Introduction

There is much talk of love today, and probably that has always been. Every person on earth knows love, or knows what love should be - or thinks he does! And every person has his or her view of who or what God should be, if in fact He is not that. That is why to say 'God is love!' (1John 4:7-8, 16) is perhaps one of the hardest things to say in our world. Every person thinks he knows, and maybe there is no real knowledge in the confident and often strident voices.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says, 'Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up (1Cor 8:1).' Paul does not mean 'build up' in the sense some use it today, i.e. of giving a person self-confidence or making him feel good about himself. To be built up, for Paul, is to be brought to maturity, attaining to the whole measure of the fulness of Christ in connection with the whole body of Christ (Eph. 4:11-13.) That is, love works in us to bring us to the goal that God the Father has intended for us. What that goal is we will consider in a moment, but first we will consider what this purposeful nature of love excludes.

The love of God is always purposeful and never wasted or wasteful. It is certainly extravagant, even prodigal, but never profligate. The Jerusalem Bible at some place (in Isaiah I think!) speaks of God who is 'prodigious in prodigal prodigies!' Paul tells us in Romans 8:28, '...in everything God works for good with those who love Him, who are called according to His purpose.' The ideas of 'random acts of kindness' and of 'loving wastefully' are ideas that are entirely existential in nature, and have little to do with the God who has revealed Himself to us as the God of love. These ideas presume no ultimate goal for love or for the world, merely the expression of some feeling, emotion or action in the present.