Sometimes (all the times?!) my sermons can go a little too long on Sundays… and listen: I’m really, really sorry about that. I’d love to blame it on being a new pastor but anyone who’s heard me speak over the years knows I have this tendency to be long-winded (…and weepy. But I digress). I need to work on this because ain’t no one got time–nor attention span–to stay focused for that long. So here’s what I was thinking – I’m going to try to slim my Sunday sermons by taking what I don’t share there and just moving it over to the newsletter instead. That way as you meditate on the message throughout the week (Because I KNOW that everyone in our community does this… right?!) you can add a few more things to consider as well. And yeah, I should have thought of this months ago. 

And so on that note, a few weeks back on this series of revealing the Jesus of the centre, I spoke on what I believe the cross reveals concerning Jesus’ fundamental disposition toward us. Part of understanding that is to understand the “ontological essence” of God which is, as we said, “love” (1 John 4:8). Michael Pahl, who was a New Testament professor to Rhonda and me way back in Bible College and is now the Executive Director of the Mennonite Church of Manitoba, asks the question “What does it mean to say that “God is love”? And here’s his response:

“God is love” means that you are beloved by God. This is your most basic identity: God’s Beloved. And this is true of each and every person, every creature, all of creation.

As I noted on Sunday, and as John 3:16 testifies, God loves the WHOLE world, not those who measure up or believe in him. All of us. There are no prerequisites to this love – Jesus doesn’t come and lay down his life for us because we believed in him or stopped sinning or obeyed him perfectly. Nope – his death on a cross precedes anything we can say or do in response to him. Do you follow Jesus? He loves you. Do you reject Jesus? Guess what? He STILL loves you! There are literally no requirements that can make God love us more or less because he can’t help but love us. And the cross, as the definition of love (1 John 3:16), means there is nothing that can be done on our behalf to earn God’s love. Pahl continues,

“God is love” means that when you are at your worst, and you know it, or when you have done your worst, and you know it, there is One who is already moving toward you, to forgive you and restore you, to make you whole.

This kind of love can be hard to wrap our heads around, let alone embrace and respond to with our lives. Yet, this is exactly what we are to do. Jesus tells us, “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” which is to say, in the same way Jesus moves toward us with love–through a limitless supply of forgiveness and grace, with the objective of healing and restoring us from our own sin and brokenness, so, too, are we to move toward others. We are to move toward each other, even at their worst, with an acceptance and embrace and “no-matter-what-ness”; with a commitment toward forgiveness and with-ness that leads to their wholeness, healing, restoration.

All this to say, when we throw phrases around like, “God is love,” we don’t JUST affirm some paradigm/worldview about some ontological truth about the Divine nature, but far deeper and much more practically, implied in this affirmation is the desire that we, us followers of this way of Love, are to be in pursuit of loving others as He loves us in this same way. It means we not only believe this is who He is and how He loves us but also that we believe this is how we are to love others, too.

Let me just add this: While it would be so much easier to just affirm a bunch of beliefs about the nature of God and his Son, to actually love others as He loves us, well, that’s just not possible. Because although God may be ontologically love… we are not. Which is why we need the Spirit of God to empower and enable us in this pursuit of love and it’s why we need oceans of grace to keep us afloat in our oft-failed attempts to love like this.

God is love. It’s a beautiful and inspiring and even comforting sentiment to affirm, to be sure. But it will only ever remain a lovely sentiment and nothing more unless we move toward embodying the profound truth of this love, showing each other and our world what “God is love” actually looks like.