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The God of Love

The famous chart topping song by the Beatles tells us: All you need is love, all you need is love, love. Love is all you need. Beatles first performed that song in 1967 as part of Britain's contribution to a TV programme called Our World. The first live global television link.

They were asked to come up with a song with an inspirational message everyone understood. They came up came with: “All you need is love”. We may laugh that their love was not enough to keep them together, but I am sure we all agree that there is some truth in what the song says.

We all need love – as individuals and as a society – the question is: where can we find this love that truly meets all our needs? The answer to that question is found in the words of the apostle John:
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. [1 John 4:9-10]
The fundamental claim of the Bible is that God is love. This God has loved us before we knew Him or had any capacity to express our love to Him. God has in fact loved us before he created us. The love God has for us flows out of the love that exists within the Godhead between God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit.

That love within the Godhead is is unreserved, unconditional, eternal and takes great delight and pleasure in the other person. It is with this same love that God loves us. His love for you is totally uninfluenced by you. It is full, unreserved and permanent!

There is nowhere in this world you find such love! At work you have to continually impress your boss just to keep your job! At home you probably get a little more love than at work, but even your parents will never be patient with you forever. They expect you to behave decently. Your friends care for you now, but if you keep putting your foot wrong, in the end they will walk away. The world has no unconditional love!

This foreign nature of God’s love for us means that when we hear God loves us, we do not give it the weight that it truly deserves because. We just dismiss it as unreal.  A man in northern China was arrested last month on his wedding day. The reason was the family of the Bride realised that the 200 guests who accompanied the groom as family and friends were paid actors. The local newspaper in Shaanxi province says, the Bride’s family became suspicious during the conversations with the groom’s side! It turns out the Groom was not as straight up in his love as the Bride had hoped.

The woman looked for love for a man who all along was simply deceiving her. That woman probably will struggle to trust her love with anyone again. Many of us are like that. Our experiences makes us sceptical on whether God’s love is any more genuine than the fake love we see around us.

Some of us accept that God loves us – but it has no impact. Why? Because we often do not appreciate who has made us the object of affections. Who is this God that loves us. Here is the answer from our church’s statement of faith:
We believe in the one true and living God, co-equal in three Persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who is invisible, personal, eternal, omnipresent, dependent on none, unchanging, truthful, trustworthy, almighty, sovereign, omniscient, righteous, holy, good, loving, merciful, long-suffering and gracious, the Creator of all things.
When we consider how wonderful God is, we are not amazed that He loves, we are comforted that indeed we have found love in Him like no other. No one can love as God does because there is no one like our God.

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Copyright © Chola Mukanga 2017
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