By: Rev. Fr. Fredrick Kiwanuka

1 John 4:7-10

Love has its origin in God. It is from the God who is love that all love takes its source. “Human love is a reflection of something in the divine nature itself. We are never nearer to God than when we love.

The real Christian “practices being God”. He who dwells in love dwells in God. Man is made in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:26). God is love and, therefore, to be like God and be what he was meant to be, man must also love.

God is love – is the greatest single statement about God in the whole Bible. It is amazing how many doors that single statement unlocks and how many questions it answers.

Sometimes we are bound to wonder why God created this world. The disobedience and lack of response in men is a continual grief to him. Why should He create a world which was to bring Him nothing but trouble? The answer is that creation was essential to His very nature. If God is love. He cannot exist in lonely isolation, Love must have someone to love and someone to love it.  Unless love is a free response, it is not love.

Had God been only law, he could have created a world in which men moved like automata (robots) having no more choice than a machine. But if God had made men like that there would have been no possibility of a personal relationship between Him and them.

If God had been only law and justice, He would simply have left men to the consequences of their sins. The moral law would operate, the soul that sinned would die. But the very fact God is love meant that He had to seek and save that which is lost. He had to find a remedy for sin.

If God were simply creator, men might live their brief span and die forever. But the fact that God is love makes it certain that the chances and changes of life have not the last word and that His love will readjust the balance of this life.

Jesus is the bringer of life. God sent Him that through Him we might have life. Jesus gives a man an object for which to live, He gives him strength by which he lives, gives him peace in which to live. Living with Christ turns mere existence into fullness of life.

Jesus is the restorer of lost relationship with God. God sent Him to be the atoning sacrifice for sin.

@ Christ the King Parish, Kampala