Love IS God!

Love is GodOften in our reading of scripture, we can miss some unique revelations God desires for us to have. It is easy to miss deep meanings from very familiar verses, verses we know by heart, verses we have read over and over. Lectio divina, or sacred reading, is an ancient way of listening to scripture. The text is read slowly and prayerfully allowing the Holy Spirit, who is always at work hovering over the face of the deep, to manifest the unseen into existence.

Let’s start with one verse everyone knows, believers and non-believers alike:

God is love (1 John 4:8).

Let’s mull that one over and see what God is really saying about himself. God is love. God is love. Now, if all you hearing is what is on the surface, that love is a characteristic of God, then you are probably missing the real message.

Let’s use a little algebra to make the point. “Oh, no!” you say as nightmares of the infamous unknown x reemerge to haunt you. But calm down; this will be a very easy lesson. Let’s start with our first reading:

God is love (1 John 4:8)

Remember the symmetric axiom? It says that if X=Y, then conversely Y=X. So, let’s flip it around. This is what you get:

Love is God!

Now what do you see? Hear? Has the meaning changed? Has it unearthed something that heretofore was hidden from us? Let’s add some emphasis:

Love IS God!

Not to revisit one president’s trademark retort, “it depends on what the meaning of is is,” but that is what we are talking about in this context.

You might think this is a play on words, but it is not. You see, love is not something that God has. It is not an attribute or a quality. It is WHO HE IS. Love is a Person and that Person is God. If you go back to the previous article, Dividing Asunder Between Soul and Spirit, we said that God is Spirit. This is the essence of God, WHO HE IS.

Likewise, we can take similar scriptures, God is wisdom, God is light, etc. and use the same law to better describe the essence of God:

Wisdom is God (1 Cor 1:30)

Light is God (1 John 1:5)

All those things we think we have such as love and wisdom are nothing more than earthly shadows of True Love that exist solely as the Person God; the true agape love that lays its life down for another without thought or hesitation.

And now for the beautiful part, the Good News – all those things that God is, His Essence, dwell in us in Christ. How? Because we are one spirit with him:

1 Corinthians 6:17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.

God manifests Love, Himself, through us in Christ. It is not the kind of love based on soul feelings that change like the wind. This Love is spirit and truth and never varies.

So, if you thought it was impossible to love the unloveable things or persons in your life, now you know it is possible. It has nothing to do with a feeling. It is no longer us living and loving, but Christ living and loving in us, as us, without respect of persons. Amen to that.

Read The Lost Coin by Samuel Hayes Sherwood. A young man’s journey takes him on a path revealing Total Truth, understanding the mystery which is Christ in us.

Lost coin 5.2-01

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