I believe God is pure love, the kind described by the Greek word agape, meaning an unconditional, selfless dedication to what is best for the one who is loved. This kind of love is not merely a feeling, but an intentional commitment. I believe that I am a recipient of God’s love, as are you. I believe this because when I have sensed God’s presence, I have sensed a love for me that urged me to be better and be more of who God sees that I can be. I have read and heard from many others about their experiences with God, and I hear the same descriptions of God’s love, so I am encouraged that what I have felt is not my wishful thinking but God’s care shown for me.
Why is it important to my faith walk that God is Love?
Let me answer this first with two staff management principles. Many managers agree with me – but some don’t – that it is much more effective in the long term to have engaged and “actualized” employees who feel that their contribution to the organization is recognized and valued. The contrary approach to motivation is to keep employees afraid of bad consequences, like losing their job, so that fear motivates higher productivity. In my experience, fear also motivates disinformation and scapegoating, so that in the long term, the organization loses effectiveness. While God’s goal is our deepening relationship with God, not our productivity, God’s love for us is a model for how to be a good manager.
When a business leader gets promoted to a higher level job with more employees under their control, the leader will find that communication with employees is more frequently misunderstood and distorted. The new leader will not be as familiar to the expanded audience as they were before, and a larger group of employees will have a wider variety in backgrounds and opinions they apply to the new leader’s messages. For this reason, successful senior leaders become adept at communicating to large audiences with clear and concise messages repeated frequently. In my faith walk, I receive the message that “God is Love” as a clear and concise definition of who God is and who God wants me to be. (Not that I don’t misunderstand it or distort it sometimes, but that’s the sin in my life and not God’s doing.)
There’s also a historical perspective that would have been especially relevant to the ancient peoples receiving God’s message. In both Old Testament and New Testament eras, there were considered to be many gods in addition to the God of Israel, and frequently, people considered those gods to think and act very much like people. There were deceptions and disputes between the gods. Gods would get mad at humans and withhold rain. Gods would have gone to somewhere far away and humans would try desperate measures to make their gods hear their cries for help. In contrast, the God of Israel speaks of perfect Love, always present, and never earned.
I know that God is far too big for me to understand, but I don’t have to understand. All I need to do is to receive Love, to let Love fill me, and to respond to my Creator and the created with Love.
JM
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