Knowing God Starts with Knowing He Is Love

Before You Read — A Word About How This Is Written

I owe you an honest word before we begin, about the voice you are going to hear.

Of all the people who wrote the Scriptures, John is the one who wrote about love the best. He does not argue. He does not build a case. He simply tells you what he saw — the Word became flesh, and we saw His glory — and then he leans in close, the way an old man does when what he has to say matters more than how it sounds, and he says it again and again. Beloved, let us love one another. He circles the same few enormous things — light, love, life, knowing, abiding — and never wears them out, because they cannot be worn out.

I have tried, in the pages that follow, to write the way John writes. I want to be plain with you: I cannot. I am nowhere near him, and I know it. But I would rather reach for the right thing and fall short of it than write you a careful, clever pamphlet that explains love and never once carries it. So if at times this sounds like a man straining toward a voice not his own — it is. I am borrowing what I can from a better writer because the subject deserves better than I am.

And I have to tell you the truth about what a book can and cannot do, or I would be lying to you on the first page. This book cannot teach you to love. No book can. Love is not information. You cannot read your way into it. The only One who can teach you love is God Himself, by His own love poured into you from the inside, by His Spirit. All I can do — all any book can do — is point. I am like a man standing by a road, pointing and saying look, there He is, that's Him. The looking is yours. The teaching is His. If anything in these pages does any good, it will not be because I wrote it well. It will be because the One who is love was already at work in you, and these words happened to be standing nearby when He did His work.

One more thing, and then we'll begin. I am not a man to whom love came easily. Some people are born warm; you've met them, and you've wondered how they do it. I am not one of them. I have had to go after kindness, and fall short of it, and go after it again, and God is plainly not finished with me yet. So I am not writing to you from above. I am writing from the same road you are on. If that is where you are — still learning, still falling short, still wanting it — then come. We'll walk it together.

I will tell you at the very end how this book actually came to be — because it turned out to be the proof of the one thing these pages most want you to believe. But that word keeps until you have read the rest.

— Michael Winslow

In the Beginning, Love

Start here, because everything starts here.

Before there was a world, there was love.

We say God is love, and we say it so often that it slides past us like water. So slow down. It does not say God loves, the way a good man loves. It says God is love — that love is the very stuff of Him, the way light is the stuff of the sun. The sun does not decide to shine. It shines because it is fire, and fire shines. Take the shining away and you have not described a sun resting. You have described no sun at all.

"The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love." — 1 John 4:8 (NET)

John wrote that when he was an old man. He had leaned on Jesus' chest at the supper. He had stood at the cross while the others ran. He had outlived every friend he started with. And after all of it — after a lifetime of looking — this is the smallest, truest thing he could say. Not God is powerful, though He is. Not God is holy, though He is that too. God is love. That is the bottom of everything. There is nothing underneath it.

Now hear what that means, and let it land slowly. When God loves you, He is not deciding to. He is not reaching down into a reserve and choosing to spend some of it on you today. He is only being what He has always been. His love for you is not a mood. It is His nature, turned toward you.

And He was loving before you existed — before anything existed. This is the strange and beautiful thing the Church has always confessed: that God is one, and yet within that one God there is a Father, and a Son, and a Spirit, three so completely joined that you cannot pull them apart, and so truly distinct that the Father has loved the Son, and the Son the Father, from before the first morning. The Spirit is the love moving between them — the living love that the Father pours toward the Son and the Son pours back.

I cannot fully explain this to you. No one can, and the ones who claim they can are usually the furthest off. But hold onto this much: love did not begin when God made the world. He did not create us because He was lonely or needed something to love. Love was already happening, full and complete, inside Him. When He made you, He was not starting to love. He was opening His hand and letting out into the world what had been true in Him forever.

And here is the part that should change how you breathe: that same Spirit — the love that passes between the Father and the Son — is the One God puts inside you. He does not send you a letter about His love. He sends His love itself, the Person of it, to live in you. That is why a book cannot teach you this and He can. The love is not described to you from across a distance. It is poured into you, where you live, and it begins to do from the inside what it has always done inside God.

So before I ask anything of you — before there is a single thing for you to do — just receive the name. God is love. Everything else in this whole book grows from that one root.

He Made You to Look Like Him

When God made you, He said a thing He said about nothing else.

"Then God said, 'Let us make humankind in Our image, after Our likeness...'" — Genesis 1:26 (NET)

He did not say it about the sea. He did not say it about the mountains or the wheeling stars, lovely as they are. He said it about you. In Our image. After Our likeness.

