The best news ever at Christmas time is that God is love. At a gingerbread event this December I heard a story that really gets to the heart of Godlike love. In the bushfires a firefighter approached a bird that had been burnt, totally charred. Feeling sad, the firefighter tried to move it away with a stick and was shocked to see little alive chicks pop out from under it's wing. The firefighter stood there a moment. The mother bird had sacrificed herself to keep her babies alive. She let herself burn up to protect them. That’s love. And that's what Jesus does for us on the cross. He goes there to protect us, covering us from the wrath that we couldn’t endure. Just like that mother bird in the bushfire. Because through and through everything God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit does is motivated by love.

This month we’ve got an amazingly rich (and thick!) book to take a look at. My prayer is that this book helps you go deeper into your faith this Christmas and appreciate why the Bible “remains the inexhaustible source and wellspring of our spiritual life.” (Bray p. 12)

I like to think of this book as a multi-layered cake. There’s much to be savoured in individual chapters - so don’t worry about reading it in order. You can dip in and out of subjects that take your interest. Bray has a wonderful conversational style as he takes the reader across mountain peaks of the Christian faith. The view from the top is of an incredibly unified Bible and a truly glorious God.

Bray packages his whole book around the simple truth that God in his essence is love:

7 Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. 8 But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. (1 John 4:7-10 NLT)

This is not the definition of love you’ll see if you open up a dictionary. Our world is sold on a definition of love that’s all about feelings. However the Bible’s definition of love is first and foremost about action. God made us in love. He made us to love one another and care for the creation and to choose to love Him. We mess up pretty quickly and there are consequences, but God carries on loving. He makes promises (covenants), in love. The rainbow in the sky (to Noah), the stars (for Abraham to remind him how numerous his offspring will be), the stone tablets (to Moses, with a promise of blessing if they obey them and curse if they don’t) the throne (to David). I hope you can see these love actions in all their multicoloured glory, throbbing with love that reaches its peak on the cross, where God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. That’s the height of love. What Jesus did (suffering for us) protecting us - like a mother chick in a bushfire - from the wrath of God that we so justly deserve for having rejected and scorned our Father’s love. He did that for us so that we could know real love. Out of the love that permeates every part of God’s being he did not spare even his own son. The cross is the ultimate evidence for the statement that God is love.

This summary of the gospel tells us a lot about where Bray is headed with his book. Every chapter and every strand of thought, to quote C .S Lewis, “runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.” Bray’s 768 pages are in a nutshell different ways of viewing this profound truth about our God and his gospel.

Tim Keller writes, “Actions of love lead to feelings of love. Not the other way around.” We won’t ever feel our way to loving God on our own. He had to reach out in love to us first. When you look at the baby in the manger this Christmas and fast-forward to the cross (for that is the reason he came), and see Christ suffering there for you, dying the death you deserve, how will you respond?

I hope these posts help intensify for you the joy believers have at this time of year as we look back to the moment of Christ’s birth, his life, death and resurrection and forward to when he will come again. In the next post we’ll get into the nitty gritty of some of the Bible doctrines Bray explores and start to see how question-answering, faith-building and truly exciting digging into Christian doctrine really is.

Meet our contributor

Katie loves books, baking and beaches and finds the Christmas season a great time to get into all three! She leads a Bible Study at her local Anglican church in Leichhardt. She teaches the Bible at two local High schools and enjoys hearing what teenagers think about Jesus. She is studying at Moore College.

God is Love by Gerald Bray