God commands me to love others. However, He does not mean I should love them naturally, but redemptively. Redemptive love is the way God loves us, expressed convincingly in the life of Hosea, the prophet. His wife left him and went to live with another man, and Hosea had the humiliating experience of having to buy her back from her adultery (Hosea 3:1–3). Think of buying back what is already yours! Yet that is what God did for us.
Redemptive love knows no shame; it is concerned with the loved one, not its own feelings. Jesus did not cry out in self-pity, Poor Me, when He was hanging on the cross. Hosea did not stint when he doled out the shekels for his wife. He took her sin and disgrace as his own and for her sake he paid her debts willingly and brought her safely back home.
Redemptive love binds and makes permanent. Gomer never again left her husband. How could she, after love like that? I am a weak brother indeed if after looking at Calvary and being brought home to God’s house, I still steal away and consort with the world. Redemptive love is the most powerful binding force in the world.
I cannot copy God’s redemptive love, no matter how hard I try. I cannot determine to love others. Even loving my wife, Paul says, must be as Christ … loved the church (Ephesians 5:25). The moment I fall back to the natural, even in natural relationships, I begin to run out of my supply. My only hope is to receive and express the redemptive love of God. That love is spread abroad in my heart by the Holy Spirit, and even the most natural of my relationships must come under that spiritual, redemptive love. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. … We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:11, 19).
And we have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16).
Daily with the King 