People have wondered for a long time what that likeness is. Is it that we can think? That we can make things? That we know right from wrong? Those aren't wrong answers. But I think they circle the thing without landing on it. Look again at the One whose image you bear. He is love. So the part of you that is most truly His likeness is the part of you that loves. You were not built first to be clever. You were not built first to be strong. You were built to love — because the One you came from is love, and a likeness is meant to look like the One it came from.

You have felt this, even if you never had words for it. Think of the last time you loved someone and it cost you — when you gave and kept no account of it, when you stayed and leaving would have been easier, when you forgave the one who had no right to ask. Something in you was working as it was meant to. The mirror was catching the light. And think of the times you held love back, or spent it only on people who paid you back in kind — something in you was running below what it was built for. Not broken past saving. Just not yet all the way alive.

Paul said this as hard as it can be said, to a church that had every gift a church could want:

"If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but I do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so that I can remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing." — 1 Corinthians 13:1–2 (NET)

Read that last word again. Not less than I could be. Nothing. You can have all of it — the knowledge, the faith, the gift to move mountains — and without love be a clanging pot. That is how near the center of you this thing lives. That is how much of what you are made for is bound up in whether you love.

So when I tell you that without love we are not much, I am not scolding you. I am telling you something you already half-know in your own chest. You were made to look like a God who is love. Where the love is, the likeness shows. Where it is not, the mirror has turned to face the wall.

The Many Ways Love Comes

Let me show you love before I name it. You come to know love by watching it move, the way you come to know a person — not by reading their description, but by being in the room with them.

So come into a few rooms with me.

Here is the first. God is bent down in the dirt at the beginning of everything, shaping a man out of the ground with His own hands, and then leaning in — close, the way you lean over a cradle — and breathing life into him. The man has done nothing yet. He has earned nothing, said nothing, believed nothing. And already he is being loved like that. What do you make of a love that is there before you could possibly deserve it? That is the love you were born into. It did not wait to see how you would turn out.

Here is another room. God is speaking to a small, weak, unimportant people, explaining why He chose them, and you can almost hear them bracing for the reason — surely it was something in us — and He tells them the truth instead:

"It was not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the LORD favored and chose you — for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples. Rather it is because of His love for you." — Deuteronomy 7:7–8 (NET)

He loved them because He loved them. There is no reason under it. They were not picked for being impressive. The love is its own reason. If you have ever lain awake wondering what God could possibly want with someone like you — there is your answer. He wants you. That is the whole of it. It was never about what you brought.

Here is a tender room. God is trying to make His people believe He will not forget them, and He reaches for the strongest love a human being knows:

"Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son she has borne? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." — Isaiah 49:15 (NET)

A nursing mother — that deep, helpless, bodily love that wakes her in the night before the baby even cries. That, God says, is the kind of love I have for you. And then He goes further than seems possible. Even a mother might forget. I will not. He reaches under the deepest love a person can have and sets His own love lower still, so it can hold up everything above it.

Now a room that may surprise you. The strongest, most stubborn love in the whole Bible — and listen to how a song teaches it:

"Give thanks to the LORD, for He is good, for His loyal love endures forever." — Psalm 136:1 (NET)

Every line of that psalm ends the same way. His loyal love endures forever. Twenty-six times. You might call it repetitive. It is not. The repeating is the point. Whatever happened in the line before — and the psalm walks straight through war and ruin and hard history — the love is still standing at the end of the line. This is the love that keeps its promises when the other one has broken every promise back. The love that will not let go when letting go would be understandable. You are standing on this love right now, today, whether you feel the ground under you or not. A man who once wept over a burned-down city wrote that the only reason we are not destroyed is that this love never gives out.

And now a room that is only two words wide.

"Jesus wept." — John 11:35 (NET)

His friend was dead. The man's sisters were broken with grief. And Jesus — who knew, mind you, that within the hour He would call that dead man out of the grave alive — stood there and wept anyway. Sit with that. He did not hover above their sorrow with the good news already in His pocket. He went down into it. He cried, because the people He loved were crying. That is what a true friend's love is. Not someone who fixes your grief from a safe distance, but someone who sits down in it with you. God is that kind of friend. He does not watch your sorrow from far off. He weeps.

And here is the last room, the one that holds up all the others:

"Love is patient, love is kind, it is not envious. Love does not brag, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-serving, it is not easily angered or resentful. It does not keep a record of wrongs. It rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things." — 1 Corinthians 13:4–7 (NET)

Notice — every word of that is something you do, not something you feel. Patient. Kind. Keeping no record. This is the love that chooses, and keeps choosing after the warm feeling has burned off. The love that holds steady toward someone who has not earned an ounce of it. This is the love that went to a cross for people who were not even sorry yet. It is the highest love there is. And it is the one God means to grow in you — not a feeling you wait around to arrive, but a steady thing you do, over and over, until one morning you look up and find it has quietly become who you are.

