Love is a great treasure. A gift. It is a great motivator. True love is sometimes hard to pin down, especially in a world culture so external in orientation.
God-love is sacrificial at its’ core. It is represented in the love of parents for children. Friends for one another. An enduring marriage. A willingness to forgive.
One easy to overlook qualities of our Creator Father is His perfect love. Seeing this can be tough when we are faced with the reality of so much imperfection in our culture and our relationships. God’s Love – like all of His character traits, is Self-imagined in His own realm. Therefore, when we try to emulate or even define perfect love, we can be at a disadvantage in that our personal paradigm colors everything we imagine about God.
While I am sure I will not begin to fully understand God until I am with Him face to face, one thing I can know about HOW He loves is that He does so completely, sacrificially, and perfectly. We contemplate the nature of His perfect love connects His desire for us to love within the challenges we face personally.
We are in the middle of the ultimate circle of love. God “loved the world” and “gave His only Son” so that we might contemplate the Perfect human example of sacrificial love. The reason Jesus said “greater love has no man that this, than he lay down his life for his friends” is because it cuts right to the core of God’s purposes, not only within the cosmos, but through the human faith experience as well. So we are given an artistic snapshot of God’s perfect love! The entire God Story is His love story, but today we choose several thoughts and passages to focus our inquiry.
Dave & Burnadette