Love or loving?

There is a crucial difference in believing that God is intrinsically LOVE through and through and believing that God is capable of love or that he is loving.

A God who is only loving or capable of love, is also capable of being unloving and capable of acting apart from love, out of selfishness or for his own ambition or purposes for example.

A God whose essence is Love is, by that definition, unable to act in any other way other than in love. It is impossible for him to act out of selfish ambition or greed or out of any motivation other than pure love.

Because of life’s pain, bitter disappointments, rejection and hurts, many of us find it hard to believe that God is intrinsically and utterly only Love through and through. Most of us if we are honest tend to think of God as a benevolent sort of person, who loves us mainly because it is his duty to, having created us. Many of us accept his love, believing that as he created us therefore we somehow owe it to him to relate back to him in some way.

For many of us this also means that in the back of our minds we are cautious about his love. If there is the chance that God can act in anger or out of vengeance, perhaps if we have annoyed him in any way or if somehow our lives aren’t quite up to scratch, then there is always a chance that God might reject us.

In other words, our conclusion is actually that God’s love is conditional - conditional on our behaviour, on our merit, on somehow living in a way that pleases Him, even if that merit is achieved by someone else doing it for us.

The truth however is that God is not just loving. He is LOVE, through and through. Everything he is, everything he does is saturated by pure, unconditional, beautiful, liberating love.