These are not different loves taking turns. They are the one love that God is, shown to you from different sides — the cradle and the breath, the love with no reason, the mother who will not forget, the loyal love that holds, the friend who weeps, the steady love that chooses. And every one of them, all at once, in a measure you cannot picture, is turned toward you right now.

What We Broke

The beginning of the Bible is a love story, and like a lot of love stories, there is a place in it that breaks your heart.

At the start, God walked with the man and the woman in the garden in the cool of the day. Stay on that phrase a moment. The cool of the day is not when you hold a meeting. It is the easy hour, the unhurried evening, when someone who loves you comes to be with you because there is nowhere He would rather be. And there was nothing between them.

"The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed." — Genesis 2:25 (NET)

To be naked and unashamed is to be wholly seen and wholly safe at once. To have nothing to hide and no reason to hide it. That is what the garden was. That is what love, before anything breaks it, makes possible — to be fully known and not have to cover a single thing.

Then came the reaching. You know the story. They took the one thing that was not theirs to take — reached to decide for themselves what was good and what was evil, instead of trusting the One who is good. And the very first thing that happened afterward was not a thunderclap and not a speech.

It was hiding.

"Then the eyes of both of them opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves." — Genesis 3:7 (NET)

They covered themselves. Then they hid among the trees. And God came walking in the garden in the cool of the day — still coming, do you see it, still looking for them — and He called out, Where are you? He knew where they were. He was not asking for their location. He was asking the question that has been hanging over the whole human race ever since. Where are you? What happened to us? Why are you hiding from Me?

The likeness did not die that day. You still carry it. But it stopped working the way it was made to. The mirror that was turned toward God, made to catch and throw back His love, spun around to face itself. And the worst of what was lost was not the garden, or the easy evenings. The worst of what was lost was the ability to love the way we were built to love — freely, without fear, without keeping the books.

That is why even our best love is such a tangle. We love when it pays. We love for a while and then tire. We hold back the part that costs too much. The likeness in us is strong enough that we still ache for love, and broken enough that we keep bending it out of true. We are mirrors that remember we were made to shine, and cannot quite manage it on our own anymore.

That is the trouble God set out to mend. And here is the surprise of the whole thing — He did not mend it by making love smaller, by lowering the bar to something we could clear. He mended it by coming down into the middle of the wreck, and teaching us love from the inside.

He Comes Down to Teach It

This is the heart of everything, so walk slowly here.

A book cannot teach you to love. I told you that on the first page and I will tell you again now, because it is the truest thing I know about what you are holding. Love is not a lesson you study until you have it. It is a fire that has to be lit from another fire. And there is only one fire old enough and large enough to light yours.

So God does not send you a book about love and walk away. He comes Himself.

Paul wrote a line that is easy to read past, and I do not want you to miss it:

"Now on the topic of brotherly love you have no need for anyone to write you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another." — 1 Thessalonians 4:9 (NET)

Taught by God. Not taught about love. Taught love — by the only Teacher who is, Himself, the thing being taught. You do not learn this the way you learn your sums, by studying until you understand. You learn it the way a cold child learns warmth: by being held against someone warm until the warmth gets inside you.

And here is how He does it. Paul says it plainly in another place: God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit whom He gave us. Read that again. Not a love about God. Not a love that resembles His. The love that God is, poured into you, taking up residence where you live. So that the next time you manage to love someone you did not think you could love — that is not you, scraping the bottom of your own thin supply. That is His love, the love that was poured in, finding its way back out. The Teacher does not stand at the front of the room. He moves in.

But long before He poured His Spirit into anyone, He was already teaching love the patient way — the way you teach a small child, by doing the thing in front of them, over and over, until they catch it.

He taught it the first time anyone ever failed Him. When the man and woman stood there in their fig leaves, ashamed, hiding — God made them real clothes out of skins and covered them with His own hands. Think about that. He did not wait for them to stop being ashamed before He would help. He covered them first. The very first thing He did after the very first thing we did wrong was cover our shame.

He taught it through a man named Hosea, and this lesson is a hard one. God told Hosea to marry a woman He already knew would be unfaithful — who would break his heart, again and again. Why would God ask such a thing of a man? Because He wanted Hosea to feel, in his own body, what it is to love someone who keeps walking away. He did not hand Hosea a lecture on faithful love. He handed him a breaking marriage, and let the heartbreak teach him what God's own heart had felt for years, loving a people who would not stay. That is sometimes how He teaches. Not with gentle words. With your own life.

