Greater Love: A Devotional Journey through 1 John (Stanley D. Gale, Waxed Tablet Publications, 2025) is a devotional that immerses us in John’s rich teaching and exhorts us in a more intimate walk with our God.
“By this we know love…” (1 John 3:16)
Quick! Name your favorite Christian book about love. How about any book that develops the teachings on love found throughout the Bible? Still at a loss? Perhaps you can think of a book that contains a chapter about love but not one that majors on it.
The dearth of books that explore the Bible’s teaching on love is all the more surprising when we consider how prominent and pervasive love is throughout Scripture.
I read a mystery recently where a wife was asked if she loved her husband. She insisted that she did but then questioned how anyone can know what love is. When people talk with one another about love, are they really talking about the same thing? Through her character in the novel, the author was expressing the challenges of getting a handle on something so common to human expression.
Love is a concept that reaches across Christian denominations, across world religions, even enfolding atheism and secularism. Loving our neighbor seems to be a universal principle, but what does that mean and how is it exhibited?
How does love relate to truth, tolerance, and teachability? For that matter, can love be taught? Can it be commanded? Does love have a backbone or does it more resemble some squishy invertebrate that morphs and adapts to personal whim? How can Jesus declare that love for God and neighbor summarize the Law? Aren’t love and law strange bedfellows?
Some will say that we can limit ourselves to the New Testament in order to study love, but that is surely in error. There are many places in the Old Testament that we can mine rich teaching on love, as it relates to God and to man. The very existence of the Old Testament is a testimony to God’s love for us and the demands of the Law, which are expressed as an exhibition of love.
Understanding biblical love is particularly important in our day because so much of what God abhors is allowed and even advocated under the heading of loving our neighbor. The thinking is that if we love someone we will be supportive of whatever. Love for neighbor becomes the justification for whatever social cause we embrace. But is that love? More importantly, is that God’s idea of love as expressed in the Bible?
A study of love gets even more complicated when we consider God’s love. What does it mean that God is love, and how does that relate to His holiness, justice, and wrath? How does love relate to the cross?
Books on love should be numerous, but they are not. Perhaps because it is too daunting a task, like trying to capture the wind in your hand or trying to catalog the stars. After all, Paul enjoins the Ephesian church to strive to know the love of God that surpasses knowledge, suggesting to us that an exhaustive taxonomy of love is ultimately impossible, complicated as it is by both extent and experience.
Perhaps the greatest distillation of the breadth of the Bible’s teaching on love is found in the writings of John, particularly in his first epistle. There we find God’s love for sinners and teaching on saved sinners’ love for God. Most helpfully, there we find Jesus, love’s illustration.
John does not allow us to be theoretical about love, nor does he allow us to define it as suits our own taste or to pursue our own ends. In his epistle, we are all brought to the same page about love in relationship to Him who is love. He arouses us to behold the love of God that is greater than we could ever grasp and to spur us on in greater love for God and others.
How would you explain love?
Greater Love: A Devotional Journey through 1 John (Stanley D. Gale, Waxed Tablet Publications, 2025) is a devotional that immerses us in John’s rich teaching and exhorts us in a more intimate walk with our God.
If you have found this meditation helpful, take a moment and give thanks to God. Then share what you learned with a friend. This is how the grace of God spreads (2 Cor. 4.15).
Except as indicated, all Scriptures are taken from the New King James Version. © Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
