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

Giving love to someone greater: is that easy or hard? For a young child and a parent, it is not only easy but natural. A child doesn’t know any other reality, sadly even in cases of abuse. Meeting and making a connection comes later; friends, spouses and trusted allies are all chosen by us, but that love is measured. We love them because we get something in return, in the healthy cases, love and priority. Then we can think about our own children, or those who depend on us. We love them because we have no choice all over again. Dependents are our loved ones, yes, but they are also our responsibility.

So by examining our limited human experiences, we can make a deeply felt comparison to God. Whatever love we might feel for him, we feel by instinct and habit first, reasoning and then finally a sense of responsibility–responsibility because we owe him for what he did for us.

But God himself has a different feeling for us, one we can never understand. It is true that we call him Father, but his relationship to us is deeper than that. He is our Creator, the sustainer of life, the one and only One who is responsible for our very existence. To demonstrate that love, he came in the flesh as Jesus to live and love us in person with miracles and teachings and die on our behalf.

We can understand some of what the love of God is by comparison but much more by contrast; it’s so much deeper and more powerful than we can ever feel for another. How blessed we are to feel his love for us!

Ethan Kirl