He taught it through the Psalms — a hundred and fifty songs, holding every single thing a human heart can hold. Joy and fury. Thanksgiving and despair. There is one — Psalm 88 — that goes down into the dark and never turns back toward the light, that ends in the shadows, and He kept it in the book on purpose, to tell you He can hold even that. Why keep the whole range, the bright and the bitter both? Because you cannot understand what love that endures forever means until you have stood somewhere you desperately needed it to endure. You cannot know what comfort is until you have grieved. You cannot know what mercy is until you have needed it badly. The dark is not a detour around the lesson. The dark is part of the lesson.

And then He taught it on the last night, in a borrowed room. Jesus got up from supper, took off His outer robe, wrapped a towel around His waist like the lowest servant in the house, knelt down on the floor, and washed His friends' dirty feet. He washed the feet of the man who would sell Him before morning. He washed the feet of the man who would swear, three times, that he had never known Him. He knew exactly what they were going to do. He washed their feet anyway. If you ever want to know what love looks like, do not begin with a definition. Begin there. On the floor. With the towel. With the dust of a traitor's feet on His hands.

And one more thing about this Teacher, which will steady you for what is coming. The Scriptures say of Jesus that He learned obedience through what He suffered. Even Him. Even the Son learned the hard way, in a real human life, through real pain. So when the lessons get hard for you — and they will — remember that your Teacher is not asking you to go anywhere He has not gone first.

The Garden, and the Cup He Did Not Want

I want to take you to the hardest place now, because this is where love shows you what it is made of.

It is the same night. The towel is folded. The supper is over. Jesus knows — knows better than any person has ever known anything — exactly what the next hours hold. The betrayal. The whips. The nails. The slow suffocation in the open air. The hiding of His Father's face. He knows all of it, in full, in advance.

And He does not want it.

This is the thing I need you to see, because people skip past it and it is the whole heart of the matter. He goes out into the garden, and He falls on the ground, and He prays:

"My Father, if possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will." — Matthew 26:39 (NET)

Let this cup pass. He asked. He asked the Father, three times, to find another way. The dread was so heavy His sweat fell like blood. Do not let anyone tell you He marched to the cross unbothered, serene, untouched. He was a man on the ground in the dark, begging for the cup to be taken away, because He could see in full what it was going to cost Him.

And then — knowing all of it, wanting none of it — He says the words that hold the universe together: not what I will, but what You will.

That is what love looks like when it is sure of the Father. Not warmth that doesn't know the price. Warmth that knows the whole price, sees it clearly, feels the full horror of it — and trusts the Father anyway, and stays anyway, and goes anyway. The first man, in the first garden, reached for what God had told him to leave alone, and the world broke. This Man, in this garden, refused the thing every nerve in His body wanted, and the world began to be put back together. Not My will, but Yours.

Why? Why drink it? Here is the only answer the Bible gives, and it is enough: for the joy set before Him He endured the cross. The joy. What joy could possibly be on the far side of that? You. Us. The people He was buying back. He looked past the whole length of the suffering to the moment He would have us home, and He decided we were worth it. He drank the cup He had begged to have taken away, because the alternative was a world without you in it, and He would not have that.

Now you know something about the love of God you could not have known any gentler way. It is not a love that has never seen the dark. It is a love that has been all the way to the bottom of the dark, on purpose, for you — and came back.

The Cross, Where Every Love Meets

So He stood up off the ground, and He went.

I will not tidy up what happened, because it matters that you see it plainly. They arrested Him on lies. They beat Him. They mocked Him and stripped Him and drove iron through His hands and feet and hung Him in the air to die in front of a crowd. He hung there six hours. And near the end, out of the depths of it, He cried out:

"My God, My God, why have You abandoned Me?" — Matthew 27:46 (NET)

That cry is real. The forsakenness is real. Do not let anyone smooth it over. The God who is love went all the way down into the worst that being human can hold — even into the feeling of being abandoned by God — because that is exactly where the people He loved had been living since the garden. He did not call down comfort from a safe height. He came down to where we were, all the way to the floor of it, on purpose.

Stand at that cross and you can see, all at once, every love I showed you. The Father who would not spare His own Son — there is the love that was there before you deserved it, poured out now to the last drop. The loyal love that would not quit after a thousand years of our leaving — there it is, holding to the end. The friend who wept at the grave — there He is, dying for the friends. The deep, bodily ache of a love that feels the loss in its own body — there it is, on a hill outside the city. And the steady, choosing love that walked toward the nails wide awake — there it is, because that is simply what love does when love is endless and the beloved is lost.

This is what love costs when it is real. This was the last lesson, taught not in words but in blood, and in the long silence of the Saturday when it looked, to everyone watching, as though love had lost. He knew what He was asking of you when He said take up your cross and follow Me. He had already carried His.

