The Love Of God

ELDER LEE TECK MENG

Powerful stories about love are often illustrated by the contrast between the lover & the one being loved. For eg, a person so unworthy yet so dearly loved by another. Or a person that is not only indifferent but totally unappreciative of the love shown towards him/her.

The Bible is God’s message of Love towards humankind. The Bible is not given to us merely for information but as we study who this God of the Bible is, we become changed from within. This transformative change is the result of the Holy Spirit working in our hearts to respond to His message of Love in the Holy Bible.

The Bible is God’s message of Love given to us for transformation - not for information.

God’s Love for us is perfect. It cannot be more perfect. I once heard it explained God’s love for us cannot change because change would mean from better to worse or from worse to better. We cannot do anything to make God love us more, because if that were true then the reverse would also apply – that we can cause God to love us less. If God’s love is changeable,          we will never really be secure in it because we would always be worrying about                                 that day when we do something to lessen or destroy God’s love for us.

God’s love is perfect in that it stands unaffected by our doing or being.

It’s hard for our finite minds & fallen nature to grasp how perfect & deep the Love that God has for us. But God didn’t leave us to figure this out. He came down & walked amongst us humankind in the form of Jesus Christ. Jesus’ earthly life showed us up-close what God’s Love is like.

The first step in appreciating how great God’s Agape-Love for us is to consider the contrast between God the Agape-Lover & us the object of His love - fallen humankind.

The Bible in Rom 5:6-8 describes our fallen nature:

6 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. 8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (NIV)

and Rom 5:10

10 For if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life ! (NIV)

Our fallen nature is described as:

Powerless : - unable to understand spiritual things; unable to seek God; indifferent to God’s Agape-Love.

Ungodly : - we are in fierce opposition to God; we don’t accept God’s righteousness & moral standards; we don’t want our sinful acts & desires to be called into question.

Sinners : - we have all fallen short of God’s standards; we fail to treat, love & respect others properly as we do ourselves.

 Enemies : - it’s a good summary of the 3 descriptions above but more. We would want to attack & destroy God if we could because He exposes how horrible we truly are which is what many people actually tried to do when God walked amongst us in the person of Jesus Christ.

What a terrible picture of humanity!

But this is exactly the background against which we see the great contrast of God’s perfect Agape-Love for us!

Why would anyone want to love such horrible people? But God did. How can words describe this kind of Agape-Love?

God’s Agape-Love is always-giving. It ‘chases’ after us, seeking to love us. Consider the parables of the lost sheep, the lost coin & the lost prodigal son (Lk 15). Jesus is never random in anything He did. And if you read & reread these parables, it becomes increasingly obvious that Jesus was masterful in explaining God’s Agape-Love to the religious leaders who were angry with Jesus for associating with tax-collectors & notorious sinners.

God loves us & wants a relationship with us. He even sent Jesus to die for our sins. He wants us to respond to His Love. May His Agape-Love move us to repent and abandon our sins, to love Him in return, and start living each new day for Jesus.

May we be transformed & keep being transformed by God’s Agape-Love.

Someone tried to express the greatness of God’s Agape-Love using Jn 3:16:

(see if you can turn this into a folding bookmark)