God is love, we can expect Him to give of Himself.
Knowing the God of love can help to make us more
loving and giving persons. Not only will getting to know Him more
intimately cause us to become more like Him, but resting secure in the
assurance that He loves us will keep us from making demands of others
and free us to reach out unselfishly and minister to them for their
benefit alone. It is vitally important that we understand how much God
loves us.
God’s Love Is Sacrificial
Not only does God’s love motivate Him to give, but
it motivates Him to give when it costs Him dearly. That too is different
from our love. We hesitate to do anything for others that will cost us
too much or inconvenience us too greatly. But God’s love cost Him the
very best that He had—His only Son. That is the message of the greatest
love text in the Bible: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His
only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but
have eternal life” (
John 3:16).
God’s giving His Son involved more than merely allowing Him to leave
Heaven’s glory and enter earth’s history. It meant allowing Him to die
in our place and pay the awful debt of our sins. God proved His love
conclusively and irrefutably by sending His Son to the cross as an
atoning sacrifice for our sins (
Romans 5:8;
1 John 4:9-10). That is sacrificial love.
It was no less of a sacrifice for God the Son than
it was for God the Father. His willingness to offer Himself was the
summit of sacrificial love. Paul called Him “the Son of God, who loved
me, and delivered Himself up for me” (
Galatians 2:20).
When the same apostle outlined God’s principles for harmonious marital
relationships, he said, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also
loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (
Ephesians 5:25).
Jesus Christ made the supreme sacrifice for us when He died in our
place. He was falsely accused, beaten, spit on, crowned with thorns,
nailed to a cross, and left to die the most excruciating death known to
man. The infinite curse of sin’s penalty, the Father’s just punishment
for the whole world’s guilt, was laid on Him as He hung on that cross.
He possessed the power to walk away from it unscathed, yet He
voluntarily stayed there and bore that suffering for us. There simply is
no greater love (
John 15:13).
Whenever we are tempted to think that nobody loves
us, we need to think of the cross. Jesus bore that shame and suffering
because He loves us. He values us so highly that He was willing to make
the ultimate sacrifice to secure for us eternal joy. That is the epitome
of love. Knowing Him intimately will motivate us to make some
sacrifices for the good of others—for our spouses, our children, and
other members of the body of Christ. It will help us give up what we
want in order to minister to their needs.
God’s Love Is Unconditional
One of the most amazing things about God’s love is
that it is extended to us when we do not deserve it and continues
steadfast and strong even when we do not respond to it. In other words,
His love is unconditional. That certainly is different from our love. We
have a tendency to show more love to the people who obviously love us
and less love to the ones who do not. We express our love to our spouses
and our children when they perform to our expectations and we withhold
it from them when they displease us. We shower affection on the lovable
children and avoid the belligerent little rascals who look as if they
might want to kick us in the shins. I find it easy to express my love to
my wife when she tells me what a wonderful husband I am, but not quite
so easy when she scolds me for not taking out the trash. I find it
easier to be loving toward my children when they are obeying me
willingly, but not quite so easy when they are resisting me.
God is not like that. The best-loved verse in the Bible says, “For God so loved
the world,”
that
is, the whole world. That does not refer to the materials out of which
our planet is constructed, but to the world of people. It does not mean
the whole mass of humanity generally; it refers to each individual
sinful person. The Bible categorizes all of them as God’s enemies,
people who have willfully set themselves against Him (cf.
Romans 5:10;
Colossians 1:21). God even loves His enemies—all of them.
There is not one good thing in any of us that merits
God’s love. He does not love us because we are so lovable or because we
can somehow make ourselves worthy of His love. We are totally unworthy,
yet He prizes us highly and showers His very best on us. It is His love
for us that gives us our worth. God finds great delight and receives
great glory when we respond to His love, enter His fellowship, and do
His will. In fact, He made us for that purpose. But whether or not we
ever return His love, He keeps on extending it to us. There is nothing
we can do to make Him love us any more, and nothing we ever do will
cause Him to love us any less. He loves us perfectly and completely
regardless of how we perform. His love is unconditional.
So many of us are performance oriented. We have felt
approved and accepted when we have performed to someone else’s
satisfaction, and disapproved and rejected when we have failed to live
up to their standards. Consequently, we treat others the same way. If
they please us, we treat them kindly and considerately. If they
displease us, we feel justified in treating them unkindly and
unlovingly. Knowing God intimately will help us express love to others
when they do not perform to our expectations.
