“You ask me, ‘Why should God be loved?’ I answer: the reason for loving God is God himself.” – St. Bernard of Clairvaux

On the Love of God

The love of God has shaped my life more dramatically than anything else, yet it’s one of those things I can’t quite put words to, much less fully comprehend.

I’ll try, just for a moment.

For me, the love of God is… the very thing that inspires me to do good in a world full of bad, a light for my hope when darkness surrounds, the foundation of a faith, and a gift I’ve been given, but need daily reminders to receive. It is a love that I seek to strive for and embody, but one I cannot fully fathom or grasp.

Perhaps this is why it’s so beautiful.

When I consider the love of God, I reflect on the works of St. John the apostle, A.W. Tozer, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. These great thinkers help put words to the love of God, and why we can’t help but love Him back.

The love of God casts out fear

I am forever grateful for the apostle John and his writings. He speaks of the Lord’s love with such hope, gratitude, and conviction. John knew what it was like to be loved by Jesus, and he lived in a way that embodied and believed deeply in this love.

As Charles Spurgeon writes,

“[John] was full of faith to accept what he was taught. He believed it, and he believed it really and thoroughly. He did not believe as some people do, with the finger-ends of their understanding, but he gripped the truth with both hands, laid it up in his heart, and allowed it to flow from that centre, and saturate his whole being. He was a believer in his inmost soul; both when he saw the blood and water at the cross, and the folded grave-clothes at the sepulchre, he saw and believed.”

One of my favorite themes in John’s writings is that God’s love is an antidote to fear. He writes, in 1 John 4, “…God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him…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. We love because he first loved us.^“

When we come to believe, in our very core, that we are deeply loved and accepted by the Father, fears of judgement, insecurity, and even death have a way of melting away, even if it’s just for a moment.

Just as A.W Tozer writes,

“To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Beloved — this and only this can cast out fear. Let a man become convinced that nothing can harm him and instantly for him all fear goes out of the universe. The nervous reflex, the natural revulsion to physical pain may be felt sometimes, but the deep torment of fear is gone forever.”

A.W Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy

Why we should love God back

Another favorite of mine when referring to the love of God is Bernard of Clairvaux (1090 – 1153), one of the great leaders of the early church. He was an eloquent speaker, a well known writer of his day, and he later had a special influence on John Calvin and Martin Luther.

In one of his more well-known works, On the Love of God, Bernard writes of how we should respond to God’s love. He states that God should be loved by us humans (1) because of who he is, and (2) because He first loved us.

Bernard writes:

“God is entitled to our love. Why? Because he gave himself for us despite the fact that we are so undeserving. What better could he have given? If we ask why God is entitled to our love, we should answer, ‘Because he first loved us.” God is clearly deserving of our love especially if we consider who he is that loves us, who we are that he loves, and how much he loves us.”

– Excerpt from On the Love of God, translated by Foster and Smith

Bernard writes also of the four “degrees” of love in which we might move through as we love God deeper.

The “first degree” involves us loving God for our sake, and because of what God can do for us. As we love God from this place, we turn to Him in times of trial and suffering, because we know that we can do all things through Him — and that he will sustain us in times of need.

According to Bernard, after numerous trials and periods of suffering, and after being sustained over and over again by our “Rescuer,” we experience a type of inward transformation, where we begin to love God not merely for our own sake, but for God Himself.

He writes of this “new” love,

“In order to arrive at this we must continually go to God with our needs and pray. In those prayers the grace of God is tasted, and by frequent tasting it is proved to us how sweet the Lord is. Thus it happens that once God’s sweetness has been tasted, it draws us to the pure love of God more than our needs compel us to love him. Thus we begin to say, ‘We now love God, not for our own necessity, for we ourselves have tasted and know how sweet the Lord is.'”

There is no love that is sweeter or purer than this divine love. God embodies the purest form of love itself, surpassing any type of love we’ve ever experienced on this earth. It is so rich, and so deep, that it takes our entire life to soak in and attempt to comprehend. And even then, I suppose we’ll only catch glimpses of its depth and richness while on this earth.

Thankfully, we’ll have all eternity to sit and dwell.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with these final thoughts from A.W Tozer,

“In Christian experience there is a highly satisfying love content that distinguishes it from all other religions and elevates it to heights far beyond even the purest and noblest philosophy. This love content is more than a thing; it is God Himself in the midst of His Church singing over His people. True Christian joy is the heart’s harmonious response to the Lord’s song of love.”

Today, what might the love of God move you to do? Or be? Or release?