1 John 4:7-8
“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8)
Agape-love is said to be “the center of Christianity, the Christian fundamental motif par excellence.” 12 Is this statement claiming too much for love? I believe Augustine was nearer the truth when he said that the supreme good is nothing other than God himself. Surely the center of Christianity is Christ himself. And yet, what kind of god is God? And what is the character of Jesus Christ? As we have seen, God is loving. Indeed, God is love. The supreme importance of love is seen in this: Love is the way God is.
Great and sharp has been the contention over whether righteousness or love is paramount in God’s character. And how do his justice and holy wrath against sin fit with his love? Some hold that righteousness is the comprehensive description, and that love is an element of what is right or true. Others hold that love is the comprehensive category and that righteousness is one facet of love. Perhaps we can do no better than rejoice with the psalmist that “steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other” (Ps. 85:10). This they did at Golgotha when God’s righteous indignation against sin fell on his own beloved Son because of love for you and me. Certainly it is true that God’s kind of right cannot exist without love, and God’s kind of love cannot exist without righteousness. Love is of supreme importance because that is the way God is.
Love is not only a primary characteristic of God; it is the imprint of his likeness in human beings, the indispensable family characteristic without which no one can claim membership in the family of God (1 John 4:7-8). Love binds the Trinity into one, and from the overflow of that love came the creation of a being that is not the “highest of the animals” but a “little less than God” (Ps. 8:5), capable of companionship and loving unity with God himself. Not only is this loving unity the central fact about God and the purpose of creation; it is also the purpose of redemption in restoring the image man marred. He did not restore man merely to prove his powers and defeat Satan. He was out to fulfill the original purpose—nothing less than loving union with himself.
True love is so deep, so broad, so high that it is beyond understanding (Eph. 3:18-19). In fact, somehow it is related to “all the fulness of God” (v. 19). But if Christ indeed lives in us through faith, we can be so established in the experience of love that we have the power to comprehend this greatest of all qualities (vv. 17-18).
Not only is love so important because it is characteristic of God and suffuses the origin and destiny of man; it is the foundation of all ethics, God’s revelation of what he wills us to be and do.
Finally, the results of loving attitudes and behavior underscore the supreme importance of our theme. God’s love for us provided life and salvation and now provides all that we need. “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? . . . Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:35-39). How great the results of God’s love for us! But what of our love for God?
When we love God with all our affections (heart), with every choice (soul), and with the concentration of all our mental powers (mind) (Matt. 22:37), we not only prove to be his and please him, but we validate all the other loves. Love for God makes love for others and even for ourselves operate at the level he designed. If I fail to hold love for God as the ultimate, I may do more than damage love for others or diminish the worth I have as a person in Christ. I may even invalidate the other loves altogether. For example, when parents put a child on the highest throne of affection and sacrifice responsibilities to God and obedience to his will for that child, the relationship to the child himself becomes warped and grotesque.
I enjoyed visiting the Nakamuras. God had rescued them from a miserable life at the brink of divorce and brought them into the family of God’s people. Their six-year-old son, Hideyaki, was a great playmate for our youngest. One day I asked if they had any pictures of him. Did they! The first album, to my amazement, brought me only through the first six months of Hideyaki’s life—pages and pages at his birth, pages for the first month “birthday,” and then more pages for the first hundred days. The whole closet was full of albums almost exclusively of Hideyaki. What affection for an only son! Gradually the affection crowded out God’s place and, inevitably, began to erode the affection of the couple for one another.
But perhaps Hideyaki at least would benefit? The last I heard, he had broken the hearts of those adoring parents, falling deeper and deeper into a life of drugs and crime. The idolatrous affection not only destroyed the relationship with God and other relationships, it participated in the destruction of the very object of supreme devotion itself.
But love for God, when enthroned above all other loves, has the power to anchor the other loves, to give them direction and power, to fill them with meaning, discipline them, and lift them to their highest and best. Above all other results, the person who lives in love actually lives in God (1 John 4:16), the ultimate goal of all our existence.
Why not take a few minutes in this season to consider your love life? What does your love life reflect in your choices to operate at the level God designed? Do you hold love for God as the ultimate? Or perhaps you do not and you damage others or diminish your own worth in Christ. Perhaps your love for God anchors your other loves and you and those you love function at their best. Why not choose today to live in love?