Perfect Love

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins,” (1 John 4:7-10, NASB).

God’s love can be hard to understand because it’s not like ours. We tend to love those whose character, attributes, and interests are appealing to us. But in God’s eyes, there is nothing attractive in us that makes us worthy of His affection. We are all sinners who have rebelled against Him.

Out of divine mercy and grace, the heavenly Father chooses to love us. Through the sacrifice of His Son, He demonstrated His love to all those who would trust and obey Jesus Christ. When we trust in the Savior, we permanently become God’s beloved children: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” (Romans 8:38-39, NASB).

What’s more, no one is beyond the reach of God’s love. Jesus made this clear by saving people like a greedy, dishonest tax collector, a criminal on the cross next to Him, and Saul – a persecutor of His church. God’s love isn’t dispensed according to how good we’ve been. On that basis, no one could be saved.

Perfect love can’t be fully comprehended by the human mind, but it can nonetheless be ours through faith and obedience in Jesus Christ. And from the moment a person trusts and obeys that love, he or she will forever live under its protective canopy. 

Jeff