One of my favorite Bible verses is 1 John 4:12: "No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us." God abides in us when we love each other. Not only that, his love is made perfect in us. God's unknowable, unfathomable love, is made perfect in me.
The Lord has been teaching me a lot about love lately. About what it means and doesn't mean. What I keep coming back to is the Gospel. There is nothing I can do to make him love me more or less. He just loves me. In all of my ugliness, my brokenness, even my willful disobedience, he loves me. He loves me enough to have died for me. It's pretty impossible to grasp and even more frightening to think about really applying it toward the people God brings into my life.
1 Corinthians 13. The love chapter. A wedding favorite. Over a dozen adjectives about what love is, not one of them a feeling; not one of them conditional or dependent on anything the person your loving does or says. God is so inclusive with his love. He is the ultimate for better or for worse. When we love, He abides in us, and we abide in him. Abide: to remain stable or in a fixed state. When we love this way, we don't have to be afraid. And yet, some of my deepest hurts and fears revolve around love - especially when I forget the Gospel, that we love because he first loved us, that he keeps no record of our wrongs.
How radical my life would get if I could completely and wholly and consistently abide in the Gospel, fully abandoning the emotion of love to live out the truth of love: love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God (1 John 4:7).
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