When God Came Near – Advent 2025 | Week 4
Our culture is obsessed with love. Across generations and genres, our songs return to the same theme again and again. Love feels essential—more than preference, more than emotion. When it’s missing, something fundamental feels hollow. That persistent longing raises an important question: Why does love matter so much to us?
At first glance, the answer seems obvious. Love is universal, emotional, and deeply relational. Yet history tells a more complicated story. What we believe about love today is not what most cultures have always believed. In the ancient Greco-Roman world, love was conditional and hierarchical. It flowed upward toward what was beautiful, strong, honorable, or worthy. Compassion for the weak was not a virtue; it was often viewed as a threat to social order.
This helps explain why the Christian vision of love was so disruptive. As theologians and historians have shown, Greek love (eros) sought value, while Christian love (agape) created value. The ancient world believed love was drawn to what deserved it. Christianity proclaimed that love moves toward what is broken. This was not moral evolution—it was moral revolution.
That revolution centered on the person of Jesus. His teaching—love your enemies, bless those who curse you, care for the least—had no real precedent at a societal level. And His followers lived it out through sacrificial care for the sick, the poor, the abandoned, and the overlooked. Even critics of Christianity admitted that this strange community of believers loved not only their own, but everyone else as well.
But the heart of Christian love is not simply ethical behavior. It is theological reality.
In 1 John 4, the apostle locates love’s origin, and in doing so reshapes how we understand it entirely. “Love is from God,” John writes. Love does not begin in the human heart, love entered the human story. It does not originate in our effort, sincerity, or moral resolve. Love comes from God Himself.
John presses this even further by defining love not as a feeling or an ideal, but as an action in history. “God’s love was revealed among us in this way,” he says—not by describing emotion, but by pointing to a sending. God sent His Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
Love, in the Christian story, is defined by how far God was willing to come and what He was willing to give.
This is the radical claim at the center of Advent. Love consists not in our pursuit of God, but in God’s pursuit of us. God did not come because humanity was impressive, faithful, or ready. He came first. He loved first. The manger is already pointing toward the cross—because Christmas is not sentimental, it is sacrificial.
John goes on to say that God’s love does not merely arrive; it abides. God remains with those who confess Jesus as the Son of God. His love is not temporary or transactional. It does not visit and move on. God makes His home with us.
This distinction matters deeply. Many people know about God’s love. Fewer have come to know it in a way that reshapes how they live and believe. To know intellectually is one thing; to know in a way that produces trust, rest, and transformation is another.
Advent invites us into that deeper knowing. It is a season of slowing down, resisting the urge to strive, and opening our lives to receive what God has already given. Love is not something we generate for God. It is something we receive from Him—and then, over time, live out toward others.
So when our culture keeps asking, “What’s love got to do with it?” the Christian story answers with clarity and conviction.
Absolutely everything.
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