He Is Love

At His core, God, as the Bible indicates, is love. The perfect Father is loving, and when the Father acts, He always acts out of this heart of love.

That’s good news for us, because at the heart of all humanity is our need for love. Maybe that’s tough for you to wrap your mind around because your earthly dad couldn’t get the words I love you out of his mouth. You wanted to hear those words so badly, and as a way of coping, you settled with the thought, My dad wasn’t the kind who told you he loved you; he just showed you.

But we don’t just want to settle for a dad who says, "You know I love you; I don’t need to say it." We really need to hear it. We want to hear these words not only on monumental occasions, but regularly, consistently, in both good and bad times. We want to hear those words by text and email and phone call and letter and birthday card and face-to-face around the dinner table. We don’t just want empty words without actions; we want to hear him say I love you and show it. And wrapped throughout this desire, we want to know that something about us touches our father’s heart — that there is a positive emotion inside of him when he thinks about us.

All of us processing the big ideas of this devotional together undoubtedly experience a whole range of thoughts and emotions about being loved. Some of us have been swimming in the ocean of a father’s love for as long as we can remember. Others have literally never heard the words I love you, son, or I love you, baby girl come out of our father’s mouth. Some have only heard the opposite — I hate you; I wish you’d never been born. Most of us have a mixture of good and not so good. And we all have this in common: none of our earthly father’s love has been perfect. Yet our need to be loved — prized and valued and wanted — is at the epicenter of our hearts.

Our new story with our heavenly Father is a love-fueled story from beginning to end. It started with your conception, the moment God designed you, and the pinnacle of the story is the place where Jesus died. That moment is summed up powerfully and beautifully like this: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16 NASB).