Love: It’s What It’s All About.
Well, today’s Valentine’s Day. If you celebrate, I hope it’s a good one. Amanda (my wife) and I did the math this morning: we started dating on Valentine’s Day in 1997…which means we’ve been together for 27 years! So suffice it to say, for us, Valentine’s Day always is something of a special day (it also provides us with one of the best moments from the vastly underrated Ghostbusters II).
Love is always something worth celebrating. Yes, I know it gets muddied up with silly, Hallmarkesque romance, flowers and chocolate, and partially nude arrow-shooting winged babies…but love…well,
love is sort of the point of the whole story.
I mean, it’s the point of the story of the bible. Not, of course, the romantic love that Valentine’s Day is about.
The story of the bible is about a different kind of love – God’s love – to which modern, romantic notions of love are only a faint shadow at best (and which even the very best marriages can only hope to reflect!). As we’re half-way through the “Between the Trees” series, telling the big story of the whole bible, I hope you get God’s point in it all:
sharing his life with us – because – he loves us – because, as John puts it – God is love.
Take a look at how John talks about God’s love in his first letter:
… God is love. 9 God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him.
Did you catch that? Because God loves, God sent Jesus into the world so that we might live through him. As I’ve said in this series repeatedly, God’s intention for this world is that we would have life abundantly with, from, and for God. It is life ‘through him (Jesus)’ that restores it to us – and it is all because God loves.
And though it can be hard to see on every page of the bible: it’s there. At the core, the story of the world that scripture lays before us is a love story from start to finish.
God’s creative, life-giving, unrelenting, and boundless love, pouring over into the world that he made – and loves.
It’s what you and I – along with our neighbors and our enemies – were made for.
So, as John puts it,
… since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.
May we be so filled with God’s love that we are known by it.