Commissioned: Real Love: Discovering God’s Heart for You

Scripture: John 3:16

So Much Love

John 3:16 is the most popular verse in the Bible. It has been waved on signs at sporting events and printed on the bottom of fast-food paper cups. One football player even wrote it in his eye-black for a national championship game, leading to it being the most searched item on the internet for over 24 hours!

This verse deserves its popularity because it is such a clear and compelling statement of how much God loves us. Let’s look carefully at what it tells us.

God is a Father. The Bible reveals that God is personal, not just an impersonal force or substance. In fact, the Bible speaks of God the Father AND of God the Son. It also speaks of God the Holy Spirit, who is the love between the Father and the Son. The greatest mystery of the Christian faith is that God is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Spirit—three persons of the same substance, an eternal community of love. Love is at the center of the universe.

God the Father GAVE God the Son. He gave the Son by sending Him into the world in human flesh to teach God’s ways to a sinful world. He gave the Son up to death on the cross at the hands of sinful people.

The Father gave the Son because of His love for the world. We cannot fathom a love so great that a Father would give His Son to rescue a world that had rejected Him! This is how much God loves you and me. The Father gave the Son; the Son obeyed the Father even unto death, and the Holy Spirit transformed Jesus’s suffering into redemptive love. God is for us!

God did this so that people would not perish spiritually but would have eternal life. God wants us back! All of us! He wants to give us life with Him that will last forever. In other places, the Bible tells us that “the world” is not to be loved—the world in the sense of the forces organized to keep people from God. It is people that God loves. He sent Jesus into the world on a mission of love to save the people of the world. Now, He is sending us to others because of that same love.

God’s did this for everyone. Because of God’s love, every person in the world is now free to come back to Him—”everyone who believes” can begin a new life with God. It doesn’t matter what we have done. It doesn’t matter how great or how small we are, how successful or how unsuccessful we are, how esteemed or how rejected we are. God’s love reaches to each one of us.

Believing is an ongoing action that results in eternal life. Our response to God is not just mental assent to His existence or even to His love. It is a response of the heart, a process that leads to a life of obedience and to eternal life with God. We give ourselves to Him in loving trust because we see the depth of the love He has for us. We are assured of eternal life because we remain in an ongoing love relationship with the God who sought us and saved us.

John 3:16 is such a powerful summary of the Good News because is centers on the most important elements of the story. All the words on all the pages of all the thickest books of catechesis and theology are summed up right here: God loves us…God gave His Son…we are all invited home.

Stop, think and pray:

God loves us so much He sent His Son to die for us. Spend some time letting that sink in and thanking God for His great love. Let’s think of someone in our world who needs to know that God loves them. What simple thing could I do to show that person that God loves them?

Scriptures: Mark 15:32-34, Psalms 22:2-6, Hebrews 12:7, Hebrews 12:11

“God, why have you forsaken me?”

If God loves us so much, if He has promised to always be with us, then why do sometimes feel that He has forsaken us? Didn’t even Jesus, when He was on the cross, cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Yes, Jesus did cry out these words of anguish and despair. In fact, Jesus was quoting the Psalmist David, and Jesus would have memorized this verse to use, as all good Hebrews did, as a cry of pain at times when God seemed absent. But the Psalm does not say that God had forsaken David, only that David felt as if God had forsaken him. God does not despise our feelings of pain and abandonment—he even gives us in the Psalms words to express our feelings to Him. God welcomes our cries of hurt and he even wants us to tell him when we feel that He has left us. We never need to hide our feelings from God. In fact, God teaches us to express them. Jesus, who was fully human—though without sin—expressed his anguish to God, and so should we.

But our feelings of pain and abandonment are not the end of the story. The Psalmist also acknowledged the faithfulness of God. God raised Jesus from the dead—He did not abandon him. Our trials will also come to an end. Our faithful God will, in His time, bring us comfort and relief.

But why does He allow the pain in the first place? The Bible also answers this question. God is allowing pain to train us. As a Father teaches His dear children, He allows pain to come into our lives to teach us about life, to teach us about ourselves, and to soften and mold us into better, kinder people. In the case of Jesus, who didn’t need to be trained, he allowed this pain so that Jesus could prove himself the perfectly obedient son who triumphed in testing, even where we fail—by offering himself fully to God for the sake of others. But for us, God allows the pain so that we can become more like Jesus. He wants us also to learn to offer ourselves to Him for the sake of others.

There is nothing wrong with feeling like God has abandoned us. Some moments in life make us feel that way. But He has not abandoned us. He never will. He will raise us up again, many times in this life and forever in the life to come.

Stop, think and pray:

We have all felt at certain moments that God has forsaken us? Have we felt the freedom to express ourselves honestly to Him in times of pain? Let’s take time now to express to God any pain that we have held in. When we are ready, let’s confess to Him our trust in his faithfulness and our thanks that He is training us as His own dear children.

