Love Poured Into the Heart

I want to focus on a phrase from our reading from Romans 5. It comes in verse 5. God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit.

Isn’t that a beautiful image? 

Think of your heart as a basin. God’s love like water is poured into that basin until it overflows. 

My cup runs over. That is a familiar image, right? Psalm 23. God’s love is poured into us till overflowing! 

Paul gives us the means by which this pouring into our hearts happens. The Holy Spirit is the spicket God uses to pour the living water of love into our hearts.

There’s a phrase that Paul adds. God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

The Holy Spirit has been given to us. By whom? 

Our gospel reading explains this. Christ promised us his Spirit would remain to guide his followers forward. “The Spirit of Truth,” Jesus entitles this Spirit. The Spirit of truth “will guide them into all truth.”  

Let me say something about truth for Christians. For us, truth and love are two sides of the same coin. Whatever is true is born of love. Whatever is of love is true. For us followers of Christ, truth and love cannot be separated.

Anyway, Christ gives the Holy Spirit for love’s sake. Christ assures his followers, you are not alone. The truth of love and the love of truth will go with you. In  this way, I will go with you. He says, I give you the Spirit of Truth to accompany you just as I have. 

We might say, amending John 3:16, “For Christ so loved the world, that he gave his own Spirit.

But what about the original verse I just borrowed from. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. Whoever receives that gift shall not perish.

Doesn’t John 3:16 seem to suggest God’s love was poured into our hearts through Christ?

Indeed, this is true!

God doesn’t rely on merely one means to share his love with us!

God’s love works through Christ. Indeed, God most powerfully reveals divine love to us through the gift of the Son!

But in turn God the Son reveals his love to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit. 

It is Trinity Sunday, and we honor the diverse ways the love of God is revealed to us.

In a beautiful turn of human history and human religion, our faith says God’s love is revealed to us in a diversity of ways – through a particular person who lived in human history some 2,000 years ago, Jesus of Nazareth, yes, but God’s love is also revealed to us as well through the universal, pervasive reality of the Holy Spirit.  

The diversity doesn’t stop there. Nor is it new.

God’s love is poured into our hearts through Christ and through the Holy Spirit. But there’s two other vehicles God uses. We find these two vehicles in the Old Testament. 

In Genesis 1 and 2 we read about God's work of creation. 

Have you ever asked yourself why God created the universe?

Maybe you’ve heard the ubiquitous answer because God wanted company. But there can be no wanting in God for God to be God. God is internally self-sufficient. God wanting because there is something missing inside himself – that can’t be for God to be God. God has all the company he needs in God’s self, in the internal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Here's a better answer to why God created the universe. Why did God create? God cannot but create. God is love and love is creative by nature. For God to exist means God is forever creating. There is never a time when God isn’t creating. 

Genesis 1-2 merely tells the story of the most significant instance of God’s creative work. 

So let me say it again because it is something we should not miss – God as love is creative by nature. And so, God is love and love created the universe we see. God is love and love pervades the universe. Divine Love’s handiwork is all around us! 

Let me say on this Father’s Day, there’s a reason there’s nothing more meaningful or powerful than experiencing the absolute beauty of creation with a loved one. Looking out at a gorgeous landscape with your love, there’s nothing better than this. Experiencing a beautiful day surrounded by natural beauty with family, what better gift than that?

Love pervades creation! Love pervades our close relationships! And placed together, we can’t help but to experience God who is love in an overwhelming way. There’s a reason for that. Love and creation have moved together from the very beginning. 

There’s one last way God’s love is poured into our hearts specified in the Old Testament. 

God’s love is poured into our hearts through the law of love.

One of the most important, most pivotal, and most powerful verses in the Hebrew Bible is found in Jeremiah 31. Verse 33 of Jeremiah 31 says this: 

this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

Did you know there’s a New Testament within the Old? It predates the New Testament by some 600 years. This verse marks that new testament that God establishes. The old testament, the old covenant, was the one that came down from Mount Sinai through Moses. It was tied to the promised land and to the temple built there. But the people are now scattered away from the promised land, the temple no more, the ark of the covenant no longer in the temple. The old covenant needs simplifying and replacing because of this new context. So God melts the law down to its core essentials and then places it in the human heart. 

Jesus tells us what the core essentials of the law are, doesn’t he?

A pharisee, one of the foremost experts in the law in fact, asks Jesus in Matthew 22:36:

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?”

Jesus responds famously. 

  “'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

The basic law written on the human heart is the what, the law of love!

God’s love is poured into our hearts through Christ who embodied love.

God's love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which inspires love.

God's love is poured into our hearts through Creation which is pervaded by love.

And God's love is poured into our hearts through the Law of Love which is written upon our hearts.

The common denominator is what, friends? Love. 

For us, followers of Christ, Love is always the common denominator.