If you’re old enough to actually recall having heard the Beatles on the radio, you likely remember their hit, “All You Need Is Love." It was a sensation as a media first when they played their song live on TV in 1967. Their broadcast set records because of its first use of television satellites, garnering over 400 million viewers across five continents.

Interestingly, a Christian thinker noted not long after the release of this mega-hit that “The Beatles sang, All You Need Is Love, and then they broke up…”

What they got right was what they sang. Only Jesus has gotten it right in the execution.

Love is our highest purpose — it’s what God made us for. Out of His love, Father to Son to Holy Spirit, He designed us to live in His likeness. And one of the most foundational and profound aspects of the Bible’s revelation of God as Trinity — the LORD, the God of all existence, as simultaneously Father, Son and Holy Spirit — is that this means that love is eternal. There has never been a time when there was not love if God, from everlasting to everlasting, has been Father to Son to Holy Spirit. Therefore, from our very design in His image, God gave us being in His love and for His love.

The loss of love is everyone’s greatest dread or tragedy. If the immeasurable array of pains and hardships can be mapped (and they can’t be), what they share in common is their tragic power to break up loving relationships. Hurt people can be pitted against one another, exploited people can be separated from one another, and those who die are removed permanently, at least from this realm. It’s as if the primary layer of pain and suffering is not its hardest part; it’s the outworking of suffering where its more devastating impact is felt in how it can destroy love.

Then, in the face of all this loss and grief, God has done His most amazing work of love. At our very worst, the Father sent His Son, Jesus, to rescue us from the most terrifying impact of our worst failures and restore us into the highest, most beautiful and glorious experience of His love. Jesus came to redeem us from all of our worst failures to love — both failing to love God and our failures to love our neighbor — and grace us with the exact opposite.

Ahead of us is God’s eternal guarantee to secure us in His everlasting love in heaven with Him and all of His people. Our promised future is one of unbroken, unending, undiminished love.

So now, in the meantime, this is our greatest opportunity, responsibility and achievement. The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13, “Now these three remain, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love." So how secure are you that the Father loves you? How clear are you that Jesus has saved you and that the Holy Spirit empowers you to love?

How do you need to repent of elevating anything or any other agenda above the work of love? And who has God sovereignly placed in your life for you to love, even if they are not the people you would’ve picked?

In case you might have missed it, on the back of worship folder every week is what we believe is our (greatest) mission: A city transformed: Loved by God the Father, saved by Jesus His Son, empowered by His Spirit, called by God to reach our city with His love.