"God is love"...he's the embodiment, the power, the fullness, the meaning of love. God is love so, love is God. That's crazy and amazing and confusing to me all at the same time. Does this mean Satan is the absence of love? That, where there is love there is God and where there is not love there is Satan. I'm mulling over this a lot today. Matt and I recently finished Dietrich Bonhoeffer's biography, and it stirred up a lot of things in me. Before we started the book I knew how Bonhoeffer's life had ended, that he was hanged and burned in a concentration camp for his attempts to stop Hitlers reign. He was an affluent German preacher who died a martyr. He died because of love. His life looked much like Christ's. He traveled preaching the gospel, never married, had many men he discipled, loved the dirty and marginalized, and gave his life so that others could live. I want to be love like this. God, help Matt and I to have so much of you that we are able to truly love this hurting, lost world.
“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”