L___? What is it?

Let’s start with God. For those of you familiar with the Bible, this passage is well known: God is love! It is found in 1 John 4:8. As you can see, it doesn’t say that God loves or He is loving, but He is LOVE. This is what He is, His nature! LOVE! The God which the Bible portrays is LOVE!

How can we summarize the Bible in one word? One day Jesus was asked: “Which commandment is the greatest”? The answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And the second like it is: Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is it! LOVE! Love God and love those around you! But Jesus didn’t stop here. He continued saying: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”. Matthew 22:35-40. This expression, the law and the prophets, was for that time a way of saying the whole Bible. So everything that is in the Bible is based on and comes from this commandment: LOVE.

Another way of putting this: Jesus came on earth to show us how God is (check Heb. 1,1-3) and we have seen that God is love. In John 5:39 we are told that the Scriptures testify/speak about Jesus. So the Bible is showing us how Jesus is which Jesus came to show us how the Father which is love. What is the word that summarizes the Bible? LOVE!

And because Christianity is about God and has the Bible as its book/manual, point of reference, or supreme authority, then Christianity could be summarized using the same word: LOVE! What a wonderful day was that one in which I understood these things!

But wait you might say! What is love then?

We have seen that God is love, the Bible is about God which is love and Christianity is about love but what is love? What a good question! Love is maybe the most misunderstood concept/reality today. So many people are speaking and writing about love, there are countless movies about love, the modern music (most of it) is about love. And everybody is looking for love, everybody wants to experience love. Many have been disappointed and more will be: what they thought was love, after some time, vanished away: from their own souls or from the souls of those who told them: “I love you”. For some love is something which they think can be found only in books or in movies but not so much in real life. Others have reduced it at the level of chemicals: some hormones are the ones responsible with it. What is love for you?

Perhaps this is the most important question of our age: What is love?