God Loves People. We should too. - New Evangelizers

I’ve written before about how the love of people and the love of God are closely related, and so by loving people, we are loving God. But there’s another, maybe simpler reason to love people: God loves them, and he wants us to love them too.

Too often when we talk about God’s love, we are thinking about God’s love for us. Yes, God loves us. But he does not love only us. He loves other people too. In fact, God loved the whole world so much that he gave his only begotten son to save it [John 3:16]. That includes us, yes, and a lot of other people besides.

But only good people, right? Surely God doesn’t love bad people? Actually, God does love bad people, and yes, we need to love them too. Jesus said “For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” [Matthew 9:13] If we think carefully about this, that’s a good thing, because even if we don’t consider ourselves to be bad people, we are imperfect, which makes us sinners too. It is good for us that Jesus has come to call sinners, because that includes us. But everyone is a sinner: all have sinned and fallen short of God’s glory [Romans 3:23]. There’s no distinction between “good” people and “bad” people here, none of us our really “good” by God’s standards. Jesus loves us anyway, so much so that he gave himself up for us [Ephesians 5:2].

What about our enemies? Can’t we just love God, who is good to us, and hate our enemies, who are not good to us? No, Jesus tells us outright to love our enemies [Luke 6:27]. The reason is straightforward. Because God loves everyone, he loves our enemies too. If we love God, we need to love those who God loves. Since that includes our enemies, we need to love them, too. That means we need to love one another, even those we dislike, and those who dislike us.

The Church teaches that we should love one another, constantly and consistently. St. John puts it this way: since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another [1 John 4:11]. St. John goes on to say that if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us [1 John 4:12]. St Peter tells us to love one another deeply from the heart [1 Peter 1:22]. He tells us to maintain “constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins” [1 Peter 4:8]. St Paul says that we “have been taught by God to love one another” [1 Thessalonians 4;9] and he advises us to “owe no one anything, except to love one another [Romans 13:8]. Jesus himself tells us to love one another as he has loved us [John 15:12]. There is no ambiguity here. We need to love people, and we can’t make exceptions for people we don’t like. God loves everyone, those people included. If we love God, we need to also love those he loves. Because God loves people, we should too.

Agapios Theophilus

Agapios Theophilus is the "nom de plume" of a catholic layman who has loved Jesus from when, as a young boy in the 1970s, he first learned about him. His First Communion, at the age of seven, was the happiest day of his life, and he celebrates its anniversary each year. He lives in a large city with his beloved wife and children. He has no formal qualifications whatsoever to write about Jesus: he writes only because he has been given the great gift of knowing and loving him, and he would like others to come to know and love him too. See Agapios' posts at https://sites.google.com/view/agapios-theophilus and follow Agapios on X (twitter) at http://www.x.com/a9apios