“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

1 John 4:7-8

I was listening to UCB Radio the other day and they said something that became so clear to me, it was something that I have heard so many times, but it was like a new revelation of understanding it. “We can’t look at what love is to understand God, we need to look at who God is to understand love, because God is love.” Again it is elementary to our faith, but we do this more often that I think we would care to admit. When people have issues with how God acts, or doesn’t act, they often say “That’s not love.” That can’t be further from the truth because God is love, and love doesn’t exist apart from God.

We have distorted what love is, and we need to get back to understand what love is. If I were to ask you what love is, it would be hard not to think of all of the things that talk about love around us. Movies often show love as the man pursuing the women no matter what obstacles are in the way, or movies can depict love purely sexual and nothing more. Add campaigns can talk about truly loving yourself, I heard one on the radio the other day for getting surgery labelled “Be you, just a better version of you.” All of these things talk about a different kind of thing, yet they all can get lumped under “love.”

What would it look like to strip all of what we know of love away. To completely forget the word love, and then look at God. Understanding that anything He does, or anything He doesn’t do, is because He loves us, because He is love. This is what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

When I was a kid I used to take binoculars and look through them, but it was always fin to look through them the wrong way so everything was further away than it truly is. When we look at the world to define what love is, we are looking through binoculars the wrong way. We are taking something that’s supposed to be helpful and we are misusing it. If we turn it around and look at God as to what Love is, then we can clearly see through the lens that it is meant to be.

“This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”

-Austin Christianson

Shepherding and Worship Pastor