“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength,” was the answer Jesus gave to the question about what is the greatest commandment. But what does loving God look like? Is it simply having positive thoughts or feelings about God? Can we choose our own preferred way to love God?
Previously I suggested that in order for love to be known and experienced, it must be expressed and responded to. I have also offered four specific expressions of God’s amazing love that take us deep into His heart. In this blog I want to suggest that along with the love expressions there is a fitting love response that He desires. Using a popular metaphor, we need to respond according to His “love language”.
A cut diamond refracts light to reveal an array of colors. In the same way, as the white light of God’s love touches the prism of broken humanity, the hidden colors are revealed. The primary colors of God’s love could be called:
- His creative sustaining love
- His individual redemptive love
- His covenant family love
- His relational intimate love
Each of these expressions of God’s love is an outgrowth of His grace and is, therefore, given without human merit. However, we do not automatically experience them.
God offers each expression of love, but experiencing that love depends on our response implying that
- God’s love is always unmerited but not always unconditional
- We are as close to Christ as we choose to be
The broadest expression is God’s creative sustaining love. It is given without merit or condition and is evidenced by all that He has created. Even those who reject God are recipients of His love demonstrated in our amazingly complex spacecraft: earth. The apostle Paul identified the proper response to this creative sustaining love as reverence and gratitude (Romans 1).
A deeper relationship is found through His individual redemptive love where He releases people from captivity to the domain of darkness into the kingdom of light (Col. 1:13-14). This love is expressed in the familiar first part of John 3:16. But in order to experience this love, the appropriate response must be repentance and belief in the Gospel (John 3:16b; Mark 1:15).
The next expression of God’s love, His covenant family love, is found in our new identity as children of God (John 1:12; 1 John 3:1-3). God expresses His family love through gifts including justification, adoption, citizenship, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The expected response to this expression of love is a life of obedience and alignment with God’s will (John 14:21).
The relational intimate love of God adds another even deeper, more personal, and dynamic level of relationship. This expression of love is the continued revelation of Himself as we walk in Him (Col 2:6). This is the love expression that Jesus talks about with His disciples in the upper room discourse:
If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love…You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you (John 15:10-15 ).
This “friendship” love that was now part of the disciples’ experience, wasn’t automatic. It came as a result of their continued alignment with Jesus and His kingdom, resulting in greater exposure to the heart and mind of God in Christ.
I think this deeply personal and relational love expression is what Jesus was asking for in John 17:
… I have made Your name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them, and I in them (John 17:26).
The offer of this expression of His love is humbling, even overwhelming to me, yet it is amazingly what God desires us to discover. It is what our soul looks for but in all the wrong places.
The natural response to this intimate love of God is to simply enjoy His person and presence. It was what Mary was commended for in Luke 10: “Mary, who sat before the Master, hanging on every word he said” (MSG). It is a response of affection that desires God even without His blessings. Habakkuk expressed it this way:
The white light of God’s love with its various colors is what we are called to experience and reflect on the resurrection side of the cross.
Though the fig tree should not blossom And there be no fruit on the vines, Though the yield of the olive should fail And the fields produce no food, Though the flock should be cut off from the fold And there be no cattle in the stalls, yet I will exult in the LORD, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation (Hab. 3:17-18).
Experiencing the increasing depth of God’s iridescent love reminds me of the Russian Matryoshka dolls where each time an outer doll is removed, another doll is revealed deeper within. Each time we experience one expression of His love, the opportunity for an even deeper one is presented.
Understanding God’s iridescent love is the privilege of discipleship. It demonstrates the value and delight He finds in each of us as He looks through our brokenness to the person we are in Christ: the person He created…redeemed… adopted… and calls by name. This amazing and wonderfully complex love of God invites us into a timeless relational journey called eternal life (John 17:3).
Questions for reflection:
1. Each love expression has a unique response. What happens when we get them mix up?
2. How do these love expressions complement and support each other?
3. How is spiritual maturity related to these love expressions?
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Great visual and explanation! So true that as we walk and abide in Him, we enjoy our relationship with Him and want to please Him more and more. I always appreciate your wisdom and insight, good sir 🙂