Love, God and You

Is love all you need? Larry explores how knowing more about the love of God opens new ways of living with freedom and caring. He draws from Dr. Thomas Oord's amazing work on the uncontrolling love of God to create paths for greater well-being in our daily life.

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On June 25, 1967 500 million people watched the first, live, international satellite television broadcast in history. The broadcast was called, Our World, designed to celebrate the global culture. Segments were broadcast from 19 countries using state-of-the-art technology. In a world torn between the Cold War, Vietnam and counter-culture revolution, the show had the goal of bringing diverse people together. The climatic segment was a live performance of a new Beatles song titled “Love is All You Need.” The group was joined by mega-artists Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton. The simple lyrics of John Lennon became the anthem of the worldwide peace movement known as the “Summer of Love.” More than 50 years later the song reverberates still. “Love is all you need..”

Last year I read a blockbuster titled, The Uncontrolling Love of God by Dr. Thomas Oord. The message of this theologian is powerful: Jesus and the apostles teach that Love is the essential nature of God. We could quote many verses but the clearest statement is found in one of the smallest and latest books, 1 John 4:16, “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”

Now, I know, your first reaction is to say, “Larry everyone knows that. Little children learn the verse ‘God is love.’ The most famous verse in the Bible says, ‘For God loved the world so much…’” Yes, but Oord says there’s a problem: most theological systems teach that love is one of several equal attributes of God. The Divine is also all-powerful, just, good, all-knowing, and so forth, balancing the various attributes to achieve eternal purposes. God may choose to love, or act in other ways, according to the situation. In the common view, God is the all-powerful ruler of the universe who choses to limit that power to create our universe and creatures who are free. 

But what love is foundational, the unchanging and eternal attribute of God's nature, preeminent over all other attributes? To say with the Bible that “God is love” means that love is the necessary expression of God's timeless nature. In Oord’s blunt language, “God must love. God cannot not love. Because God must act like God… It is impossible for God to be unloving… being so would require God to be other than divine.” In my words, God is not free to choose whether to love because God's nature is love. God’s total power is founded in Love. God’s total knowledge is hemmed in by Love. God’s unfailing justice is filtered with Love. 

Let’s take this even further. The essential love of God gets even more exciting when we realize the nature of Love. Think about how love works in our own relationships. Can a man coerce his partner to love him? What if he promised her a million dollars for her love, or enlisted 100 friends to bombard her with messages demanding she love him, or locked her in a house until she gave her love to him? All this is absurd, isn’t it? Real love is uncoercive, uncontrolling and directed toward their mutual goals. Could the love of God be any different?

But not everyone is happy with an uncontrolling, love-driven God. Who wants a less-than-almighty God, one who doesn’t determine every detail of the universe with divine power? 

It’s common for believers to think that God’s power is primary. Such power determines in advance every action and outcome in the universe, from the distant galaxies to your destiny. Here’s a personal story. Jan and I met and fell in love in the while attending the same Missouri church and school. My family came to the neighborhood after leaving behind a drought-stricken farm to move to the city. Jan’s family built a house in the neighborhood 10 years later. The common view of God’s power holds that the choices of our parents were pre-determined and essentially controlled by God. Even the drought that affected thousands of farms in that era was brought God’s choice and power.

In response, perhaps the best way to see a new perspective is to think about animals doing what is a part of their essential nature. When some action is an essential part of a creature’s nature, we sometimes laugh at what they do. Dogs sniff each other because that’s what dogs do. Dolphins swim because that’s what dolphins do. Birds sing because that’s what birds do. In a similar way, love is what God does because it is the foremost and inherent attribute of this nature. 

This would mean that it is impossible for God to act out-of-character with Love. God’s nature would preclude directly intervening in world weather patterns to create a terrible drought, bankrupting untold numbers of Midwestern farmers. In God, love comes first. We see this in the most incredible person in history: Jesus Christ. It is Jesus who demonstrates in the Cross and Resurrection that love conditions God’s sovereignty, for it is there God’s power is expressed in self-giving and uncontrolling love. Compelled by his divine nature of essential love, Jesus could do no other work than give himself for others. He embodied this uncontrolling, uncoercive love in every action and teaching. He influenced everyone but compelled no one. Would Jesus have created a terrible drought, bankrupting thousands of farmers? I don’t think so. In God, love comes first.

We could add to this personal story by considering the COVID 19 pandemic. Did God cause or allow this event in sovereign power? Did God predetermine that various proteins would form a virus in animals, then mutate, be ingested by a human eating a fried bat in China, and spread across the planet, causing the death of thousands? If we believe that the essence of God is love, the answer is “No.” The enduring theological truth of the biblical narratives is that God is good. The very nature of this loving God requires that there be no unilateral control of singular events across the universe. As Thomas Oord writes, “Because God loves everyone and everything, God can’t control anyone or any event.” At the same time, the God of love brings almighty energy to work within the material world and within human mentality to press toward good for all. We may choose to respond to God’s love and join ourselves to bring about good. 

The essential nature of God is uncontrolling love. What does that mean for us today? We can ask the question: Does this mean God created me with some real freedom? Does it teach that God doesn’t force me to obey, or lay out some future course of action that I am compelled to follow?

The answer is, “Exactly.” We can zero in on this fundamental idea for today: you have the power of choice in your life now because of this essential, uncontrolling love of God. The Divine created the universe and each entity within it as having various degrees of freedom. This love-driven power precedes and enables your freedom to respond as you choose. God in His essential, pure nature of Love cannot act to control, determine, coerce or compel you, but does relentlessly allure us toward the Divine and the Kingdom of Good. 

Here are 3 takeaways about our human lives under the uncontrolling nature of God:

First, the essential Love of God grants you the freedom to believe what you will about yourself. Each of us has an image of ourselves deep within our mind. It has been shaped by our genetics, environment,  and interpreted experiences. God also has a view of who you are. God says you are the “masterpiece,” the adopted child, and the “beloved.” According to the Gospel of John, God has implanted the Light in every person who ever existed. God works at all times to convince us of these truths but we can choose otherwise. We can stay with the belief that we are broken, flawed, and unworthy. The uncontrolling love of God offers you the opportunity to seize this freedom and accept this divine assessment. The greatest proof about your own worth is demonstrated in Jesus offering his earthly life to unite humanity with God.

Second, the essential Love of God grants you the freedom to seek your own dreams. Your future is not predetermined. A loving father would not predetermine a daughter to be a lawyer if she loved painting. The essential, uncontrolling love of God does not force humans or physical entities in the universe to do anything, no matter how desirable that action may be. Instead, in Oord’s words, “God relentlessly expresses love in the quest to promote overall well-being.” To echo the phrase of the Apostle Paul, we are invited to be “co-workers” with the God in building a future that is yet unwritten. 

Finally, the essential Love of God grants you the freedom to follow the ways of love in relationships. The Bible in 1 Corinthians 13 describes love as patient, kind, ethical, self-giving, humble, collaborative, full of hope and strength. You can allow God to channel those very qualities through your own life. This love will be for everyone, no matter what their color, orientation, nationality or even legality. Like a sail flutters in the wind, so your life can move under God’s influence to love. You can love because the essential love of God works through you.

The book of Ephesians has a powerful prayer for us to lift up this fact, asking, “That you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and height and depth of the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

When we understand the deepest truth of love, the Beatles had it right. Love is all you need.