An interesting thing to consider about the Apostle John’s statement “God is love”. Some have turned the phrase around saying, “Love is God” or just reducing it “God is loving”. That is not what the statement means at all. This is not indicating that one of God’s attributes is love. It is really much bigger than that. This is saying that God’s fundamental nature is love. It’s the core of who he is. Everything he does is with love. He can do nothing without his loving being at the center.
Paul reminds us that every Christian must always lead with love before anything else. The Message paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13:1-3says, “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy but don’t love, I’m nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate. If I speak God’s Word with power, revealing all his mysteries and making everything plain as day, and if I have faith that says to a mountain, “Jump,” and it jumps, but I don’t love, I’m nothing. If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned as a martyr, but I don’t love, I’ve gotten nowhere. So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.” If you don’t have love in everything you do, nothing you say to people will matter. It doesn’t matter how eloquent or powerful you speak, it will amount to zero. If you don’t lead with love, it really doesn’t matter what you know or have learned, it’s to nothing. If you don’t have love, it doesn’t matter how much you give or what you do, it totals zilch. Love isn’t just a thing, it’s everything. It’s the core of who God wants us to be in what say, what we think, what we know, what we give and what we do. Use whatever phrase you’d like: it’s the whole ball of wax, it’s the whole caboodle, it’s the whole enchilada, it’s the sum of how we relate to life. Get the idea?
What will you do today to reflect the fact that God is love and you lead in love? What will you say to your family? “I love you”. What will you think about today? “I am God’s representative of love to the world.” What will you do today? “Help ease someone’s pain.”