There is a great Biblical illustration of God’s
unconditional love in His relationship with the nation Israel. “The LORD
did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in
number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples,
but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your
forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand, and redeemed you
from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (
Deuteronomy 7:7-8).
Can we see what He is implying? There is no human reason for His love
for Israel. They were a rebellious, stiff-necked people. But He loved
them simply because He loved them.
That is how it is with you and me. He loves us just
because He loves us. Nothing we ever did made Him love us, so nothing we
ever do will make Him stop loving us. He loves us when we’re grouchy
just as much as when we’re glad. He loves us when we sin just as much as
when we don’t. He loves us when we open our mouths and say things we
know we shouldn’t have said. He loves us when our wives or husbands or
parents or children are not treating us as though they love us. He loves
us when we’re feeling as though nobody in the whole world loves us. He
loves us even when we don’t like ourselves. He never stops loving us.
God’s Love Is Eternal
This message also was given originally to the nation Israel, but its application is for every true child of God.
The LORD appeared to him from afar, saying,
I have loved you with an everlasting love;
Therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness (
Jeremiah 31:3).
That everlasting love reaches into eternity past. He
knew us and loved us before He made us, when we were but a thought in
His mind. And He will love us for eternity to come, for, as Paul assured
us, nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God (
Romans 8:39). The love of an eternal God must be an eternal love.
If anybody ever deserved to forfeit the love of
Christ it was His earthly disciples. They were men of inestimable
spiritual privileges, yet they displayed an amazingly small degree of
spiritual insight. Witness their behavior on the evening of the last
Passover. The impending ordeal of bearing the world’s sins was weighing
heavily on the Lord’s heart and He longed for their prayerful support.
But Luke informs us that they were more interested in arguing about
which one of them was the greatest (
Luke 22:24).
None of them even extended the common social
courtesy of the day by washing the others’ feet when they entered the
room for dinner. They probably were too busy competing for the seats of
honor near the Lord. Later three of them fell asleep when they were
supposed to be praying, all of them deserted the Lord when He was taken
captive, one of them denied Him, and another one later doubted Him.
Notice how this upper room episode began: “Now before the Feast of the
Passover, Jesus knowing that His hour had come that He should depart out
of this world to the Father, having loved His own who were in the
world, He loved them to the end” (
John 13:1).
To the end of what? Who can really say? He will love us to the end of
our waywardness and wanderings. He will love us to the end of our
deepest need. He will love us to the end of our lives, to the end of
time, to the farthest extremity of eternity. He will love us forever.
His love is eternal.
How can we ever exhaust the love of God! The love of
an infinite God must be infinite love. Paul called it a love that
“surpasses knowledge” (
Ephesians 3:19), far greater than our finite minds can grasp. He also called it a “great love” (
Ephesians 2:4). He referred to its breadth, its length, its depth, and its height (
Ephesians 3:18),
but it is obvious that he was speaking of dimensions that defy
measurement: breadth and length which encompass the whole world, a depth
which reaches to the lowest sinner, a height which exalts us to the
loftiest Heaven. God’s love has no limit. It is described in F. M.
Lehman’s gospel song:
Could we with ink the ocean fill, And were the skies of parchment made;
Were every stalk on earth a quill, And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above, Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole, Tho’ stretched from sky to sky.
I read somewhere that those words were penciled on
the wall of a narrow room in an asylum by a man who supposedly was
demented, and they were discovered after his death. He was not demented
at all. He had learned one of the most precious truths of all time, that
God’s love is infinite. We can no more exhaust it than we can empty the
ocean with a bucket. And we are invited to keep drawing from His
inexhaustible supply. To do so will enable us to keep extending love to
those around us even when our love is not returned.
God’s Love Is Holy
When some people hear that God’s love is
self-giving, sacrificial, unconditional, eternal, and infinite, they get
the idea that it is merely soft, sloppy sentimentality, that God is an
indulgent Father who gives us everything we want and conveniently turns
His head the other way when we sin. But that is not the case. Everything
God does is done in the totality of His being, so His love must always
be consistent with His other attributes. Since God is holy, then His
love must be a holy love that encourages holiness in those loved. The
evidence is overwhelming! For example, in the same context in which Paul
explains that we in love were predestined unto the adoption of sons, he
states God’s purpose for choosing us. It is “that we should be holy and
without blame before Him” (
Ephesians 1:4).
