I Am Head over Heels in Love with God…Does That Make Me Sound Nuts?

1 Peter 1:22

Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.

Thus is the command of Peter.  All these things about Jesus and God and our interactions, new lives, obedience to, purification into, it is all about truly loving one another.  Is that not at the heart of our condition as human beings, the search for love? 

Yes, I am going to meddle in the realm of ‘romantic’ love with the overtures of ‘religious’ love.  We love God and our neighbors as Jesus commanded us in the summation of the law.  But isn’t that just one of those religious generalities?  A grand abstract command that we can give lip service to, but can it really exist in the real world? 

Can the grand and total love commanded by God really find an equivalent in the love between two people? 

Oh my, where do I start?

If romantic love, the starry eyed desire that two people have for each other at the beginning of a relationship, or even mutual love, the deeper, more satisfying, longer lasting love that develops as people seriously work to intertwine their lives for the long term, if that love were truly the expression of the church’s desire to fulfill the law, loving God and loving our neighbor, how different would the world be?

Would anybody go hungry?  Would anybody be poor?  Would anybody be at war?  But how can we even make that consideration?  In our culture, such love gets so wrapped up in issues of sexuality that to apply it to our relationship with Jesus, for example, would really make things weird.

But Peter is seeking to get his readers to understand the intensity of romantic love exists in a longer, more intense, less sexual form.  The grand and total love commanded by God is not only the equivalent of the love between two people, but it can surpass that love. 

But it requires much, our obedience to God, the purifying of our souls, the embracing of the sacrifice that Jesus has made for us.

The most amazing romantic lovers, the most excellent marriages, the most impressive partnerships between people in love with one another, the power of that love is not the engine of their success.  It is when their love, their human love, begins to take on the aspects of the love God has for us, the love we can have for God in return, that it becomes transcendent.