a way to live - give it a try!

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.

1 John 4:16

Is love a state, a comfort, a reality, a tangible intangible experience, which we can live in?

Ask any young person experiencing puppy love, and you would say yes! Such love transmits through anything, changes mindsets, gives strength, emboldens thinking and creates a different level of patience, tolerance and mercy and grace.

Notice that 1 John 4:16 sneaks in the word rely. Other translations say believe, trust, and have faith. The idea is that we are encouraged to have faith in this love, because God is love.

This idea means that everything God does, and is…reflects LOVE. Our own ideas of love are time and experience limited, however what would eternal love look like?

How I felt about love changed when my first child was born. How I felt about love was moved when I experienced the free loving kindness of another. When we consider an eternity of love, every permutation and iteration of love…maybe that might be called True Love. True Love is something we can know, experience, feel and live in - but because it is eternal, we need to also have faith, belief and trust - even when we do not feel love, God remains love, and His love remains for us and with us.

In other words, we can know the love of God by faith. We can live in the love of God by faith. And we can know that the Lord lives in us, through His love, by faith.

Is this so hard? Is this beyond us?

No…because every relationship of love operates to some degree by freely giving, freely choosing - you might say, in good faith, to share love, receive and give love.

In other words, we place faith in those around us to be in their love, mutually or by our own free choice to simply give love regardless. We understand through lived experience that love and faith go together in some measure. So while God demonstrated or proved His love for us as John 3:16 declares, faith, trust and belief in that love remains for us to express and operate.

However we can have confidence in the promise of the Word of God from this verse, in that we can know this true love, infact, we can we know that we know that we know! We can know and rely on the love God has for us…maybe it can be a way to live life - give it a try!