God Is Love

God Is Love

I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow—not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love.

Romans 8:38

On a trip to London with two other couples, we thought it only fitting that we take the opportunity to see the long-standing musical production of Charles Dickens’s story of Oliver Twist. In the opening scene, destitute boys in a London orphanage are hovering over a miserable meal of gruel. Meanwhile, the family and friends of the orphanage’s manager are enjoying heaping platters of succulent fowl and tasty vegetables in an adjoining dining room that the boys can see. Although the paint is peeling on the stark gray wall behind the rough tables where the boys are sitting, a huge motto is visible: GOD IS LOVE.

The audience is left to wonder whether the ragged, coughing urchins ever notice the dusty sign, let alone comprehend its meaning. But in reality God’s love is not part of a theatrical backdrop. It is not meant to have a paradoxical place on stage. God’s love has been real since the beginning of time, when the Lord laid the foundations of the earth.

How you perceive God’s love shapes your love for each other. God’s love is self-sacrificing (John 15:13), compelling (2 Corinthians 5:14, NIV), and unchangeable (John 13:1, NKJV). Those qualities are what make it perfect.

The late Ruth Bell Graham once wrote, “When I stop to think of all that love should be—accepting, forgiving, supporting, strengthening—God is all that and more. He is perfect love.” And when Ruth Graham felt that her love for her husband, Billy, did not measure up to such divine standards, “At that moment Romans 8:31-39 comes into my consciousness, and I am surrounded again by an awareness of God’s love. He loves me in spite of me!”^a

If the GOD IS LOVE sign had the audacity to cling to the scaly wall in Oliver’s dreadful orphanage, it can surely abide in the hearts of a husband and wife who care for each other.

Though our feelings come and go, [God’s] love for us does not.

—C. S. Lewis

^a 176