Daily Java: This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:10)
I love my wife. She is a very fine person, in addition to being attractive and especially loving me back. I love my daughter and my son. I love my parents. Other people I love in varying degrees.
But I have always wondered how you could truly love someone without having first the love of God in your heart. I know that love is our manifestation of God in our hearts. If he can come out in no other way, he will in love. It is natural since we are made in his image. It is the one thing that we automatically show, whether God is in us or not. Since it is his nature, and we are made in his image, it cannot help but come out.
But there is a problem in translation. If God is not in our hearts, our manifestation of that love is flawed since it is only through our own ideas that we show the love.
No matter how much I may love my wife, or my kids, or my parents, or anyone else, I love God more. They know that and accept it.
What I guess I cannot figure out is how I could love them as much as I do without the love of God overshadowing everything else. After all, I love because God loved me. Everything that I claim to do in love comes from God.
So if I do not have God in my life or in my heart or as my motivation, that means I cannot truly love others. When it comes down to it, if I reject God and his love, I have thought of nothing else in my life except myself. Everyone else really becomes meaningless. I have denied the entrance of true love into my life when I deny the entrance of God into my life. I have decided that everything in my life will be for my own pleasure and for my own motivation.
That means that when I will not let true love into my life, I can not really feel true love. Everything else will be subjected to what I feel and what I want, including my wife and kids and parents and everyone else. When it comes to a real problem, I will choose myself over them, because I already have. I have chosen myself over true love, which is God.
After all, the word says, just a little bit further, God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us. Without him, love is not complete. It is only partial, incomplete, insubstantial, flawed.
After all, no love based on your own perceptions can possibly be complete. Since you are flawed, your version of anything will be flawed. And your version of love will be flawed. It may be the best version of love any human ever made, but it will be flawed, because it will be from you.
Only the love of God is unflawed. And when that motivates your life, you will know true love. Your love will be complete, not only in your life, but in your manifestation of that love to others: your wife, your kids, your parents, everybody.
Only in God can anyone really love.
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