Love is...

 As I sat and prayed about what my small group should study I was reading Ephesians (seriously considering doing a study on the entire book as I recently acquired a commentary on it!) when this particular verse leapt out at me,

“so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and ground in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge that you might be filled with the fullness of God.”

–Ephesians 3:17-19

Paul is praying here for the church at Ephesus, but did you notice what he said there? You being rooted and grounded in love. Well that sounds idyllic, but I do not think it is the actual case. I think we would like that, but I do not think we are quite there because we do not know what love truly is.

“Love is the cornerstone of all virtue and morality; forgiveness, it's capstone”(and Jesus being the embodiment of both)-Matt

Forgiveness is the thing that sets us apart. It is what reaches into our hearts, releasing fear and allowing love to truly grow. It is the pinacle of what we reach for when we are reaching for Christ, and we so often miss the mark...well, I so often miss it at least.

“As we live and grow in a world that tells us we’re never enough—that we have to prove our worth and demonstrate our value—our souls, which were designed to be filled with God, are filled with devils and dust. Increasingly, I’m coming to believe that fear is at the heart of all sin and disaffection. Fear that God will not be enough for us; fear that the identity we’ve been given is somehow incomplete. “

 –Jonathan Martin, Prototype

1 John 4:18 teaches that,  “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.”  I’d prayed for months about clarity in these verses, for them to truly impact me and Christian showed me that the Greek word used for “cast out” here is the word ballio—where the word ballistics (The firing characteristics of a weapon so a very violent removal) comes from. The word for punishment here is only used 2 times in the entire bible. The other time is in Matthew 25:46 which is referring to hell. (“and these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.)

“But let that sink in for a moment: If God is love, and perfect love casts out fear, then fear is the opposite of everything that God is. If perfect love casts out fear, then perfect fear must also cast out love. To put it more starkly, fear casts out God in our lives.”-Martin, Prototype

This is a serious statement that is being made. We allow our fears, our doubts, our insecurities to hold us back from being perfect in God. One of the beautiful things is that God knew we would fail, but he also knew that the closer we were to Christ the more we would be like him. Proximity to the Son makes us shine all the brighter as he purifies our hearts. 1 John 3:2-3 says

“Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure.”

 So we strive, daily, to set our fears aside and to align ourselves more and more closely with God, with love knowing that it will be a struggle, knowing that we will fail at times, but that we are not alone in this.

So that is the basis behind this study.

1.  To realize that we are in fact loved by a God who loves us for no reason other than that we exist (and that we were created by God simply to be loved and to glorify His name.) 
2. To learn what love truly means in the sight of God (through 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8)
3.  To learn how Jesus emulated love in his every action and how we should look to him as our example of how to love.

In learning to love, we are completely transformed. We begin to see the world in an entirely different light. We see that as we begin to fall in love with the world and those around us. Their inner light shines through and they become all the more beautiful to us in the process. As Martin so beautifuly describes in his blog post:

“Whenever we have an experience of authentic love, we are transfigured.  The object of our affection and delight is in no need of changing–beauty is not just in the eye of the beholder.  Objectively speaking, the beauty of God is already present in our beloved, whether we recognize it or not.  Rather, when we encounter beauty in another person, we are changed–we are transfigured.  Hence, the Kierkegaard quote I began with, “Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself.”  They do not become beautiful because we recognize their beauty; rather their beauty makes us beautiful. “

And wouldn't it be beautiful to actually be transformed by Love? To allow God to work in our minds and in our hearts to see the world as He sees it? The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis is arguably one of my favorite books. In it the statement is made, “You cannot love another creature fully till you love God.” It also warns, “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.” We can never view love as something separate from God. We must always see the two as the same because they are, and so love should be our focus, meaning God should be our focus, but that is my prayer for all of us.