Articles
For God So Loved
Love is a concept ingrained in every human being. We learn love from parents, family, and friends through what we hear and see lived out in them. However this concept is much more clearly understood when we personally practice love.
In order to be understood more completely, love must be tested to grow and be further refined. If we never test our love, it will forever remain infantile. We should put our love to test by extending it to others or applying it in very difficult circumstances. By doing this we will gain not only in understanding the quality of love but gain in the strength and depth of love.
We often try to avoid trouble as it is disturbing and painful. But under duress love is tested and grows exponentially. Only by living through such troubles do we begin to gain insight into godly love. Godly love seeks the welfare and benefit of the object of our love regardless of cost or reciprocity. It seeks the good of the other no matter what. God’s love for each person is so deep and strong that he gave the best he had to save just one.
We can mentally acquiesce to understand this concept, but when we have been required to test our love to the extreme by applying it under duress we begin to understand in a very practical way what God has truly done for us.
Love should be so powerful, so deep, so passionate that you will nearly destroy yourself to save the object of your love from trouble or ruin. You would give all you have to trade places with that person to save them from present or future difficulty. That’s what God has done for us, for me. He loves me so purely, so deeply, so strongly that heaven and earth were moved because of me. God loves us greatly. Do we return that love and share it with others in the manner he has given to us?
Yet this love has limits. We as physical beings have limits of knowledge, understanding, strength and exposure. We can only go so far, no further. We wish to trade places to mitigate and absorb the troubles our loved ones experience, but we cannot. We would give them of our knowledge and help them see what lies ahead, yet we cannot. Even God, the Almighty, limits what his love will accomplish. He will do all except make us listen. He has given us all knowledge (2 Pe 1:3) but will not force it into our heads.
The strong compulsion to sacrificially love posed against the fact that I am limited in my application of love is difficult. Love compels me to take away the troubles, pain and guilt, but I cannot. This great conflict within the heart and mind is a struggle some have already experienced, and all will face one day. The greater the trouble, the greater the conflict. Yet it is this duress and conflict which will produce greater understanding and strength of godly love.
This is what God knows about me and sacrificially gives to me daily. This is the love of God.
