God is Love

God is crazy about you. He is the most extravagant of pursuers out there. He knows every detail about you because he knit you together in your mother’s womb (Psalm 139:13). He is so meticulous about you that he has even counted how many hairs there are on your head (Matthew 10:30)! He cares about the minuscule details of your life.

He knows everything about you—the dirt, the grime—everything! And yet despite that knowledge, he chooses you. You’re worth it to him! He would literally die for you to make that clear and he already did. He is zealous for you and he’s been chasing you down since day one. You didn’t just “find God” one day, because he had already found you first—you just finally acknowledged his loving presence. 

The fact that you were a sinner before you accepted his love didn’t make him any less loving towards you because, “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Regardless of where you stand with him, he still “makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 5:45).

It’s not everyday you come across a system that hands out love to everyone, enemy and friend alike. But that’s how God works. God shows no partiality. He is no respecter of persons. He takes care of everyone—those who have it together and those who in their brokenness, tear everything apart for the rest of us. “This insistence on the absolutely indiscriminate nature of compassion within the Kingdom is the dominant perspective of almost all of Jesus’ teaching,” says Brennan Manning. (Abba’s Child: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging, page 57.)

When God put on flesh and walked among us as Jesus, he showed us this incredible love. He tracked down the least of these, spent time with them, healed them, delivered them, and genuinely cared for them at his own expense. He came to set people free, not enslave them. He came to heal them, not condemn them. He came to deliver them from their enemies, not entrap them. He allowed those who should have known him best to murder him, unleashing God’s love on the world like never before. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), cried God-in-flesh as he breathed his last while nailed to a cross.

He is the God of the prodigal. He throws parties and celebrates those who return to him, even after all of their actions have been incredibly insulting. He is a lover of the burn-out and the sell-out; the least of the least of the least of these; the poor and the homeless; the weak and the beat-up; and even the religious, the rich and the strong.

He heals those who deserve to be sick. He remains patient with those who deserve swift punishment. He dies for those who kill him. He offers forgiveness to those who still have yet to learn that they have people they must forgive themselves. He offers his Holy Spirit to imperfect bodies.

This is love. This is Jesus. This is who God has always been, is, and will always be: a being of boundless, unconditional, extravagant, unrelenting, beautiful, offensive love.

Of course, it is also God’s love that creates his desire to judge and right all wrongs; for how can God be good or loving if he does not ultimately care about the sins and injustices of this world? So even the wrath of God is born out of his love. Therefore, we remain allegiant to his loving kingdom and character as we lead others to join us there with him.