When He Looks at You and Sees Himself

After a whole life of watching, John wrote one more line that I have to set in front of you. Read it slowly. There is more folded inside it than it first shows.

"No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us, and His love is perfected in us." — 1 John 4:12 (NET)

Two things happen at once, every time you love.

The first: you make the God no one can see visible. No one has ever laid eyes on God. He cannot be caught with the eyes in your head. But when you love someone at real cost — when you forgive the one who doesn't deserve it, when you stay where everything in you wants to leave — the people watching are seeing God, whether they would name Him or not. You become the one window the world gets, the place where the invisible love shows through. You are His likeness, made visible again.

The second: His love is perfected — brought all the way home, finished, arrived at last at what it was always reaching for. God's love did not stop at the cross. The cross threw the door open so His love could pour into you. And the love is not finished — has not done the whole of what it set out to do — until it runs through you and out into someone else who is thirsty for it. He made love to move. When it moves through you, it has finally done its work.

And when that happens — when His love runs through one of His children and out into the world — the Father looks, and He sees Himself.

This is the thing I woke up wondering about, that morning before the house was awake. This is what makes Him glad. Not a performance that scraped a passing grade. Not rules kept through gritted teeth. When a father watches his child and catches, in the child, his own habit of generosity, his own way of sitting with hurting people, his own refusal to give up on somebody — something rises up in that father that runs deeper than approval. It is recognition. There it is. That came from me. She has my heart in her. That is what God feels when He sees His love alive in you.

Let me tell you about something I have seen with my own eyes, because I think it is the plainest proof of everything in this book.

Every so often you meet a person, and there is something coming off of them. Not a trick of the light, not just a pleasant way about them — something deeper, a warmth you can feel in the room before they have said a word. You leave their company lighter than you came in. I have come to believe that what I am seeing in those people is the Spirit of God, alive in them and spilling over. They have stayed close to Him so long, let His love run through them for so many years, that it has begun to show on the outside. The old artists were not making things up when they painted a ring of gold light around the heads of the saints. An artist is someone who finds a way to show you what cannot be said in words — and they had seen this, and they were straining to put it on the wall. They were not decorating. They were testifying. The light is real.

And here is the strangest part. When you have His Spirit in you, even a little, you can recognize His Spirit in someone else. It is like a candle leaning toward a candle. The light in you knows the light in them. You do not reason your way to it. You feel it — there is the Lord, in that person — and something in you answers.

This is the love being perfected that John meant. It begins invisible, down where only God can see it. But give it years of running, and it works its way out until other people can see it without being told. That glow is not the person's own. It is borrowed light — the Lord shining through a window so clean you forget it is a window at all. That is what a fully alive image-bearer looks like. And that is what He is making of you, slowly, whether you can see it in yourself yet or not. You almost certainly cannot. The ones who carry the most of it are nearly always the last to know they carry any.

He is looking deeper than your hands, you understand. The LORD looks on the heart. The doing matters — we will come to that, love is never only a feeling — but He is not content with right actions coming out of a cold heart, and He is not fooled by them either. What He is after, He named long ago in a promise: I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take the heart of stone out of your body and give you a heart of flesh. He does not want you managing yourself into good behavior. He wants to change the heart, so the love comes out of you on its own, because by then it is simply who you are.

That is what He is hoping to see when He looks at you. Himself. His own love, alive in His child.

You Love Because He Loved You First

"We love because He loved us first." — 1 John 4:19 (NET)

Do not rush past the order of those words. The order is the whole thing. You do not love your way up to God and then collect His love as your wage. It runs the other direction entirely. He loves you first. You receive it. And then — to your own surprise — you find love for Him rising up in you, like an echo coming back off a far wall. It did not start with you. It started with Him, and now it is pouring back the way it came.

This is why the great command is not the crushing weight it first sounds like. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Heard cold, that sounds like an order to manufacture something you do not have. But the command rests on a gift already given. What He asks of you, He has already supplied. You do not wring the love out of yourself by trying harder. You receive His love, and the loving follows it out.

And now I have to give you both halves of loving Him back, because people are forever grabbing one and dropping the other.

The first half is what you do. John — who understood love as well as anyone who ever lived — wrote: let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. Love that is all talk is not love. It is a feeling with no hands. The love God is after has work in it. It washes feet. It covers shame. It shows up. It gives what it costs to give. A love that never does anything is not the real thing.

The second half is what is in your heart while you do it. He looks at the heart. He is not satisfied with the right thing done by someone who would rather be elsewhere, and He can tell the difference. What He loves to see is a heart that actually wants His way — like the old song that says I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart. Not a law beaten into you from outside. A desire grown up on the inside, where His Spirit has been at work.

