That day Rick Garmon encountered God’s transforming love in his son’s embrace. God’s love is more than just talk. It is real. It completely changes the way we think, the way we see others, the way we live each day. Love delivers us from the vicious cycle of vengeful retaliation. It makes life worth living. It changes everything.

I have been preaching the Gospel for several decades now; and with every year that moves by, I am more and more convinced that my mission in life is to help people understand God’s love for them. I’ve grown less interested in the side issues, the niceties, and the doctrinal trivia. This world desperately needs for us to keep the main thing the main thing. So today my central message is God’s astounding love. It’s a message that’s always new, never old, never dusty or musty.

In many ways I am inspired by John, the last living apostle. His great topic, needless to say, was love. He featured love in his Gospel, and love dominated his first Epistle. They say that as he got older, he reached the point where he preached of nothing else. Occasionally, some impatient member of the audience would interrupt him: “Brother John, you’ve already preached that one. Tell us something new!”

“Very well,” the beloved disciple would say with a smile. “A new commandment I give to you—that you love one another.”

John was not senile. He simply understood more deeply than the rest of us that there is one item of news that never stops being new: the life-changing love of God.

After focusing for nine chapters on the glorious love of God, I would like to spend the last pages of this book suggesting a few ways in which change can now begin in your life. I have spent so many words on God’s love for a reason. I often wonder if we get it backward, spending 90 percent of our time demanding that we love one another and only 10 percent of our time reminding ourselves of God’s love for us. Perhaps, love would flow more abundantly from our lives if we reversed this ratio.

Whatever the ratio needs to be, God’s love should flow from us in practical and real ways. In every relationship we have—with God, self, friends, neighbors, and enemies—Christians have a foundational, nonnegotiable responsibility spelled l-o-v-e. There is no person in the world—including God Himself—whom God does not expect us to love.

And that is why I say that God’s love changes everything. Think of it: What is life except relationships? And what are relationships without love? If we lack the ability to love, we lack the ability to live. Or, at least, to live the “more abundant” life God wants us to enjoy (John 10:10b).

Because God Loves Us, We Can Love Him