Thoughts on God's Love

Been thinkin... decided to try and organize my thoughts by writing them on paper... computer paper...

God’s love is strange. It doesn’t make sense sometimes. God’s love is a paradox in a way. It is nothing like our human love. I was thinking the other day about being a lover of God. In Western culture when I think “lovers” I think of two people who love each other more than anyone else; two people who want to spend the rest of their lives loving each other and becoming one. This is kinda like God’s love. Kinda. I am a lover of God and he is a lover of me. And it is true that I need to love God more than anyone else. But God does not love me more than anyone else. So in that respect the two “loves” differ. I also want to become one with God and to know him infinitely. I want to love what he loves. But here in this place I realize that God’s love is very different from the loves I know. When I am in a love relationship with God suddenly I begin to desire others to be in that same type of relationship with him too. I WANT my lover to love and woo other people. How strange… you don’t see that in most love relationships. We get jealous when our “lover” loves someone else as much or more than us. It’s different with God.

As the love relationship with God grows deeper, I begin to see God’s heart and I begin to feel his love for other people. I not only begin to want him to draw other people to him, I begin to love other people too! I want His will/love for them. “Begin” is the keyword here. I have a long way to go. I wish to understand, to know the depth of the love of Christ. When I read verses like

Exodus 32:31-32 –Then Moses returned to the Lord and said “oh these people have committed a great sin, and have made for themselves a calf of gold! Yet now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, I pray, blot me out of Your book which You have written.”

and

Romans 9:1-3 – I speak the truth in Christ—I am not lying, my conscience confirms it in the Holy Spirit—I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race,”

I am in awe of the love Moses and Paul had. It is not the love I am used to. They would be willing to give up their most precious gift—communion with God—so that others might experience it. They truly felt God’s love. Paul loved his communion with God more than anyhting, and through that love he in turn loved his people SO much that he was willing to give up his relationship with God for their sake. Um… that’s crazy. Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it this way “Paul wants to win, for the people whom he loves, communion with God, which he loves above all things, and curses himself away from communion with God and his people, that is, because he is obedient to the command that he should surrender himself completely to his neighbor. But for this very reason in wishing to be banished from God he remains in the closest union with him. At the point where the most terrible conflict with God seems to rage, the deepest peace is established.”

Love is selfless. Love is obedience. Love is less about a relationship and more about serving. Bonhoeffer also says “This very deed(referring to the quote above), however, gives us clear proof that love ultimately seeks not communion, but the “other”; and also that the less it seeks communion the more surely it will find it.” Beautiful.

Lord give me your heart for people. I want to know your love.

Joyfully,

MJ