When You're In Love

Everyone has been told that God loves us, but let's change that a little bit. God is IN LOVE with us. Sounds a little ridiculous right? But why? Why does it sound so ridiculous to us? I think a large part is the connotation that "in love" gives: intimate, trusting, personal, self-sacrificing, marital. We as Americans throw around the word "love" so much now that it has a thousand different meanings, and all of them never quite hit on the head what Jesus means when he tells us the first commandment is to love God and the second is to love others as yourself. The only way we can even know what true love looks like is to refer to the Bible, and see how Jesus lived, for "God is love," (1 John 4:8), as well as 1 Corinthians 13, when Paul describes love.

So then hearing that God is in love with us is a fault of our own; we do not trust God enough to know that he truly IS in love with us, and we are not in love with him enough then, either. Think of how you felt when you were in middle school and you had that huge crush. Or your first relationship, or your current one. You think about them ALL THE TIME. Like, literally, I can almost guarantee it. You just wanted to be with them, to spend every moment with that person, to make them happy, to talk with them, to just look upon them and be in their presence. And for some of us, we can relate to that, and we have not even felt real love on this earth like that, but we all think we know what love should feel like. So, then, why does it not feel that way with out love toward God?

All God wants from us is for us to love Him; indeed, it is the only thing that we can do that is not disgusting to him (Isaiah 64:6 literally calls all our good deeds used tampons). John 6:29 says that the only good work we can do is to believe in Jesus, and later, in John 14:15, we are told that if we love Jesus, we will obey him commands. If we are IN LOVE with Jesus, we will do what we are told. Think of Jesus as your first crush, then imagine him being you last, and only one. Think of Jesus being the one person you devote your life to in marriage. Then know that this is literally how we should feel about loving Jesus, because we are his bride. Godly men and women get married because they love each other and they want to be together for the rest of their lives in a binding covenant. Jesus wants no less, and actually he wants more, because we are to love him before we love others.Jesus is the perfect example of love, and we are to live like Christ, meaning we are to BE love. Loving Jesus should be a matter of desire to please him, just like loving a person here on earth is a matter of pleasing them. You should want to spend every moment with Jesus, and be thinking of him always. We should want to just make Jesus happy, to just look upon his grace and enjoy just being in his presence. Every fiber of our being should be aching with desire to know Jesus more, to obey his commands more fully, to have a deeper relationship with him. Fall in love with Jesus, make him your one and only beloved.