Scripture: Romans 5:5-10

Unconditional Love

God loves us unconditionally. We do not earn His love by our good behavior. We cannot lose His love by our bad behavior. We sometimes feel that we are not deserving of God’s love—and that is certainly true! We are “helpless” and “ungodly;” but that does not change the fact that God loves us! We may feel that we are less deserving of God’s love than others, but God does not compare. He just loves us.

God “proves” His love for us by his amazing generosity. It is as if he says, “Now people will see that I love them; I’ll give them such an astounding instance that they will not be able to deny it. I’ll die for them when they are sinners when they are my enemies!”

The Apostle Paul rightly points out that this is not how we human beings would think. We might be willing to die for a good person. We might carefully calculate whether the person’s life was worth enough to the world that we should die for them, and if we decided that the person was worthy, we might “with difficulty” summon the courage to do it. But God showed his love for us by dying for us, knowing that we were sinners. Jesus died for us, sinners. The Apostle goes even further and says that we were God’s enemies. What person dies for their enemies? We kill our enemies! And yet God would rather die for His enemies than kill them.

Through the blood of Jesus, we have been “justified.” This means that at our baptism, when we were united with Jesus Christ, we were set free from enslavement to sin and we were healed. Faith, hope, and love were poured into our hearts, and we were given the ability to do God’s will. We were “reconciled” to God. This means that the barrier of sin and guilt that separated us from God has been taken away and we have been granted free access to Him so that we can pray to Him and grow in loving relationship with Him. We will be “saved” by His life. This means that Christ’s life at work in us ensures that we will be saved from punishment on the day of judgment and that we will be granted eternal life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches us that “through the power of the Holy Spirit we take part in Christ’s passion by dying to sin, and in His Resurrection by being born to a new life; we are members of his Body, which is the Church, branches grafted into the vine, which is himself.” (#1988, see also 1991, 1992)

God did all of this for us out of unconditional love. We do not earn it. We do not deserve it. This is God’s heart toward us, every moment of every day. He loves us. He is for us. Amazing love! We can only give thanks!

Stop, think and pray:

• Let’s take some time to humble ourselves before the Lord: Let’s clear our minds of any thought that we deserve His love and let’s also clear our minds of any thought that we are LESS deserving of God’s love than others. God loves us without condition. Let’s give Him thanks and praise for this glorious truth.
• God wants us to live each day in the reality of what His love has done for us. Let’s commit to doing that today.

Scripture: 1 John 4:7-11

God is love

This passage from the first letter of John tells us that God revealed His love to us by sending His Son to save us even when we did not love Him. God sent Jesus to be the “expiation” for our sins: this means that he did away with the guilt for our sin and made us clean before God. He did this “so that we might have life.” He did this for us when we had done nothing for Him. All of this echoes the words of the apostle Paul in yesterday’s reading from his letter to the Romans.

But John outdoes Paul with this significant statement: GOD IS LOVE. The Catechism beautifully comments on this verse, “But St. John goes even further when he affirms that “God is love”: God’s very being is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of time, God revealed his innermost secret: God himself is an eternal exchange of love, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us to share in that exchange.” (#221) What an incredible statement: God’s very being is love! The Bible gives us hundreds of statements about what God is like, but very few about what he IS. In fact, there are only three. The first is God’s revelation to Moses: “I AM”—God alone is eternally existent and depends on nothing for His existence. The other two are through the apostle John: “God is light (truth and goodness)” (I John 1) and “God is love.”

The sovereign eternal being, creator of heaven and earth, is love. His purpose in creation was to express love. He didn’t need creation, he chose to create in order to express His love. He loves us not as an afterthought, not just barely after careful consideration of the other alternatives. He loves us because that is who He is. He does not equivocate (He is light) and He does not change. (He is the eternal I am.) And He is love. We can count on His love for us because it is sourced in and flows from His true and unchanging being.

God’s love flows from who he is, and our love for others flows from who we are in Him. John says that whoever is “begotten by God and knows God” loves others. As baptized and confirmed believers in Jesus Christ, we have been made partakers of the divine nature, and we have the opportunity to know Him personally in the holy eucharist, in the sacrament of reconciliation, in our devotions of prayer, and through meditation on Scripture. In these ways, we keep the love of God flowing through our lives. We are not the source of this love; “love is from God.” We do not produce it. We receive it and we pass it on to others. We love others because He loves us. And the more we cultivate a continual experience of God’s love for us, the more we become loving people.

Stop, think and pray:

Let’s begin by meditating on the truth that God’s very nature is love. Are we experiencing God’s love for us at this moment? Are we faithfully receiving the grace of the sacraments God has provided for us? Are there additional devotional practices—prayer, reading, meditation–that we’d like to make part of our lifestyle? Are there any relationships in which we are blocking the flow of God’s love with our judgment or unforgiveness? If so, let’s release those people from our judgment so that the love of God can flow through us.

Scriptures: 1 John 3:1-3, Romans 8:14-17

Children of God

God loves us as his own dear children! Not only does he love us with the tenderness of a father, but he will also provide for our future the way a father provides for his heirs!

