God is Love

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.” 1 John 4:16

 God is Love and nothing but what is good can come from God, because His very nature is Love. God came into the world in the form of Jesus Christ.

This is the big one. We really believe that your understanding of God shapes your entire view of the world. If you believe God is ambivalent towards you, doesn’t care about you, then really, why would you care about anybody else? Some people think God only loves you if you do certain things, or hold particular beliefs, but we try to ask, “What does a perfect God look like?”

 A perfect God is loving and wise. And a wise and loving God wants what is best for everybody. When you say you love your spouse, family, friends, what you really are saying is, “I want to be with you, and want what is best for you.” God is no different, He wants what is best for us, and He wants to be with us. However, God is in an unusual position. While I cannot make a person love me, as Creator, God could, in theory, force us all to love Him. But we know that isn’t real love. If I forced a person to love me, we would know that the love is fake, and what God wants from us is real love. So He gives us the opportunity to love Him, or not to love Him.

He does know though that it is in our own best interests to love Him. The way He made us was that the more we love others, the happier we will be. The modern, materialistic world tries to tell us otherwise; that in fact we’ll be happier when we look out for #1, when we have the biggest house, the nicest car, or become the biggest celebrity. The problem is that it just isn’t true. We’re happiest when we are helping others. But as we forget this, we need to be shaken and stirred out of our wrong beliefs so that we can be truly happy. That process is salvation, and God directs it.

This is where we see things differently than traditional Christianity. Most Christian churches follow a set of beliefs that looks something like this: due to the sin of Adam, God cut off humanity from Him because God cannot stand sin. In order to get back with God, God requires some sacrifice, so when the sinfulness of humanity was so great He sent His son, Jesus, to be the only sacrifice great enough to be deemed sufficient for the reconciliation. These churches teach that if you believe this to be true, you too can be saved.

Saved from what? The way they’d have you believe it, you’ll be saved from God! That doesn’t sound like a loving God to us. He doesn’t sound very perfect. Compare our beliefs to traditional Christian beliefs. In our view, we have to be saved from ourselves, and our own errant ways, versus with traditional Christians you are being saved from the anger of God. We just do not believe the latter to be true. We believe that a perfect God is loving, and because He actually is perfect, He is loving without any exceptions. Imagine the implications on the world.