Lent 4

Lent 4 (John 3:14-21) “For God so loved the world..”

God just doesn’t have love. God is love.

This is the most fundamental teaching of the Bible. Moses knew this. The prophets knew this. It is the reality of who Jesus is. The human choice to separate from God stems from the human decision to redefine God.

Human beings have a tendency to define God as knowledge or power and to use love as a description of one of many attributes of God. God is not knowledge. God is not power. Knowledge and power are two of many attributes of God. God’s nature is love.
The challenge in understanding that truth is the corruption of human language. Our English language uses the word love to express desire, preference and sentiment.
The Greek language in which the apostles wrote the New Testament and Jewish scholars used to translate the Old Testament uses a very specific word for love. That word is agape. Agape has a very specific meaning.

Agape is steadfast, holy, unconditional, sacrificial love. No dictionary can adequately define agape. It includes the concepts of being open, non-judgmental, unaffected, willfully committed to the well-being of others for their own sake. Agape is infinite and eternal. It is in fact a transcendent principle and universal concept that can only be embodied. Jesus defines agape. Jesus is the love of God embodied. To understand divine love it is imperative to study the life of Jesus Christ.

The imperative is vital to our understanding of God and of human nature. The stakes include our ability to live well in this life and to live at all in the life of the world to come.

It is important to consider that in his pre incarnate form Jesus is the co-eternal Beloved of God the Father. The Beloved is the eternal expression of the one who is eternal love. The Beloved freely chose to surrender all of His divine attributes to come to earth and to become a particular man at a particular time and place.
The only aspect of divinity the Beloved Son of God did not surrender when he was incarnated is love. Love is the very essence of who God is.

It is by love not power or knowledge that Jesus was able to heal and perform miracles. It was that love that enabled him to endure the unimaginable physical pain of crucifixion. It was that love that enabled him to bear the unimaginable spiritual pain of human separation, sin and death. And, it was that love that reunified humanity to divinity, sin back into love, death back into life.

Jesus is the universal gift of Divine Love to the human race. Divine love is universal. That is why Jesus is the universal savior. That is how Jesus is our Heavenly Father’s Plan of Salvation, Pattern of Salvation, and Purpose of Salvation.
In Jesus God rescues us from separation, sin and death. In Jesus God offers us the gift of a new life (eternal life) and a new way of living (the path of transformation). The new life is eternal solely because the source of that new life is eternal. The new way of living is the path of transformation because the source of that path is infinite.

The infinite and eternal love of the infinite and eternal God flows to us, in us and through us from Jesus Christ.

Humans chose to separate from God. Separation produces pain, sin and death. God chose to reunite with humanity in Jesus Christ. That union produces faith, hope and love. Salvation is God’s initiative and God’s gift.

The question of salvation is not which is the true religion? The question of salvation is not even in the category of right law, right knowledge or the human right to define God as we choose. The question of salvation is: will you receive the transforming gift of infinite and eternal love God offers you and everyone on this planet through the co-eternal Beloved Jesus Christ?

God just doesn’t have love. God is love. That love is steadfast, holy, unconditional, sacrificial, infinite, eternal and transforming. That love is Jesus Christ.

For God so loved the world….