Emotional Health

One of Jesus’ disciples, John, went on to write at length about the church as a people marked by Trinitarian love that is exemplified at the cross and empowered by the Spirit:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. . . . In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. . . . Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. . . . We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother.12

Furthermore, Jesus speaks of the reward of such a Spirit-empowered, Christlike life of love, saying, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”13 Difficult as it is to comprehend, those who love God in word and deed and life will experience the presence of God in a loving intimacy akin to a warm, safe home in which a family lives together.

God loves you fully, and always will. You cannot make him love you any more. And, nothing you can do will make him love you any less.

Furthermore, God the Holy Spirit lives in every Christian. He is there to heal our hurts, enlarge our hearts, and give us an ever increasing love for God and people. As a Christian, you have access to a supernatural eternal and limitless source of love that is for you and for you to share with others.

What do you think your life would be like today if God did not love you?

12 1 John 4:7–21.
13 John 14:23.

“Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” –1 John 4:11

The practical implication of being reconciled to the source of love is that the Christian is not only loved but is also enabled to love. Romans 5:5 says, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” Because the Holy Spirit puts the love of God into the root of our new nature, we can bear fruit that begins with love. As Galatians 5:22 says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love.”

In addition to being the source of all love, God has also defined love for us:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.11

Jesus himself said that this kind of supernatural Trinitarian love would be among the chief marks of a Christian church. In John 13:35 he said, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

According to the Bible, the mark of Christian maturity and true spirituality is love. And, the more we understand and experience the love of God the more loving we become toward God and others.

Is there any area in the definition of love above that you need to focus on improving in?

11 1 Cor. 13:4–8.

“…this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” –1 John 4:10

The most loving person who has ever walked the earth is Jesus Christ. The most loving act the world has ever seen is Jesus’ death on the cross in place of sinners, reconciling them into loving relationship with God. Indeed, Romans 5:8 gloriously declares, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus, who is declared repeatedly to be the Son of God,8 did this work of salvation in love.

For those who turn from sin and trust in Jesus, the Bible declares that we are now adopted into the family of God; God is our Father and we are sons of God.9 While the language that both men and women are sons of God may seem curious to modern ears, it was a reflection of God’s deep love to those who first heard it. Paul was saying that believers are like sons who have full legal standing in the family with all the inherent blessings of that status, as was the case in ancient culture.

Similarly, Christians are blessed to have God as their Father, the church as their family, fellow Christians as their brothers and sisters, God’s provision as their sustenance, and God’s full inheritance for their eternity. Furthermore, as sons, God’s people have a duty to obey God the Father by following the humble example of love set by God the Son by the power of God the Spirit.

In sum, God the Father through God the Son by God the Spirit has made it possible for sinners not only to enter into the loving relational community of the church, but, incredibly, to live in the very life of the Trinity. Jesus prays that believers of all times “may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.”10 According to Jesus, the incredibly important big idea is that we share in the life of the Trinity itself and the very love of God.

Is there anyone in your life that could really benefit from your love right now?

8 Rom. 1:3, 4, cf. Gal. 4:4; John 1:1–14; 5:18–25; 10:30–38.
9 Rom. 8:14, Gal. 3:26; Heb. 12:7.
10 John 17:21.

“…God said, “Let us make man[h] in our image, after our likeness.” –Genesis 1:26

God’s love compelled him to make us in his image and likeness to be in loving relationship with him and with one another. God did not make us because he was lonely, or because he wanted someone to talk to, and certainly not because he was relationally needy. He has experienced relationship perfectly within the Trinity.

However, God did make us to worship, to pour ourselves out in love to him in a relationship of self-giving adoration and action patterned after the community of the Trinity. Speaking of creation, in general, which also applies to the creation of mankind, in particular, the Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware says:

The world was not created unintentionally or out of necessity; it is not an automatic emanation or overflowing from God, but the consequence of divine choice. We should think, not of God the Manufacturer or God the Craftsman, but of God the Lover. By voluntary choice God created the world in “ecstatic” love, so that there might be besides himself other beings to participate in the life and the love that are his.4

Furthermore, because men and women are made in God’s image and likeness, we too are created for loving relationship with God and one another. This need for relationship and love explains why, prior to sin even entering the world, the one thing declared to be “not good” was “that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.”5

Tragically, because of sin, our love and worship are marred. As sinners separated from God, we are prone to love people, things, and experiences as gods rather than God. Too many people worship angelic beings who pretend to be god.6 As worshipers, we pour ourselves out in adoration and action for the spirits/demons, people, things, and experiences that we love in place of God.

In love, however, the Trinitarian community of God enacted a plan through which we sinners might be saved from our sin and reconciled to God and one another in loving relationship. The Bible reveals that God’s loving plan was that God the Father would send God the Son into human history as Immanuel, God with us in flesh. The God-man, Jesus Christ, lived as a perfectly Spirit-filled human, a perfect example of our life of love for God and others. He died on a cross in the place of sinners and then resurrected to bodily life to bring us newness of life so that God the Spirit would indwell lost sinners, regenerating them and sealing them as God’s possession.7 Make no mistake, Jesus mission was one of love.

Who has most reflected God’s love to you? What can you do to thank them today?

4 Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminary Press, 1995), 44.
5 Gen. 2:18.
6 Deut. 12:1–3; 1 Kings 11:1–10; Ps. 106:37–39; 1 Cor. 8:5; 10:20.
7 Eph. 1:3–14.

“…God is love.” –1 John 4:8

Love is one of the most important words in the Bible and appears roughly eight hundred times in the Old and New Testaments. In our culture, though, it is one of the most misunderstood words and is used for everything from sexual sin to sloppy sentimentality. In 1 John 4:8 the Bible plainly states that “God is love.” Subsequently, to understand love as the Scripture speaks of it, we must begin with the Trinitarian God who is the source and ultimate example of love.

Based upon the teaching of the Bible, Christians believe that in the unity of God’s essence there are three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—who are fully equal in essence, attributes, and eternality, yet eternally relating in fully personal ways. While the word Trinity does not appear in Scripture, the concept very clearly does. The church father Tertullian (ad 155–220) was the first to use the word Trinity. To say that God exists as a Trinity does not mean there are three Gods, or that one God merely manifests himself as solely Father, Son, or Holy Spirit on various occasions. Rather, the Lord is one,1 but his oneness, like the oneness of a marriage,2 contains more than a single person.3

Each person of the Trinity thinks, feels, acts, and speaks in self-consciousness and continuity of identity. Each is able to understand self and creation, to initiate loving relationship with each other and humanity. Father, Son, and Spirit exist and relate in perfect loving harmony in the one divine essence. Christians of all ages and branches affirm that there is no God but the Lord, who is Father, Son, and Spirit.

Inextricably connected to the doctrine of the Trinity is love. In the very nature of God there is a continuous outpouring of love, communication, and oneness. In perfect love, the three persons are characterized by reciprocal self-dedication to the good of the whole Trinity. Because God is a relational community of love, God is the source and model of all that is love. During his earthly life, Jesus frequently spoke about the deep love between him and God the Father. In John 3:35 we read, “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.” In John 5:20 we read, “The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing.” Also, in John 14:31 we read, “I [Jesus] do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.”

Spend some time today in prayer thanking God for specific ways He has loved you!

1 Deut. 6:4.
2 Gen. 2:24.
3 Matt. 28:19–20.