Both together. That is the whole of it. The deed without the heart is religion going through the motions. The heart without the deed is a nice feeling that never helped a soul. But the two of them together, both welling up out of the love He poured in — that is the thing you were made to give Him.

And I promised you I would not hide the hard part, so here it is once more, plainly. This will cost you. Jesus said it without flinching: if anyone wants to follow Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me. This love does not put you first — that is nearly the whole definition of it. There will be days you do not feel like loving. People in front of you who have not earned a thing. Long seasons where you keep on loving and see nothing come back. He knows all of it. He is not surprised by it, and He is not absent in it. He is making something in you through the very cost. The Scriptures trace the road: suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope — and hope does not disappoint, because God's love has been poured out in our hearts. See where the love arrives in that line — at the end, past the suffering, past the endurance. You reach the deep love by going through the hard thing. Not around it. Through it. The same way He did, in His garden, with His cup.

What It Looks Like to Love Him Back

A love this large cannot just sit still inside you. It has to come out. And it turns out God has given us all kinds of ways to let it.

The very last song in the book of Psalms is not a quiet meditation. It is nearly a marching band:

"Praise Him with the blast of the horn; praise Him with the lyre and the harp. Praise Him with the tambourine and with dancing; praise Him with stringed instruments and with flutes. Praise Him with loud cymbals; praise Him with clanging cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!" — Psalm 150:3–6 (NET)

Everything that has breath. Horns and harps and drums, loud and glad, with the whole body, dancing. God designed all of this. He is the One who gave the temple its singers and its players. He is the One who gave the very recipe for the incense that rose before Him. He made the ways we bring our love back to Him — the music, the sweet smoke rising, the lifted voice, the moving feet — and He made them because He wanted to receive them. He cares how we come to Him, because He is the One who built the coming.

And He does not merely tolerate it. Once, when the temple singers and players all sounded together as one voice, the house of God filled with a cloud so thick the priests could not stand up to do their work — the glory of the Lord had come down into the room. The praise pleased Him so much that He came into the middle of it. That is the God you are singing to. He comes into the song.

Even your prayers take a shape when they reach Him. John, in his vision, saw the throne of God, and around it elders holding harps and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of God's people. Your prayers are the incense. They rise. They carry a fragrance. They are gathered into golden bowls and kept. You are not flinging words at a ceiling. You are sending up something He catches and treasures. And because of the cross, they rise to Him carried in the sweetness of what His Son did — you never come to Him empty, or alone.

And there is the woman with the jar. I love this one. She came to Jesus carrying a jar of pure perfume worth a whole year's wages, and she broke it open and poured every drop of it over Him. The people in the room called it a waste. He called it beautiful, and He said that as long as the good news is told anywhere in the world, what she did would be told too, in memory of her. Sit with that. She gave one jar. He gave her a place in the story forever. She held nothing back, and He answered by holding nothing back. That is not a trade. That is what an enormous love does when somebody finally gives it everything.

And there is a kind of praise that costs the most and means the most — the praise you lift when things are not going well. Anyone can praise on a good day; it costs nothing. But the praise you raise in grief, in sickness, in the long stretch where nothing changes and the prayers seem to come back unopened — the Scriptures call that a sacrifice of praise, and it is the strongest thing a human heart can offer. Because what it says is: I love You for who You are, not for what I am getting from You right now. That praise, lifted out of the dark, is the nearest you will come in this life to loving the Father the way His Son has loved Him forever — the way He loved Him from the floor of the garden, with the cup still full.

There was a country priest named George Herbert who died almost four hundred years ago, and he wrote a short poem that says all of this better than I can. It is a little conversation between Love — that is God — and a soul who feels too dirty to come in. Read it slowly:

Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning If I lacked anything.

A guest, I answered, worthy to be here: Love said, You shall be he. I, the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear, I cannot look on Thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord; but I have marred them; let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame? My dear, then I will serve. You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat. So I did sit and eat.

— George Herbert, "Love (III)" (1633)

The soul keeps insisting it is not good enough. Love keeps answering every excuse with kindness. And in the end the soul stops arguing and sits down and eats. That is what it looks like when you finally let yourself be loved — not earning your seat at the table, only letting the One who set it welcome you to it.

What Comes Back to You

There is a small verse hidden in one of the shorter books near the end of the Old Testament, and almost everyone walks straight past it. I do not want you to. I think it may be the most astonishing sentence about God in the whole Bible.

"The LORD your God is in your midst; He is a warrior who can deliver. He takes great delight in you; He renews you by His love; He shouts for joy over you." — Zephaniah 3:17 (NET)

He shouts for joy over you.

