On God's Love -- A Quote from George F. Thomas

George F. Thomas says, concerning the point of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son,

[...] The older brother represents the principle of merit and justice and quite properly complains that his younger brother’s reckless conduct has not deserved the love shown him by his father. [Citation omitted] Thus, God’s love is not measured out according to the value of the person loved, as human love is; rather, God is the Creator and His love is creative of worth. Even the sinner has some worth as a creature made in the image of God; and God’s love is “creative,” not in the sense that it gives value to a being that is wholly without value, but that it brings to fulfillment possibilities of value that were present but frustrated.

            Though God’s love is given us irrespective of our actual worth, it is effective in our lives only when we respond to it in the right way. For example, Jesus makes it clear that the forgiveness of our sins is conditional upon our willingness to forgive others. Moreover, we are commanded in the Gospels to love our neighbor and are told in the First Epistle of John that the test of our love of God is our love of our neighbor. In other words, God’s love is given to us whether we deserve it or not; but it is given with the purpose of awakening in us the desire and capacity to love Him and our neighbor. Hence, we must regard ourselves not as passive recipients of God’s love but as active and responsible beings called by God to cooperate with Him in the achievement of His purpose of love in our own lives and in the lives of others.

            Thus, God does not love us from the need of anything we can give Him in return; but He loves us with the purpose that we should return His love and thus enter into communion with Him by giving ourselves to Him. His agape-love moves downward to us, but it seeks to start in us a reciprocal movement upwards towards Him. Similarly, we are to love our neighbor without regard to his worth or his return of our love; but we are to strive through our love to awaken in him the capacity to give as well as receive love and thus to help him realize his potential worth. The result may be that our giving to him will be met by his giving to us, and a fellowship of mutual giving and receiving will be established between us.

--George F. Thomas, pp. 51-2 of Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, Charles Scribner’s Sons New York, 1955.

"...the greatest of these is love"...

... so said Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 (verse13); elevating love above faith and hope. A similar thought was expressed by Henry Drummond in the following passage of his essay "Love, the Greatest Thing In the World", from his book, The Greatest Thing In the World And Other Addresses:

In the Book of Matthew, where the Judgment Day is depicted for us in the imagery of One seated upon a throne and dividing the sheep from the goats, the test of a man then is not, "How have I believed?" but "How have I loved?" The test of religion, the final test of religion, is not religiousness, but Love. I say the final test of religion at that great Day is not religiousness, but Love; not what I have done, not what I have believed, not what I have achieved, but how I have discharged the common charities of life. Sins of commission in that awful indictment are not even referred to. By what we have not done, by sins of omission, we are judged. It could not be otherwise. For the withholding of love is the negation of the spirit of Christ, the proof that we never knew Him, that for us He lived in vain. It means that He suggested nothing in all our thoughts, that He inspired nothing in all our lives, that we were not once near enough to Him, to be seized with the spell of His compassion for the world. It means that—

"I lived for myself, I thought for myself, For myself, and none beside— Just as if Jesus had never lived, As if He had never died."

You can find the book online here. For Christians, I think this is a good reminder that loving one another is what really matters; as opposed, say, to disputes about fine points of doctrine. And whether Christian or not, I think you can be inspired by the idea that the most important thing in life is love. Thanks to Robin Parry for quoting from this passage in his post What is "a good Christian"? over at Theological Scribbles.