Whose Love Is It?

Are we meant to carry God's love to each other, or to love in our own way?

This started as a question I wrote down quickly, half-formed. Here it is, lightly cleaned up:

Does God want us, His creation, to possess Godlike love for each other? Or does He want us to exercise our own sense of love? It seems we have the free will to do whatever, even never love. We are even allowed to hate God Himself! But maybe it's essentially that if you try to align with and possess God's love and exercise it for the people around you, perhaps that is just a "greater chance" that He, and His grace, will allow your being to be a part of His will as time goes on. Obviously those who hate Him can also be a part of His will… but maybe not for eternity, you know?

There are several questions folded into that. Whose love is it when I love someone well? What does it mean that we're free to refuse, even to hate God? Does loving like God improve my chances with Him? What does it mean to be "a part of His will"? And what happens at the end?

Not His love or mine

The first part of the question sets up a choice: God's love, or my own. I don't think it's actually a choice.

John writes:

"Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love." (1 John 4:7–8)

Love comes from God. If that's true, there isn't a separate supply of human love sitting next to God's that I could use instead. "We love because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Paul says it from another side: "God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us" (Romans 5:5).

But poured into our hearts means it really does end up in us. It doesn't bypass me. When I love someone, it's still me loving them, with my face, my history, my particular way of paying attention. Jesus uses the picture of a vine:

"I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." (John 15:5)

The fruit grows on the branch. It is the branch's fruit. But the branch didn't generate the life in it. That's closer to what I think God wants than either option in my question: not His love instead of mine, and not mine instead of His, but His love becoming mine as it moves through me.

Paul holds both sides in one sentence:

"…continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose." (Philippians 2:12–13)

I work it out. God works in me. Neither cancels the other. In God's Grace I called this the difference between sovereignty and participation: grace can come first without making my response imaginary.

Can God's love be possessed?

The word in my question that bothers me now is possess. "Possess Godlike love."

In Fine Lines I wrote that love and possession are not the same thing. Possession quietly turns another person into something I manage. I think the same thing can happen with God's love. If I imagine it as something I can have, hold, and measure, it becomes a spiritual asset. I start comparing how much I have with how much other people have. I start using it. That's the taking I wrote about in Giving or Taking, only aimed at God instead of at a person.

John describes it differently:

"No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us." (1 John 4:12)

His love is made complete when we love one another. It isn't completed by being stored. It's completed by being given. So maybe the better words are receive, remain, and pass on. I don't possess God's love. At best, I take part in it.

That doesn't make my own sense of love worthless. It's real, and it's particular: it loves this person, not humanity in general. God's love doesn't seem to erase that and replace me with something generic. But my own sense of love also bends. It can slide into control, into need, into keeping score. So I don't think God wants to replace it. I think He wants to correct it and fill it, the way a branch that remains in the vine still grows in its own shape.

The freedom to refuse

The part of my question that surprises me most when I sit with it is this: we are allowed to never love. We are even allowed to hate God Himself.

God puts the choice in front of people plainly. "Now choose life," He says through Moses (Deuteronomy 30:19), and the next verse says what choosing life means: to love Him, "listen to his voice, and hold fast to him" (Deuteronomy 30:20). Something offered as a real choice can be refused.

Why would God allow that? My best guess, and it is a guess, is that love which can't be refused isn't love anymore. It's control. In Care and Control I asked whether what another person tells me can actually change the help I offer. A love that could never be refused would answer that question with no. The freedom to refuse looks to me like part of what His love is, not a hole in it.

And He doesn't stop giving to the people who refuse Him:

"But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." (Matthew 5:44–45)

Jesus' reason for loving enemies is that this is what the Father already does. And Paul says the decisive act came before anyone had earned it: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). God's love isn't waiting for us to stop refusing it. It's already moving toward the people who refuse it.

A greater chance?

Then comes the part of my question where I have to push back on myself. I wrote that if you try to align with God's love and exercise it for others, maybe that's a "greater chance" that He will allow you to be part of His will as time goes on.

There's something true in that. What I practice shapes what I become. In God's Grace I wrote that what is repeatedly received can become something a person becomes capable of giving. Alignment is not nothing. A life that keeps turning toward God's love is different from a life that keeps turning away from it.

But "chance" is the language of odds, and odds are the language of earning. If I love people in order to improve my standing with God, the people I'm loving have become a means. I'm taking again, only now the thing I'm trying to get is heaven. Paul closes that door:

"For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast." (Ephesians 2:8–9)

So I want to rephrase my own idea. Maybe aligning with God's love doesn't raise the odds that He will allow me in. Maybe it changes whether I'm becoming someone who wants what He is giving. The question moves from God's permission to my capacity to receive. I hold that loosely. It's a proposal, not something I can prove.

Used by His will, or part of it

I also wrote that those who hate God can still be part of His will. I think that's right, and Scripture has a well-known example. Joseph's brothers sold him into slavery. Years later he tells them:

"You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." (Genesis 50:20)

The brothers were inside God's will. Their worst act was turned toward good. But they weren't taking part in what God was doing. They were working against it, and God worked through it anyway.

So there seem to be two ways of being part of His will. One is to be used by it, even against your own intention. The other is to share in it. Jesus describes the second:

"I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends…" (John 15:15)

A friend knows what the other is doing and wants it too. Maybe that's the difference my question was reaching for. Everyone ends up inside God's will somehow. Not everyone wants to be His friend in it.

And eternity?

The last line of my question was "maybe not for eternity." That's the hardest part, and I don't want to pretend I can settle it. Christians have disagreed seriously about what happens at the end, and an essay isn't going to resolve that.

What I can hold onto is what God says He wants. Peter writes that the Lord is patient, "not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9). Whatever the end looks like, it isn't God hoping people fail.

I also have to be careful with the word those, as in "those who hate Him." I can't see into anyone's heart well enough to sort people into groups. Sometimes what a person rejects may be a picture of God someone handed them rather than God Himself. And the question doesn't only sit with other people. Before it is a question about anyone else's eternity, it is a question about me: am I letting His love in, and letting it out?

What I'm left with

So does God want us to possess His love, or to exercise our own? I think the honest answer is neither, exactly. He wants His love to become ours the only way it can: by being received and then given away. My own love is the place where that happens. It isn't replaced. It's filled, corrected, and sent.

The questions I want to carry out of this:

• When I love someone well, where did that love come from?
• Am I loving this person to get something back, even something from God?
• Do I treat God's love as something I have, or something I take part in?
• Can I let someone say no to me without punishing them for it?

God's love becomes ours the same way it stays His: by being given.

Scripture quotations from the NIV.