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| What Is Love series |
God’s Love is Selfless
God is for you. He will never leave you nor forsake you. His love for you is completely selfless. That’s who He is. In our last post, we saw that we need to know God as a person and who He is to know what love is. I ended with John 17:26: “I made Your name known to them and will make it known, so that the love You have loved Me with may be in them and I may be in them.” When we see true love in action through what He has done, it inspires us to love Him and others. As a result, the same love He has can be in us! Let’s take a look at His love in action so that we can be inspired in this way.
Because He is all-knowing, He knew what would happen when He created the world. He knew that if He gave us free will, we would walk away from Him over and over. Nevertheless, He refused to control us but gave us a free will instead. But because He knew what would happen, He came up with a plan. A very selfless plan. 1 John 4:9-10 talks about this plan, “God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.” Let’s take a minute and think about all this. God always knew the cost of our free will. Not only was He entering a heartbreaking relationship with us, but He knew His only Son would have to die an excruciating death to save us. Nevertheless, He still chose to give us full freedom because He wanted us to experience His love completely.
God’s Love is Reckless
Scripture often illustrates God’s relationship with us as a marriage. There is a faithfulness in marriage that mirrors the intimate faithfulness God speaks of in His first commandment. The story of Hosea is one of the best pictures of this relationship God chose to have with us. At the start of Hosea, the LORD first speaks to him by saying, “Go, take to yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord.” (Hosea 1:2) Could you imagine! Hosea was asked to marry a woman who he knew would be unfaithful!
I’m sure it wouldn’t surprise you to find out that eventually Hosea’s wife committed adultery with another man. Still, the LORD tells Hosea not just to forgive her but to love her: “Go again, love a woman who is loved by another man and is an adulteress, even as the Lord loves the children of Israel, though they turn to other gods…” (Hosea 3:1). Like Hosea, God chose to marry us even though He knew we would be unfaithful. Just like Hosea, every time we walk away, He is willing not just to forgive us but to love us. I love the way God says that He will, “speak tenderly” to us in Hosea 2:14. He doesn’t insist on going over everything we’ve done wrong. He doesn’t guilt us or try a tactic to make us faithful to Him through manipulation. He gives us complete freedom. This is His love – “If we are faithless, He remains faithful” (2 Timothy 2:13).
I’m sure you’ve probably heard the song Reckless Love. Now, the meaning of reckless, doing something “without regard to the danger or the consequences”, doesn’t seem like God at first. But, when I see this picture of His love and faithfulness in Hosea’s story, I can begin to see it. When it comes to thinking of His own pain He simply doesn’t care. Whether it’s the pain He endured on the cross or the pain He feels when we are unfaithful, His love for us is selfless, reckless even. He has and always will care for us more than Himself. So much so that He even died on a cross for us!
God’s Love is NOT Condemning
So, what does God’s love look like when we are unfaithful? Let’s see what Christ showed us. One of my favorite stories in the Bible comes from John 8. Jesus is teaching at the temple one morning. The Pharisees interrupt Him when they bring a woman and (I imagine) roughly fling her into the center of the people gathered around Jesus. This woman had been caught in adultery; she had been unfaithful. Now everyone knew what she had done, even this good teacher that the whole town admired. She was undoubtedly full of shame, guilt, and regret. The Pharisees wanted to force Jesus’ hand and undermine His ministry. Since the law commanded that she be stoned, they asked Jesus what they should do.
Jesus turned to the crowd and said, “let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” (John 8:7) While the law required her death, Jesus revealed the heart of God and His love for us. One by one the crowd dissipated, and Jesus was left there with her. He asked her, “‘…where are they? Has no one condemned you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘Neither do I condemn you…’” (John 8:10-11) Jesus continues to do this for all of us. He assures us that we are not condemned when it says “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” (Romans 8:1) There’s a little more to this woman’s story though. His faithfulness doesn’t stop at simply not condemning us. His love pursues us further. We’ll talk more about this in our next post.
Such a blessing to read and re-read these posts. The way biblical Truth is spoken here in such a loving and caring way is very uplifting! Thank you, and both of you, for the time and thought you put into all of these expressions of what God is really saying in His Bible. It is necessary that we hear with the heart of a true disciple❤️