Love and obedience consistently go together in Scripture: “For this is
the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are
not burdensome” (
1 John 5:3; cf. also
John 14:15; 15:10).
God will use every loving means at His disposal to
encourage our obedience. He does that because He loves us. We discussed
discipline when we studied God’s holiness, but we cannot overlook it
here. The writer to the Hebrews encouraged us not to regard God’s
discipline lightly. It is the evidence of His love for us (
Hebrews 12:5-6).
He knows that obedience to His Word will be for our greatest happiness,
so He takes steps to help us want to obey Him. If He did not love us,
He would not care about our happiness.
What kind of loving parents would we be if we let
our children do anything they pleased, such as put their hands in the
fire, ride their tricycles on the freeway, or play superman on the roof
of the house? The authorities would probably declare us to be unfit
parents. Our love constrains us to discipline in order to insure the
kind of behavior that will bring our children future happiness. And that
is exactly what our loving heavenly Father does.
He does not enjoy inflicting pain any more than we
do. Before my father spanked me as a child, he used to say, “This is
going to hurt me more than it hurts you.” That was difficult for me to
believe at the time, and I never understood it until I became a parent
myself. Then it became all too clear. It wasn’t my hand that hurt; it
was my heart. God says the same thing. Concerning His people Israel we
read, “In all their affliction He was afflicted” (
Isaiah 63:9).
He feels our pain because He loves us. Don’t chafe under His
disciplinary hand. He knows best what we need, and He always administers
it in love for our best interests. We can respond to His holy love by
bringing our lives into conformity to His Word.
God’s Love Is Comforting
Some children would give everything they have for
someone who loves them and cares enough for them to set limits on their
behavior and administer loving discipline when they violate those
limits. That would mean more to them than all the material things in the
world because it is the evidence of true love, and true love brings
security and comfort. They know that someone who loves them enough to
endure the unpleasantness of administering discipline will do everything
in his power to take care of them, and that brings them genuine
consolation. When we grasp the reality of God’s love, we will no longer
seek our security in jobs, bank accounts, investments, houses, husbands,
wives, friends, or health. We will rest in the Lord, free from all
fear, secure in the assurance that He is going to provide all that we
need and protect us from everything that will not be for our good.
Listen to the Apostle John again: “There is no fear
in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves
punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love” (
1 John 4:18). God
never punishes His children. He laid all the punishment for our sins on His Son. He
disciplines us in
love for our benefit, but even that is nothing to be afraid of.
Understanding God’s love eliminates all fear—fear of God’s discipline,
fear of what tomorrow holds, fear of losing a loved one, fear of losing a
job, fear of natural catastrophies, fear of global war, fear of
suffering, fear of death, fear of being alone, fear of rejection. God
loves us! There is nothing to fear. His love is comforting.
God’s Love is Life-Changing
Most of us long to be loving people, able to give
love to our spouses, our children, our fellow believers, our unsaved
acquaintances, and, most of all, to the Lord Himself. But we find it so
difficult. It is nearly impossible for us to love others unless we are
genuinely convinced that we ourselves are loved. Some of us are hard,
callused, insensitive, and unloving people because we are not convinced
we are really loved. We are saying unconsciously, “Why should I be
loving to others when nobody shows me any love?” God’s love can change
that. We can find all the acceptance and affection we crave in Him; then
with the confidence that we ourselves are loved, we can extend love to
others. “We love,” said the Apostle John, “because He first loved us” (
1 John 4:19).
It really is true—God loves us. Jesus said it plainly: “For the Father Himself loves you” (
John 16:27). It is to our advantage to know and believe the love that He has for us (
1 John 4:16).
We may never be able to grasp it fully with our human understanding
alone, but God is ready to make it real to us if our hearts are open and
receptive to His Word. Then, secure in His love, we shall be able to
reach out in love to others, unselfishly, sacrificially,
unconditionally, and inexhaustibly. It will profoundly influence our
relationships with those around us.
A world-renowned theologian was asked by a student
what he considered to be the most significant theological truth he ever
learned. His answer was, “Jesus loves me. This I know; for the Bible
tells me so.” Believe it, Christian. God loves you!
Action To Take
Look for evidences of God’s love for you all
throughout the day, and remind yourself often that you are the object of
His endless love.
Tell several others during the day that God loves them.
