April 26, 2018
1 John 4:7-16…“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” vs. 12
Many of us have profound questions about God and do all we can to find satisfactory answers. Inevitably, that search will be frustrated–God is beyond space and time and inaccessible to our mortal minds. As John tells us clearly, no one has ever seen God. But that doesn’t mean we have nothing to say about God or that we can never experience God’s presence. John goes on to say that God is love and if we love one another God lives in us and–this is really astounding–God’s love is perfected in us. That’s a pretty audacious statement! It implies that God needs us and that, apart from its human expression, God’s love is incomplete. Our own experience gives support to what John says. We can talk about love until we’re blue in the face and even write country western songs about it, but it remains nebulous and theoretical until we feel its presence in our connections with one another. That’s how it is with God. God is only an idea or a concept until we choose to love one another. It’s in our loving that God becomes real and we can actually say that we know God. We may never ever find words to describe the reality that ‘is God.’ Classes and books will always be insufficient. But for many people, that’s just fine. The God they’ve found in their loving relationships is all the God they’ll ever need.
Thought for the Day: If God is love, in what sense is love God?
0 Comments