What I Set Out to Find

I did not set out to write a book about love.

I set out to understand the Bible better. I wanted to go deeper, to read more carefully, to understand what God was actually asking of me as a Christian. And the more I read, the more one thing kept surfacing, quietly at first and then impossible to ignore. Everything kept coming back to love.

Not as one theme among many. As the theme beneath all the others. The foundation everything else was built on.

I started to see it everywhere. The law, all of it, summarized in two commands, both of them about love. The prophets calling Israel back, always back, to a love for God they had abandoned. Jesus arriving not just to teach about love but to embody it completely, to demonstrate what it looks like when a human life is lived entirely from its overflow. Paul writing to a divided, struggling church and telling them that without love, everything they were doing, the gifts, the sacrifice, the theology, amounted to nothing. John, at the end of his life, having seen and experienced more of God than almost anyone, reducing the whole thing to three words: God is love.

It struck me that this was not a small insight. This was the whole thing.

Christianity is not primarily a set of beliefs to hold or rules to follow or religious practices to maintain. It is a love story. It begins with God loving a world that had turned away from Him and ends with that love restoring everything the turning away had broken. And in between, it asks one thing of us: that we receive that love, and then give it away.

Love God. Love people. Everything else follows.

More soon.