Valentine’s Day and God’s Love
Today is Valentine’s Day. If you are married or in a dating relationship, chances are you have already bought your sweetheart some chocolate candy or flowers. You may even have a romantic dinner planned this evening at your favorite restaurant. Valentine’s Day is a holiday about love, based on the legend of a priest named Valentine, who continued to perform wedding ceremonies for couples even though the emperor had banned marriage. Valentine, the priest, believed the love between a man and a woman was God-given and that marriage was a sacred right. His conviction landed him in prison and cost him his life. Legend has it that before his execution, the priest sent a letter to the jailer’s daughter, who he had grown fond of, and signed it, “Love from your Valentine.” The first “Valentine” as we know it.
I have had a couple of opportunities to speak about God’s love in this month that contains Valentine’s Day, and as I have prepared for these engagements, I was struck by the powerful language the Bible uses to describe it. Romans 5:8 tells us that “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Meaning the crucifixion is the way God has put his love for us into action. The cross, of course, accomplished the substitutionary atonement, forgiveness of all sin, past, present, and future. The death of Jesus has assured us that when we die as believers, we really don’t, that instead we go on to be with Christ forever. Yet, Paul gives us another way of viewing the events of Good Friday, as if all of this was not enough. They were a demonstration of God’s love for us, for sinners who do not deserve it. That means you. That means me. “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom.3:23).
Paul’s prayer in Ephesians is that we would be “rooted and established” in this love that Jesus has demonstrated to us (Eph. 3:17). He longs for us to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Eph. 3:18-19). The language here is powerful. The implication is that God’s love for us is so great that it cannot be measured by scientific means. It surpasses human understanding and knowledge. Do you need to be reminded of this today? As the enemy whispers lies about your worth before God, do you need to remember that God’s love for you in Christ is so immense that every language that has ever existed fails to adequately describe it?
It goes even further. It gets even deeper, as God’s love, when responded to through repentance and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, becomes something we can never be separated from as believers. Hence, my favorite two verses in the entire Bible, Romans 8:38-39: “38 For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul runs the gamut of possibilities here. The conclusion? Nothing we go through or suffer as believers, no mistake we make can ever come close to separating us from God’s love for us in Jesus. Your bad day is not as bad as you might think.
I could go on and on about God’s love, I really could. However, I want to close by reminding us of the message we have been commissioned to share with those who do not yet know anything about Jesus. “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). People who understand very little about Jesus, people who are blinded by sinful choices need to know how much they are loved by the God of this universe. They need to see this love in our lives and hear about it from our lips. Our kindness displayed through love can be the cause of their repentance and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ (Rom.2:4). Which can lead to radical life transformation, like the woman at the well in John chapter 4. She converted an entire village to Christ as a result. After drinking of Jesus’ love, she was never the same. Who might you need to share God’s love with on this Valentine’s Day?
