As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.
John 15:9
Jesus is talking about love. He talks about the love that exists within the Trinity between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He talks about the love that he has shown to his disciples.
One of the most profound experiences of love that I have had in my life happened when I first became a father, many years ago now. We brought our son Benjamin back from the hospital and my wife went off for a shower and I was sitting there on my own in the living room holding Ben who was asleep in my arms.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, I was overwhelmed by a wave of love for my new-born son. To be honest, it shocked me.
I hadn’t expected to love a baby like that. I mean, how can you love a baby? They don’t do anything. They don’t have any discernible personality. I had assumed that a father’s love gradually grew over time. As the child develops, as he becomes a little person, as you start to be able to interact with him, play with him, get to know him. I had thought that it was at that point that you started to love your child. But no, it wasn’t like that at all.
Holding this tiny body in my arms, I was overwhelmed with love for him. I was truly shocked by the experience.
As I was trying to process all of this, I heard God speak. Now, I don’t often hear God speak, it is a very rare occurrence in my life. But at that moment I heard with total clarity, God say this,
“Stephen, if you as an imperfect human father can love your son so much, how much more do you think that I, your perfect heavenly father, love you?”
That stunned me. To think that the overwhelming love I was feeling for my son, was just a tiny fraction of God’s love for me. It stunned me. It turned me inside out. I don’t even have the words to tell you how that made me feel.
And in that moment, I suddenly realised that I had completely misunderstood what it means to be a Christian. I had got everything upside down. I had been a Christian for 20+ years, and yet, until that moment, I had never properly understood what being a Christian actually was. I suppose that just shows you how dense I am!
If you had asked me at the time, “Stephen, do you believe in God?” I would have replied “Yes.” If you had asked me, “Stephen, do you try to obey God?” I could have answered, “Yes.” But if you had asked me, “Stephen, do you love God?” I could not have honestly answered “Yes” to that question.
And yet, I suddenly understood for the first time why Jesus said that the first and most important commandment was to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” What God wants is our love.
I had got things completely back to front. I was doing all the right things – praying, reading my Bible, going to church. But they weren’t being done as the expression of my love for God, they were simply acts of duty.
But God didn’t want my duty or my service. When you love someone, what you really want from them is to love you back. God wanted my love.
Now, if you love God you WILL want to speak to him in prayer. You WILL want to try to learn about him and encounter him in the Bible. You WILL want to join with others in worshipping him at Church. But these should be the expression of something much deeper, a love for God at the very centre of our being.
But then I was left with a question, “How can you love God?” We can’t see God, we can’t touch God, we can’t have a conversation with God like we can with a person. So how do we love God?
I realised that I didn’t know how to love God. So, I started what became a 5-year journey of learning how to love God. It involved a lot of prayer, a lot of reading, a lot of seeking out people who could share their experiences with me and help me. And gradually, slowly, I started to be aware of a love for God that was growing inside me. Until I finally got to the place where I could honestly say, “Lord, I love you.”
The ultimate fact of our existence is that we are extravagantly loved by God. What God wants from each one of us is that we love him back. What it means to be a Christian, at its most essential, is someone who is trying to learn how to love God back. Amen.
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