God Is Love

7/23/14              Saul                        14

I reached out to a teenager named Saul with the gospel at a park, who told me he had just completed his catechism classes and was confirmed in his Catholic Church.  Still, it all seemed new to him, from an explanation of our God-given conscience in knowing good from evil, to our sin in breaking God’s laws and commandments, to our need for forgiveness in restoring us to a right relationship with God, to the salvation found in Jesus Christ.  As a high school teacher, I can tell when my students “understand but don’t get it”.  What I mean by this is that it is possible to understand individual ideas without being able to see how they relate to each other to form a larger concept.  Saul understood the parts of the gospel, but he didn’t “get it”. So I gave him some Gospel tracts to read in the hopes that he would be able to gradually come to a better understanding, but as I turned to leave he said “I just have a question.  In my catechism class they said something about God is love.  What does that mean?”  So what does it mean?  A lot of people take it to mean that God loves us no matter what and without consequence for our sins, or that being a Christian just means to act loving in all that you do.  But I pointed Saul to the cross, the greatest demonstration of love that has ever occurred – “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”   Romans 5:8