This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 1 John 4:9 (NIV)

Two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I fell in love. It was remarkable, awesome, unbelievable! I would lie awake at night basking in it. I would wake up with a strong sense of it. I thought about it, wrote about it, read about it. Oh the joy of it! I told everyone about it. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced before. It filled me with energy, made me feel like I was on top of the world. Everything around me was brighter and cheerier as a result of it.

There’s nothing quite like falling in love. It thrives in the most difficult of circumstances, overcomes obstacles, passes understanding, covers many infirmities, makes one fit for any work, cannot be measured, and speaks even when lips are sealed. Someone once said, “Love is a feeling of a feeling like a feeling we’ve never felt before.”

You may remember when you fell in love, when the spark was kindled, when nothing else mattered, when you thrilled to your lover’s call, when you enjoyed your lover’s presence, when you believed you could die for your lover.

Yes, two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I fell in love with Jesus.

My love for Jesus doesn’t begin to compare with His love for me. His love is meteoric, astronomic, titanic, and oceanic. It’s a love that’s continual, incalculable, and permanent. A love that focuses attention, perseveres through thick and thin, and cannot be contained. As Isaac Watts said, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” 1 John 4:10. There you have it! We love because he first loved us” 1 John 4:19.