Love is all around us. We encounter the word incessantly, pouring out of our televisions, our radios, splashed across newspaper headlines and peppering social media. There has never been so much love, nor so much talk of it.

Only, I’m beginning to think that our obsession with the word belies the fact that we have lost track of what it means. For many people, the answer to that question would be, ‘love is love’ – inferring that it comes in many forms and that it can be anything we want it to be. It is yet another example of where absolutes have been removed, making it impossible to have any kind of definition at all. That’s what leaves us with the somewhat meaningless, ‘love is love’.

We don’t need to despair, however, because a proper definition does exist; it just happens not to be to everyone’s taste: God is love.

Instantly you bring Him into the conversation, of course, the eye-rolling starts. He’s a known killjoy. Funnily enough, the least Biblically literate of unbelievers know, almost instinctively, what He disapproves of. And, when you know He disapproves of what you want, then the best thing to do is write Him off as irrelevant, or even better, imaginary.

When you do that, though, there are consequences. You are purposely and repeatedly cutting yourself off from truth and choosing a convenient lie. Indeed, you are doing exactly what many Christians are accused of by atheists: you are creating a pretty fiction for yourself, and denying all evidence to the contrary. Spiritually speaking, you are deranged. For the sake of an easy and self-indulgent life now, you are choosing a hideous eternity.

That, however, doesn’t mean that believing ‘God is love’ sorts everything out. It is more than a mere fridge-magnet sentiment to be parroted in every tight spot and awkward situation. A few years ago, I sat in church as our then minister thundered that many people had gone to a lost eternity believing God is love. He was right. There are those who think that, because He is love, He would not let a basically decent person, who has lived a civilised life, suffer eternal death.

Neither He would; He has made provision for us to avoid that eventuality. He is not willing that any should perish – but some of us will it for ourselves by failing to accept His gift. Even in this, we are disobedient, messing about with our eternal souls, gambling them on a nursery belief that, because God is love, He won’t condemn nice people to hell.

No indeed; we condemn ourselves.

Which brings me back to that definition of love: God is. That’s really no help if you don’t know anything about God, though. I often hear from unbelievers that He is a figment of the imagination, a patriarchal construct, designed to supress and control successive generations, and to subjugate women particularly.

Every word they utter tells me that, no, indeed, they do not know Him at all. They have believed the propaganda – the tired, dog-eared mantra that the Bible is filled with contradictions, and that God presides over it all like a power-crazed tyrant. This God, who has been built from straw, is all too easy to knock down. He can be dismissed because He is fake.

See, the definition of love extends to a bit more than three words. And, if it’s too big to distil down to, ‘God is love’, then you certainly can’t get off with simply saying ‘love is love’ either.

So, go to the Bible, to the First Letter of John, and the fourth chapter. Here is a complete definition of love. It tells us that love is from God and that God IS love. This couldn’t be clearer, really, could it? Whether we like it or not, and whether we accept it or not, we cannot understand love apart from Him.

Which is the point where unbelievers start to shake their heads at smug, sanctimonious Christians, believing that they have a monopoly on goodness. The arrogance, honestly, of these God-botherers, claiming that only they know what love is, and that anything contrary to their understanding is not love.

See? We have heard all the arguments before.

I know that what I write here will offend some. Mercifully, being offended doesn’t kill; being lied to very well might, though, so let’s not do that. However much people want us all to agree that love is whatever we make it, and whatever we’re comfortable with, that simply does not make it true.

Love is what you see in the fact that God, while we were all in open rebellion against Him, sent His Son to die in our place. He only asks that we accept it, and permit Christ lordship over our lives.

Easy when you know how, but a colossal challenge if you have lived your life apart from God, believing Him to be a fiction. We live in a country that makes it increasingly hard to talk about Him without being mocked, pilloried, or silenced. In my own mother’s lifetime, Britain has gone from depending on the Lord in warfare, to dismissing Him utterly from our public sphere. It is difficult to witness for Christ when people hate you for it. Or, more accurately, hate Him through you.

Why go out with the Gospel, why intervene in debates where God’s name is trampled underfoot when you know that the chances of being listened to are slim, and the chance of being jeered at and derided very great?

The answer is ‘love’. We love because He first loved us. Having that love in us now, we cannot contain it; it has to flow outwards to others where we once were.

We see you, walking through the storm of life, head bowed against the onslaught. Watching, we remember how it felt to be there in the cold, buffeted this way and that, our peace and happiness subject to every prevailing wind. And we are moved, by the Saviour’s love for us and in us, to catch you and pull you in where we are, beneath the shelter of His wings.

That, my friends, is love, which comes from Christ and through Him, and depends only upon Him. God is love and, therefore, when He is the foundation, love IS love.