The Apostle Paul writes that because we have received God’s Spirit and are led by His Spirit, we have become His children. We have been adopted into His family. The Holy Spirit “bears witness” and causes our hearts to cry out, “Abba, Father”—which means Papa! As God’s children, we have become His heirs along with Jesus Christ. That means that we will enjoy an eternal love relationship with the Father in glory, along with all those who are in Jesus Christ. We have inherited an eternal home! John, who is called the beloved Apostle, marvels at this reality: “See what love!” With excitement, John affirms that we are God’s children now and that even greater things await us—when Jesus is revealed, we shall be like Him. John says that this is why “the world”–those who do not know God–do not know the children of God.

But wait a minute. Isn’t everyone a child of God? Doesn’t God love everyone? Yes, God loves everyone and everyone is a child of God by virtue of being created in His image. But Paul and John are saying that those who turn to God in repentance and faith and receive his Spirit become his children in a new and intimate way. God wants to bring every person into this experience of family and grant each one an eternal inheritance. He has shown his love by sending his only begotten Son to die for us all. He is calling each one into his eternal family.

It is not our job to judge who is in God’s family and who isn’t. But it is our job to offer everyone the opportunity to come to God through Jesus Christ. The Church teaches us: “Although in ways known to himself, God can lead those who, through no fault of their own, are ignorant of the Gospel, to that faith without which it is impossible to please him, the Church still has the obligation and also the sacred right to evangelize all men.” (CC 848, Ad Gentes 7)

Being a child of God carries with it a sacred obligation. John tells us to “purify ourselves as he is pure.” Paul tells us to “suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him.” Knowing that we are children of God should never cause us to think of ourselves as better than others, but instead should remind us to live as Jesus lived and to lay our lives down for others. This includes sharing with others the good news that they, too, can become God’s children through Jesus Christ.

Stop, think and pray:

Let’s take time to think about all the ways that God has cared for us as a Father cares for His children, and to give him thanks and praise. Are there ways we need to purify ourselves today? If we are suffering today, let’s remind ourselves of the glory that lies ahead for us as God’s children.

Scripture: John 10:9-10

Abundant Life

In his book, I Want You to Be Happy: Finding Peace and Abundance in Everyday Life, Pope Francis writes, “We are not alive by mistake. God desired life for us. He created us because he wants us to be happy. He is our Father, and if our lives in the here and now are not what he wanted for us, Jesus assures us that God is working to redeem us.” What a wonderful thought: God wants to redeem us from unhappiness! In his book, Pope Francis challenges us to think of the things that bring us happiness: love, forgiveness, beauty, big dreams, the freedom to take risks, the friendship of others, hope for the future, the knowledge that we are destined for great things. These are all holy things. Holiness and happiness are made for each other.

“God created us to be happy, and whatever he does in our lives is designed to make us happy!” This is not how we usually think of religion. We often think that religion is designed to make us miserable, to take from us the things that will make us happy. This is because there is a “thief,” a liar, who comes to steal, slaughter, and destroy. This thief—the devil—tells us that we cannot be holy and happy at the same time. But in fact, only those who are holy are truly happy.

Jesus said, “I am the gate.” Jesus’s teachings are the way to life. Obeying Jesus brings us happiness. The thief tells us that freedom from God’s rules will make us happy. But it never does. It is obeying God’s rules that make us happy. Saint Paul said, “I am a slave of Jesus Christ.” He also said, “It is for freedom that Christ has set you free.” This seems like a contradiction. How can slavery make us free? Bishop Robert Barron explains that Paul is not speaking of the freedom to do whatever we choose to do, but the freedom to live with excellence:

The more I surrender to Christ Jesus, who is himself the greatest possible good, the very Incarnation of God, the freer I am to be who I am supposed to be. The more Christ becomes the master of my life, the more I internalize his moral demands and the freer I am to be a child of God and to respond promptly to the call of the Father. Finally, human beings are not hungry to choose; they are hungry to choose the good. They don’t want the freedom of the libertine; they want the freedom of the saint.

We want the freedom of the saint! Abundant life begins now, not in heaven. Heaven will be even more wonderful, but God intends that our lives on earth be abundantly happy. Let’s not allow the thief to rob us of the happiness that God has for us. Jesus promises that we will have life and have it more abundantly. We can “just barely” have life, or we can have more abundant life. The process of becoming holy is the process of having more and more life. Saint Irenaeus said, “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.” God glorifies himself through us by giving us more and more life—by making us happier and happier! Let’s be fully alive!

Stop, think and pray:

Let’s thank God for his desire to make us happy and ask for his wisdom about how to be happier. Let’s think about the things in our lives that truly make us happy—good relationships with those close to us, bold plans for righting wrongs, good dreams for our future, etc.. How can we increase our happiness today by giving our energy to these things? What are the things in our lives that are draining our happiness? How can we get rid of them?