I’m not going to apologize. Many people have asked me “why?” and “how?” But the truth of the matter is that I love professional wrestling. I know that for almost everyone but me, this seems silly. And it is. But I really enjoy professional wrestling. It won’t bother me if you think this is weird—I’ve accepted that. But I don’t love professional wrestling like I love my local church. And I don’t love my local church like I love my daughter. And I don’t love my daughter like I love my wife. And I don’t love anything like I love God. Our loves are not all the same. 

When we think about the “formative practices” of the Christian faith, we must begin with love. I have to admit that I am a bit stunned that whole books on the spiritual disciplines have been written with no attention given to love. When Jesus is asked, “Which command in the law is the greatest?,” He doesn’t say: “Read your Bible and pray.” He says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and most important command. The second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands” (Matt. 22:36–40). 

If love is the greatest command and the fulfillment of the law, it seems that it would be a pretty great place to start when we ask: How do we become more like God? And yet, even though there has been a strange silence concerning the role of love in Christian formation, the world has been, is, and will always be talking about love. There is an ever-present temptation to allow the world to shape our loves and lives. This temptation is called “worldliness.” And you’d have to be naive to believe the world does not have an agenda for shaping what we believe love is and how we are to practice love. This means we have to give extra attention to the formative practice of love. 

We are in desperate need to have our loves formed. We are born lovers, but our loves are not as they should be. Their structure is sound, but their direction is bent and broken. The result of these misdirected loves is that we end up looking for love in all the wrong places. Not only do we search for the love we long for on dead-end streets, we end up practicing a kind of flimsy and faithless love. Like an old piano or a forgotten guitar in the closet, our loves are out of tune and we need to have them returned. 

If we are on a journey to have our heart, mind, and strength transformed by God, in Christ, through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, then we must behold the God who is love. Only when we have looked upon the perfect love of the God who is love can we become people who love well. We are not fit for loving fellowship apart from God’s reshaping of who, what, how, and why we love. When we behold the God who is love, we can become people who practice a true love of God, others, and self. 

God Is Love 

You ever watch a child discover their shadow? Ever watch a puppy bark at its reflection in the mirror? It’s not uncommon to mistake a shadow or a reflection of something for the real thing. Sure, but children and puppies don’t know any better. You and I certainly never experience this kind of confusion, right? You can’t see my face as I am writing this, but I am smirking. You and I both know that we actually regularly settle for shadows over substance. But unlike children and puppies, we should know better.

We don’t have to imagine that this is the case. God’s word actually tells us that we do this. And it tells us why. In Romans 1 we are told that, “Claiming to be wise they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles….They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen” (Rom. 1:22-25). We are born into this world settling for shadows over substance, gifts over Giver, lovers over the Beloved. This really screws up the way we think about love.  

God is different from all created things. He is uncreated. He is the Creator. He is Trinity. When we think of what characterizes God, we will often speak of God’s attributes. God’s attributes are split into what we call the incommunicable attributes and the communicable attributes. The incommunicable attributes are those attributes God alone possesses. This would include, but is not limited to: God’s eternality, God’s aseity, God’s omniscience, etc. God’s communicable attributes are attributes that are reflected in limited ways in those who bear God’s image. This would include, but is not limited to: knowledge, holiness, communication, and love. 

But there is another big difference between image bearers of God and God Himself when it comes to the attributes we share with God. Even though we share these communicable attributes with God, we do not possess them in the same way He does. We can love, but God is love. We can know truth, but God is truth. We can pursue holiness, but God isholy. God doesn’t merely possess or reflect the perfection of all good things, He is the perfection of all good things. This is why it is necessary to look at God if we want to reflect God. He is the substance, we are the shadow. 

In 1 John 4, the Apostle John reveals just how closely connected God’s love is with God’s nature and our practice of love. “Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love…Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His on to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another…And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and the one who remains in love remains in God, and God remains in him…We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:7-19). 

Our practice of love is rooted in our reception of love from God. The love we receive from God is not a gift God pulls from outside of Himself, but rather, the deliberate overflow of who God is.  If we are to reflect God’s love, we must first receive God’s love. A glass can only spill what it contains. The only proper foundation of our love for anything and anyone is God’s love. Every other love is sinking sand.

Excerpt taken from Formed for Fellowship by Kyle Worley, ©2025. Used by permission of B&H Publishing.