Season of Preparation Day Sixteen: God’s Beloved

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 1 John 4:11

For love to exist on earth, it had to first exist in heaven. What started as a love between the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—spilled over to mankind. The purest of loves unmarred by sin.

I’ve never spent much time thinking about what love looks like in its most holy form, the love of the Trinity, but when I do it is still beyond anything I can comprehend. The closest I may come to experiencing that love is when I behold the Christ child lying in the manger.

A love with no strings, unconditional, selfless. Even on our best days with those we love the most, we fall short. The closest we can come to offering such a love is the love we have for our children. And still, I think it must be only a faint whisper of the love of God.

The purpose of man is the worship of God. True worship only exists as an act of love, and man has been created to love and to be loved.

But in our fallen state, we spend our lives searching to fill our need for love with the love of other humans, forgetting that we are already the recipient of the most powerful love there is. We are God’s Beloved.

There is no one on earth that can love us with the same love God has for us. And in an interesting sort of twist, the more we know God’s love for us, the closer we come to loving others with that same love.

When my children were born, I experienced the fiercest love I have ever known. I knew that I would fight a lion with my bare hands to protect them. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to fight for and protect them.

Anything except surrender them.

It took a painful season with a prodigal for God to finally convince me surrendering them to him was the most loving thing I could. He wanted to call my child his Beloved, but I was standing in the way. With my interfering in the name of protecting them, I was actually in the way of what God needed to do to draw them to him. While it’s good for children to know their mother’s love, it’s much more important for them to know God’s love. In fact, their life depends upon it.

And what is that pure and holy love that pours from the doors of heaven to fill the wells of our hearts. It’s God’s Son taking my place in death. It’s Jesus drinking the cup of wrath meant for me so that I might one day reign with him in God’s kingdom.

It is by this and through no merit of my own that God calls me his Beloved. His esteemed, dear, favorite, worthy of love.

God gives us the opportunity to experience the pure joy of such a love as he has for us when we come with a humble and expectant heart to the baby lying in a bed of straw on that holy night.

This Christmas I want to draw close to the manger and savor the feeling of a heart swelling with the joy of unconditional love. I want to feel the pure and holy love found only in the perfection of the Trinity’s love for each other.

And may I be as willing to share that love with others as was my Lord and Savior when chose me as his Beloved.