“God is love, and all who live in love live in God.” What exactly does this mean? Suppose someone were to ask you what love is and you say “Love is God”. Then they were to ask the follow-up question: “What is God?”. Now, where do you go? While we may be able to see and touch pure gold, for example, how do we as faulty humans wrap our minds around pure, undefiled love?
We can’t see or touch God, or pure love for that matter, but we can certainly give illustrations and examples of what pure perfect love “looks like”. God loves you so much that He sent His eternal Son to shed His blood in order to completely and perfectly cleanse you of the filth of all sin. God didn’t create someone specifically for this task, he gave of His eternal self. How much deeper could He dig into Himself to demonstrate His perfect commitment of love to us? The very history of Jesus is the history of God’s love to us. From the beginning, all of God’s interactions with and in His Son testify to His love for us and His means to advance us into His love. God has always been in Christ, lovingly reconciling the world to Himself.
God wants nothing more than for you to live with Him forever. Think of it. And He not only does something to ensure that His children can come home, He does everything – withholding nothing. No sacrifice, even His perfect eternal Son, is too great when one loves you perfectly. If we ever truly have or had love for another, we can know, to a great extent, what love is. This is God’s plan; that we could come to know Him, not by seeing Him with our eyes, but by knowing love for another.
What if we live in love every moment of every day? We would be at the center of God’s kingdom because we would literally be living in God.
If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. -1 John 4:15-16 (NIV)
