“All You Need is Love”, “Love is All Around”, “What’s Love got to Do with It” and countless other songs have love in the title. Is there a word that has been misused as much and as often by our world as love?
God’s love for us is, and always has been, active. The greatest action being the death and resurrection of His Son on our behalf.
Today in the second in our series on Love we are looking at Our Love for God. It’s not just a suggestion or a nice idea but Deuteronomy 6:5 is a command from God that we are to love Him with our all, our everything, our heart, mind and strength.
We prove our love by keeping His commandments, by not forgetting Him, no matter how comfortable our lives become. Not because we owe a debt - it’s a free gift- but so we can display our love for God to Him and to all the world.
‘Love is love’ is such a warm and fuzzy and nice phrase. It is one of the catchphrases of our times. But what does it mean? And do we realise the inconsistency of defining a word by itself… as well as the way in which such a phrase is logically inconsistent (Is my love for ice-cream the same as my love for my wife? Is the love of Jesus the same as the love of Amnon for Tamar?)… as well as the way such a phrase works as a catch-all justification for any form/type/expression of love that I find acceptable/desirable?
We need some clarity on ‘love’. In this week’s ‘love’, we are looking at God’s love for us as humans – and we will see that love in the Bible (which really means all of life) is defined sharply, clearly, and wonderfully – by God.
In the third in our series ‘Christ and…’, we are looking at ‘Christ and conscience’ – how do we make ethical and godly decisions about key matters in life? Moreover, is there some standard, some concrete and accessible standard, of the ‘good’ that guides us in such decision-making?
In Colossians 3:1-11, Paul reminds us that our lives as God’s people are defined by, circumscribed by, ‘the Messiah’ – by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is the ‘good’, and He is real. He is the defining standard for ethical decision-making.
