The Love of God is Good News for Teenagers
This is part of a monthlong series about teaching youth the attributes of God. We believe it’s important to teach students about God. That should be a no-brainer. But it’s surprisingly easy to never teach clearly about the attributes of God. You can read YPT’s other articles about the attributes here.
Our perception of God shapes our understanding of everything else; therefore, the accuracy of our theology matters immensely. We must be very careful not to allow our culturally shaped understanding of certain concepts, like love, to be projected onto God. When that happens we unknowingly mold God into our image.
While many affirm love as an attribute of God, my fear is that a grievous few hold a healthy biblical understanding of that truth. This means that student ministry leaders must not be content to allow teenagers to simply affirm love as an attribute of God. We should help them understand what God’s love does–and does not–mean.
God is Love
This three-word sentence is not just a convenient summary but an explicit statement made by the Apostle John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, in the Scriptures. 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.” God is not just a source of love, but the very essence and origin of love. Love is not just a quality that God is known for, but central to his character and being. This is what makes it an attribute of God, not merely an adjective we use to describe him.
When speaking of God’s attributes, we must be careful to understand each in light of one foundational truth about God: He is in no way divided. This is one of the truths about God that stands in stark contrast to us. Where we have different attributes or traits that sometimes conflict with one another, God is completely whole. So when we say “God is love”, we must not speak of his love as being at all separate or at odds with any of his other attributes. The love of God is not an emotive expression that ebbs and flows depending on feeling, mood, or circumstances. God’s love is steadfast, unchanging and infinite, and in perfect harmony with all of his divine attributes.
God’s Love is Holy
In a culture that holds a very flimsy view of love, we must be careful to help students understand all of God’s attributes in light of the eternal reality of his holiness. Doing this prevents us from projecting our own understanding of love onto God as we consider what it means that God is love. Much false theology can be traced back to this crucial mistake, so we must be intentional in helping our students understand the holiness of God as the lens through which we are to understand all of his attributes.
To say that God’s love is holy is to affirm that it is absolutely whole, pure, and set apart. Where our conception of love as humans has been tragically twisted and distorted due to the effects of sin, God’s love flows out of the white-hot intensity of his holiness, always revealing love as it truly is and as it ought to be understood. Jen Wilkin writes, “When God acts in Scripture in ways we perceive to be unloving, the problem is not with his actions but with our limited perspective…human love, even in its finest moments, can only whisper of the pure and holy love of God.”
God’s Love is Covenantal
Like God himself, his attributes are constant and unchanging. So, too, is his love. When God revealed himself to Moses, his self-proclamation emphasized love. “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands…” (Exodus 34:6-7). God’s love is known and experienced within the context of covenant relationship.
Despite the fact that we continually fall short in our commitment to follow, obey, and serve him (we are covenant breakers), God’s covenantal love is steadfast and unchanging. How beautiful!
If you are in Christ, you can rest in God’s steadfast love. In fact, nothing can separate you from his love, and because he did not spare even his own Son but gave him up for us, we can be supremely confident that he will also graciously give us everything we need as we pursue the hope to which he has called us (Romans 8:31-38)! His love is shown in his saving us, but it is also displayed in his continuous work through his Spirit to bring us to completion in him.
God’s Love is Demonstrated
One of the most beautiful aspects of God’s love is the truth that it is not only spoken of or alluded to, but demonstrated. The Apostle Paul writes, “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Contrary to our own experience of love in a fallen world, God’s expression of love doesn’t stop at words or empty platitudes. John doesn’t just proclaim to us that God has loved the world, but that God loved the world in this way: that he gave his only Son (John 3:16).
These verses not only point us to the tangible substance of God’s love, they also remind us that God’s love is unconditional and initiative. Later in his life John would teach, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us,” while adding, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:10,19). God not only has demonstrated his love, but he is the initiator in restoring us—sinful rebels—to himself through the substitutionary atoning work of Jesus.
God’s Love as a Communicable Attribute
Some of God’s attributes are incommunicable, which means that we as human image bearers do not share in them. These include God’s omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. Other attributes are communicable, or those that we as human image bearers do share with God, and that we have been created to reflect. Love is one of God’s communicable attributes. Not only do we have the capacity to love, we were created to be his representatives, tasked with reflecting him to the whole of creation through the expression of those attributes.
Although that reflection has been tarnished by sin, the Spirit of God works within Christians to restore that image in and through us. How does that happen? Once again, John provides crucial insight for us in 1 John 4:12 and 16: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us… So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”
Notice two key insights from those verses. First, God’s love is perfected (i.e., matured or brought to completion) in us only as we abide in him and in the experience of his love. It is only by abiding in him that we might come to know his love, and it is only through abiding in him that we are shaped—and compelled (see 2 Corinthians 5:14)—by his love through Christ. Second, the expression of God’s love in and through our lives reveals the reality of God and his good character to others. Although no one can say that they have tangibly seen God (who is Spirit), the experience of his love reveals him and his presence in a very real way!
May God’s love shape our posture toward the students in our ministries and their desire to be aligned with Paul’s prayer for believers in Ephesians 3:14-19: “that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith–that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” Oh, that we might pursue that vision together as we make disciples of the next generation.