Stop, and let that be true for a moment. The One you have been straining to love — the God who is love, the God who knelt on the floor of the garden and drank the cup — is, right now, singing over you. You lift your small voice to Him, and He answers by covering you in a louder song of His own. You cannot out-give this God. Whatever you bring Him, He sends back more. And not as a bargain — not so much praise traded for so much blessing. It comes back larger simply because of who He is. A love that endless cannot take the love you offer and answer with anything less than all of itself.

Jesus put a picture to it: Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure — pressed down, shaken together, running over — will be poured into your lap. Running over. Your two hands cannot hold what comes back. Not because you earned a bigger share. Because the One pouring it can no more hold His love back than the sun can hold back its light.

You remember the story Jesus told about the boy who took his inheritance, threw it all away, and came home broke and ashamed? The father in that story does not wait at the door with his arms folded. He sees the boy while he is still far off down the road — which tells you the father had been watching that road, every day. And he runs. An old man, gathering up his robe, running down the road to a son who came home with nothing. He throws a robe over the boy's shoulders and a ring on his hand and kills the best calf in the yard and throws a feast. The son came back empty. The father gave back everything, and more. That party was never measured to match what the son deserved. It poured out to match what the father felt.

And under all of it runs the simplest, strongest logic in the whole Bible: He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all — how will He not also, along with Him, freely give us everything? He already gave the costliest thing there is. Why would He turn stingy now? Once you have received the cross, you never have to wonder again whether God is willing to be generous with you.

That is who you are dealing with when you love Him. A Father who runs. A God who sings over you. A love so far past your imagining that when you hand Him what you have — all of it, like the woman with her jar — what comes back is more than your arms can hold, and there is still more behind it.

Stay Where the Love Is

On that last night, walking from the supper toward the garden, Jesus said this to His friends:

"Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; remain in My love." — John 15:9 (NET)

Hear what He does not say. He does not say go and produce love. He does not say work up enough love to satisfy Me. He says remain. Stay. Do not wander off from the place where the love is already flowing.

He had just handed them a picture to make it plain. I am the vine, He said, you are the branches. A branch does not strain and sweat to make grapes. A branch makes grapes by one thing only — by staying joined to the vine, by letting the life of the vine rise up into it. Cut the branch off and it cannot make a single thing, no matter how hard it tries. But leave it joined to the vine, and the fruit simply comes. Love is exactly like that. You do not manufacture love by force of will and then present it to God. You stay joined to the One who is love, and love rises through you the way sap rises through a branch — because you are connected, not because you are straining.

But I promised you honesty all the way to the end, so I will not hide this either: staying joined is not always warm and easy. Jesus said, the same night, that the gardener prunes the branches that are bearing fruit — cuts them back — so that they will bear more. Read that carefully. The pruning is for the good branches, the ones already growing. The knife is not punishment. It is care. He cuts back what is already growing well so it can grow better still. And it hurts. Both are true at once. The cutting hurts, and the cutting is love.

So when you hit the dry seasons — the prayers that seem to go nowhere, the love that costs more than it returns, the grief so heavy that your praise comes out as barely a whisper — do not read those as proof the connection has failed. More often they are the sign that the One who loves you most is doing His most careful work on you. The branch cannot see next season's grapes. The gardener can. He knows exactly what He is growing in you, and He is not careless with the knife.

There was a man named Enoch, far back near the beginning, and the whole of his life fits in one short sentence: Enoch walked with God; then he was not, because God took him away. That is the entire biography. Not Enoch achieved great things. Not Enoch impressed God. He walked with God — beside Him, day after day, year after year, through whatever the years held, at God's pace and in God's direction — until one day the walking and the going home were the same thing. That is the life that pleases God. Not a performance. A walk, taken at His side, that simply keeps going.

A woman named Julian, who lived six hundred years ago and spent decades turning over what God had shown her of His love, came back again and again to the same answer, no matter which way she approached it. Let me give her the next-to-last word:

Would you know your Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well: love was His meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did He show you? Love. Why did He show it? For love. Hold yourself in that love and you will know and understand more of the same — but you will never know or understand anything else from it, forever.

Love was His meaning. Whatever you are walking through right now — whatever it is costing you, whatever season you are in — that is the thing at the center, holding all the rest of it together.

So let me bring it home, the way I would say it to you if we were sitting at one table, with the evening coming on.

The One who is love made you to look like Him. He came down and taught you how to love by loving you in ways that cost Him everything, all the way down to a cross, all the way through a cup He begged to be spared and drank anyway, for the joy of having you home. When you love, He looks at you and sees Himself, and it makes Him glad down to the depths. He shouts for joy over you. And all He asks is that you stay close — stay where the love is flowing — and let Him keep growing it in you.

