A Meditation on the Love of God in Christ

There are moments when a truth you have known for years suddenly lands differently. Something in you goes quiet, and in that quiet the familiar becomes startling. That is what happened to me recently with the love of God. I was not studying anything new. I was simply stopped — held by something ancient and overwhelming — and found myself, if I am honest, a little undone by it.

I want to write about that. The love of God in Christ, looked at slowly, up close, the way you examine something you cannot quite believe you are holding.

A Love That Knew Exactly What It Was Doing

The love of God is not the love of someone who walked in without reading the terms. When God moved toward the human race, He did so with full knowledge — every betrayal, every rejection, every act of ingratitude that would ever be committed against Him, every generation that would turn away. He saw it all. He came anyway.

"But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." — Romans 5:8

That word while is carrying the entire weight of the gospel in that sentence. While we were still in the middle of our worst. The cross was the response to His love, not to our repentance. The decision was made before we deserved it, the movement began before we asked for it, and the work was completed before most of us even knew we needed it.

Human love, even at its most generous, is contingent to some degree. It responds to something — beauty, kindness, shared history, some quality in the other person that draws it out. The love of God in Christ responds to nothing in us. It originates entirely in Him. Which also means it is not subject to anything in us. Your failure does not reduce it. Your obedience does not increase it. It is fixed. Settled. Immovable.

This is the part that takes time to absorb. We are so conditioned to earning and losing, to performing and failing, that a love with no moving parts feels almost too good to be true. And yet there it is, in plain language, in the middle of the New Testament. God loved us at our worst. That is the baseline. Everything else is overflow.

A Love That Knows Everything and Has Not Moved

The second thing that stops me is that He knows everything.

We live in a world where love and full disclosure are kept at a careful distance. We show people the version of ourselves we think they can handle, and we manage the rest. Deep down, many of us carry a quiet fear that if the full picture were ever seen, the love would not survive the seeing.

"O Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar." — Psalm 139:1-2

God has searched you. He has known you. The actual you — the thoughts you have never spoken aloud, the motives beneath the motives, the fears you have never named even to yourself, every contradiction and unresolved wound and gap between who you are and who you intend to be. He sees it all. He has always seen it all.

And His love has not moved.

There is no hidden information that, once revealed, would change His disposition toward you. You are fully known and fully held, and those two realities exist together in God with no tension between them. That should undo us. It undoes me.

A Love That Refused to Stay at a Distance

Perhaps the most staggering thing about this love is that it refused to remain at the level of declaration. It became flesh. It walked into our world, sat at tables with broken people, touched those whom everyone else had stopped touching, wept at a graveside, got tired, felt pain. The love of God chose proximity.

"The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth." — John 1:14

God could have redeemed humanity through a decree issued from heaven. He chose instead to enter humanity through a birth in Bethlehem. He chose the long, slow, embodied way — present with the people He loved, living among them, speaking to them face to face.

And then He went further still. He went to a cross with His face set. He had set it long before He arrived in Jerusalem. He laid down His life — John 10:18 makes clear that no one took it from Him. This was a chosen love. A love that looked at the full weight of what was required and moved toward it deliberately, completely, all the way to the end.

A Love With No Dial

I keep returning to this thought, and I want to say it plainly: there is nothing you can do that will make God love you more, and there is nothing you can do that will make Him love you less.

This is not a licence for carelessness. It is an invitation to freedom. So many believers live in a kind of spiritual anxiety — trying to maintain a level of performance that keeps God's favour warm, afraid that a misstep will cost them something in the relationship. But the love of God in Christ is not a dial that moves with your behaviour. It is a settled, covenantal reality that your behaviour cannot reach.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." — Romans 8:38-39

Paul exhausts the categories. He runs through every conceivable thing that might threaten this love and declares that none of it is sufficient. The love of God in Christ is not fragile. It is not provisional. It holds you on your best days and your worst ones with exactly the same grip.

What to Do With This

Let it change you. Let it get into the foundations — into how you see yourself when you fail, how you approach God when you are ashamed, how you face the seasons that feel like they are trying to take you out. A person genuinely rooted in this love moves through the world differently.

"And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord's holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." — Ephesians 3:17-19

Paul prays that we would know a love that surpasses knowledge. He understands that this love is larger than any framework we can build around it. We grasp it progressively — as we root ourselves in it, return to it, sit with it, and let it do its slow, deep work in us over time.

The invitation is simply to receive it. To stop running long enough to be found by the One who has been moving toward you all along — who knew everything about you before you knew anything about Him, who loved you at your worst before you ever showed Him your best, who is holding you right now with the same love that drove Him to a cross.

He has already come. He is already here. We are loved — fully, freely, irreversibly loved. And once that truth really lands, nothing looks quite the same again.

— Catalysing Transformation in One Million Lives by 2035

About the Author

Debo Owoseni is a Transformation Coach and the Convener of Life Transformation Enquiry™ (LTE), a platform catalysing transformation in one million lives by 2035. He is also a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at De Montfort University, Leicester. Debo is the author of two Springer monographs on Generative AI and a sought-after voice at the intersection of faith, knowledge, and human flourishing.

www.debowoseni.com  |  www.lifetransformationenquiry.com

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