The Gift of Love

The gift of love has been with us since the beginning of time. In the beginning God created the world and all that is in it and God saw that it was good.  But this creation of God was not just another building project, it was a project – indeed a projection – of his very Being and the motivation for such a project was not pride or recognition or honour but love.  And as a sign of that love, God created persons who could not only be given the right to live in that world but who could appreciate and care for that world – loving the world that God had given them to enjoy and share with him.  Of course we know well that this idyllic world did not continue with humanity in it as the serpent caused Adam and Eve to doubt the love of God and caused them to ignore God’s clear instructions designed to give them the best possible life that they could ever know. And while perhaps God could have chosen to forgive their transgression, he knew that they needed to be sent away that they might reflect and come to understand that the gift of life that they had been given was indeed quite precious. Now they would come to know a limit to this life; they would come to know changes in climate and they would come to know suffering.  Yet the Bible makes it clear that even this change did not change one thing and that was God’s determination to continue to love his creation even though the perfect relationship of Eden had been broken.

As we move on through the record of the Bible, we continue to find that whatever situation the people of God created for themselves, no matter how it may have offended God or broken the covenant established between God and the people, God never stopped loving them.  They experienced disaster, disease, turmoil, oppression, exile and even death, yet at no time did God withdraw from them his love.  His love may appear to have been hidden from them and they may have believed that God’s anger with them had led him to hate them, yet the overarching message from every prophet was that God ever was waiting to receive the people, to show mercy to them, to grant them forgiveness and restore unto them the peace that he so much wanted them to experience.

While the books of Samuel, the Kings and Chronicles detail the physical history of the people of Israel from the time they first arrived in what is now known as Israel, most of the books of the prophets concern themselves with the overthrow of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, the resulting exile and the eventual restoration of the people to their homeland. This event was the most traumatic and significant in the history of the people since the exodus from Egypt.  Yet just as with the exodus from Egypt, the restoration of the people after the exile was a sign once again of the unfailing love of God for the people.  The people were failures and disappointments to God in so many ways and they suffered greatly for breaking faith with God, but God would not let them go.  God never lost hope in the people and was determined that they would be the light to the nations that he hoped they would be.

When we come to the birth of God into the world in the person of Jesus, we encounter God’s determination to not only reveal his unending love for his creation, but also his determination to teach us how to love.  The accounts preserved for us in the gospels not only chronicle the life of God in Jesus but more than that, they give us examples of how God seeks for us to respond to the human frailties, disabilities and struggles of life in general and life in the covenant relationship in particular.

The covenant that God made with the people of Israel in the time of Moses which was sealed with the giving of ten commandments was renewed in the time of Jesus and sealed not only by the summation of all the commandments into two but also with an eternal blood sacrifice that nothing would ever be able to break.

And while God sought to make a new and lasting covenant with the people whom he had first called to be a light to the nations, God led the apostles to take that covenant message to all the peoples of every land.  And so, the word of this God became a word for the world. The covenant of this God became the covenant of all in the world who would welcome him into their hearts and minds and lives.

The coming of God in the person of Jesus Christ was the ultimate sign of God’s love because it gave proof that God had always loved his creation and that he would continue  to love his creation even if they did not deserve to be loved – according to the thoughts of those less than God.  God declared once again his love for humanity and continued to declare that love not only in the birth of Jesus but all the way through the ministry on earth and through the last days, the trial, the crucifixion, the death and finally the resurrection. Even after the love of God is evident in the granting of the Holy Spirit. This is a love that nothing in the world can ever take away from any who choose to believe.  Paul affirms this in his writings declaring that of all the gifts of God, love is the greatest and reminding us that nothing in all creation can ever separate us from the love of God as expressed through the life of Jesus.

As with any gift from God, the value of the gift is not just that we know we are loved by God but that because God loved us we can and ought to love one another. To paraphrase the apostle John: “If we cannot love the person we see, how can we say that we love God whom we cannot see.”  And as the apostle James reminded the people, a word of love spoken does no good unless it is expressed in action.  The word of love spoken by God has ever been expressed in action.   As Jesus so poignantly pointed out: Greater love hath no one than that one lay down one’s life for one’s friends.  The greatest gift any one of us can ever receive in our life is love and the best thing we can do with that gift is to use it as best we can and so reveal through our words and our actions our true commitment to the God who is love himself.

May we ever believe in the gift of love received from God and seek to make that gift real in our lives remaining committed to strengthening our relationship with God and one another.

AMEN