Knowing God starts with knowing He is love.

Knowing He is love means loving Him back.

Loving Him back means pleasing Him — both in what your hands do and in what your heart wants while they do it, willing to be held in His hands, and to walk through your whole life right beside Him.

That is all of it. And it is enough to fill a lifetime, with plenty left over.

A Closing Word — How This Came to Be Written

I want to tell you the truth about how this book got made, because it turned out to be the proof of the one thing it most wants you to believe.

I told you at the start that a book cannot teach you to love — that only God can, by His own love poured in from the inside. I believed that when I wrote it. But I need you to know it did not stay a thing I merely believed. It became a thing that happened to me, while I was making this very book.

The first three times I wrote it, it was cold. I knew it was cold. I would read it back and it was correct — the theology in order, the verses in place, the argument holding — and it was dead on the page. It explained love the way you would explain a machine. And a book that explains love and does not carry it has already failed the only test that matters. So I tore it down and started over. And then again. I went looking for a warmer voice, and I found it where it has always been — in John, the one who wrote about love better than anyone, who never argues and only ever leans in close and says the enormous things again and again. I let his voice in. And the book finally became what you are holding. Not a manual. Something nearer to a man talking to you across a table.

And then, this week, while I was doing something as ordinary as cutting my grass — not praying, not studying, just pushing a mower back and forth across a yard — a voice that was not my own inner voice said, as clear as anything I have ever heard: you are finally starting to get it.

I have to tell you why that undid me. It called me by my full name — the long form, the one my own thoughts never use. In my own head I go by the short name, the way you do with yourself. My inner voice has never once addressed me by the long name. So this was not me, encouraging myself. It came from outside the room of my own mind, in a name I do not call myself, at the exact moment I had stopped trying to teach love and started only pointing at the One who teaches it. And the name He used — I will only say that it is a name that means one who is like God, and that this whole book is about Him looking at His children and seeing Himself in them. I did not miss what He did there. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

This was the second time in my life that words came to me like that. The first was years ago, and it turned me down a different street than the one I meant to walk, and what He showed me on that street became something real and good that I have written about elsewhere. I will not retell it here; it has its own home. I only want you to know that this was not a one-time trick of a tired mind. It has happened before, and it bore fruit before, and I know the difference between my own thoughts and the ones that arrive from somewhere else.

I tell you this not so you will think more of me. If anything, think less — I am a slow student who needed the lesson cut down to four drafts and then spoken aloud to me over a lawnmower, and who is still, by his own honest reckoning, not a naturally kind man. I tell you because it is the plainest evidence I have that everything in this book is true. I did not teach myself to write about love. I could not. He taught me, from the inside, in the middle of the work — and He let me feel it happen, just the once, so that I would know the thing I was claiming on the page was real.

And hear the word He actually used. Not you have arrived. Not now you understand. He said you are finally starting to get it. That is a word to a man still on the road, not a man at the end of it. If you are still on the road too — still slow, still falling short, still going after a love that does not come naturally — then that word is as much for you as it was for me. We are starting to get it. That is all any of us are doing. And it is enough, because the One teaching us is not in a hurry, and He is not going to stop.

The book pointed. He did the teaching. That is exactly what I told you it would be on the first page. Now I have told you how I came to know it for certain.

To Him be all of it.

A Word About Where This Came From

The Scriptures. Every verse here comes from the NET Bible. Where I have quoted Scripture, I have set it apart from my own words on purpose, so that you always know which is which — His word carries a weight mine never will. NET Bible® copyright ©1996–2017 by Biblical Studies Press, L.L.C. Used throughout with gratitude.

The old voices. I am not the first to walk around inside this truth, and I leaned on some who went before me. Augustine, who ran from God for years before he could write down why our hearts stay restless. Bernard of Clairvaux, who nine hundred years ago wrote about loving God, and about the Spirit as the love passing between the Father and the Son. Julian of Norwich, whose long meditation on the love of God I quoted near the end. George Herbert, the country priest whose poem "Love" sits whole in the tenth section, every word of it his. All of these have been in the public hands for centuries, and I am grateful to stand in their company.

And the One who actually does the teaching. I said it at the start and I will say it once more here, because it is the truest thing in the book: I cannot teach you to love, and neither can these pages. Only God can, by His own love poured into you by His Spirit, from the inside. If anything here helped, it was only because He was already at work in you, and these words happened to be near. To Him be all of it.

Michlaude Discipleship Project All of it is free. None of it is mine to sell. For the glory of God alone.