The Flow Of God's Love #love 04


The foundation of the Gospel message is God’s love.  

Jesus’ death on the cross, his resurrection, the hope this brings us, the forgiveness it embodies, the demonstration of love that is seen in our care for others, our desire for reconciliation and peacemaking - it all is rooted in God’s love.  

The source of this love is God, and there’s a natural flow to how this love emanates from God and out into the world.  When we understand this natural flow, as God has established, we can join God in demonstrating this love every day.  

God loved us first. 

This whole thing begins with God’s incredible, extravagant love for us.  God is the source.  God is fount.  God is the first cause.  The Apostle John says it so well in 1 John 4:10:


This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 

And in 1 John 4:19:

We love because he first loved us.


This whole story of begins with God CHOOSING to love us and inviting us into relationship.  God didn’t have to do it, and God doesn’t need us to get the things done that God wants done.  God invites us to receive holy love: God's unmerited, sacrificial, unconditional, and all-inclusive love.  The Lord loves you right now where you are with everything you’ve done, everything you’re doing, and everything you’re going to do.  We’ve done nothing to deserve this love, but God gives it anyway.  God's love is where this whole thing begins.

This one fact - that God chose to love his creation - is astounding all by itself.  God could be as so many portray him: distant, aloof, vindictive, absent, demanding, punitive, or petty.  God could’ve chosen to leave us to our devices.  But God didn’t.  The Lord chose to love us, and it’s this love that sets everything in motion.  

Many scholars and theologians have wondered at God's magnanimous love, trying to explain why God would do what God has done.  We don’t know if any of them are correct, but my favorite answer is that God loves because it is God's nature to love.  The Lord can’t help it because God is the very definition of love.  We would know nothing of love if God had chosen to hide God's nature from us.  But the reality of God's love permeates all of reality and brings into focus the beautiful flower, the quiet stream, and the big blue sky - all resulting from this deep and abiding love.  

This flow of this love begins at the source: God.  But there’s a discernible flow to this love that we can observe.

We love God in reply. 

When you understand that God loves you, and you allow God to really love you - which is a challenge for many - you experience what it truly means to be loved.  

I’m humbled by the extent of God’s love.  I spent 10 years running away from Jesus, doing whatever I wanted and consciously rejecting his will in my life.  Because of this, his persistent, gratuitous love for me is even more astonishing.  By human reasoning, because of my willful premeditated rebellion, I deserve at a minimum, penance and repayment for my sins.  On the extreme end, I deserve death and eternal separation from my good and beautiful God.  But as I neared my Father’s house, head hung, and practicing my plea for forgiveness, God threw the door open and came running to me.  Jesus wrapped his arms around me and kissed me, put on a fine robe, and threw a feast for me.  

I have, to some extent, comprehended the confusing truth of God’s unconditional love for me.  And because I have been forgiven much, I love much.  

This is the extravagant love that God lavishes on us.  If you can get even an inkling of comprehension of the magnanimity of God’s expansive love for you, then the natural response is to love God in return.  Out of a heart of gratitude and humility, we surrender to God’s love and love God in reply. 

Jesus underlines this for us as he names love for God as the Greatest Commandment in Matthew chapter 22:37-38:


“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.”


Love for God is the natural response to God’s love for us.  We say, “yes” to the relationship God offers and then we become students of Jesus, sitting at his feet and learning how to love God even more. 

God’s love is incredible in part because God could’ve created human beings that HAD to love God.   But we know that this would not be true love.  Obligatory love is no love at all.  God created us with agency: we can choose.  The Lord created beings that could choose to love God, which is what God desires.  The opposite is also true.  We can choose NOT to love God.  The Lord won’t make you love God.  

Notice the flow of God’s love: it flows from God to us.  As we begin to comprehend the reality of God's love for us, we respond by loving God in reply.  God's love ignites the fire in heart that fuels our response to the Lord's good and perfect love for us.  It’s the same love - God's love poured out into our hearts, and the love we show God in reply.  

But God’s love continues to flow outward, as there is a third flow we can observe.

We love others.

Out of this reciprocal love relationship - God pouring out extravagant love over us, and us loving God with everything we’ve got in return - flows our love for others.  

Continuing on in Matthew 22:39-40, Jesus states a second command that is greatest:


“And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’  All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”


Right alongside loving God with all you’ve got, Jesus sets “loving your neighbor as yourself.”  Love for others sits alongside love for God, because the two are both manifestations of God’s love.  

It’s all the same love.

God’s love for us flows into us, over us.  We respond with that same love for God, flowing out of us and back to God.  Out of this reciprocal relationship of love God’s love for others flows through us to everyone else.  It’s all the same love, and God is the source of that love.

This means that the manifestation of that love from us to others looks like God’s love for us.  It’s sacrificial, as unconditional as we can muster, inclusive, lavish, and life-giving.  Our expressions of God’s love are always imperfect, tempered with fear, self-interest, and ulterior motives.  But because the love we demonstrate is the same love, our imperfect love resonates with the love God has already been pouring out on creation.  This is why people who don’t consider themselves followers of Jesus can spot a poser when they see one.  It’s also why the more rigid and unloving expressions of the Gospel are often rejected outright.  A mean-spirited guilt trip simply doesn’t feel like God’s love, and we intuitively know it.   

This is the natural flow of God’s love.  From God to us, from us to God, and, out of that reciprocal love relationship flows love for others.  

God is teaching us what love is.  We love God out of gratitude for this love.  Jesus teaches us how to love others. 

When we understand it’s all the same love, we have laid an important portion of the foundation of what it means to be “Christian.” 

What, if any, resistance do you have to this description of God’s love?  

What were you drawn to the most in this article?

What would happen if you abandoned yourself to this notion of God’s love and stepped into the flow of his love described in this post?  How would your life be different?

What is keeping you from embracing God’s amazing extravagant love?

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