This is part 3 of a blog reflecting further on a sermon message I gave in reference to the worship song, “Reckless Love.” Please join in the conversation with your thoughts and reflections.

I was speaking with another person after the service Sunday night and this person has obviously had some bad experiences with love. He said that he doesn’t see anything wrong with the phrase, “reckless love” because there’s no such thing as perfect love. He said that everyone is broken and unable to love without hurting people and he even went as far as to say that God’s love must be the same.

You see, this person has experienced reckless love in an entirely different way than what the song is meant to convey. I told this person – who’d been hurt and burned by people and had previously given up on God, and is now on the path back to loving and believing in God again – that they were right about one thing. No human is capable of perfect love, and sometimes love is so tangled up in our sin that our love can be violent and dangerous, or in another word, reckless.

Then I told him that I believe God is different. God’s love is perfect and God’s love doesn’t hurt us like that.

This person, having gone through whatever it is they went through that broke their faith in the first place, is now coming back to God with a working understanding of God’s love. I mean, it’s a work in progress. He’s confused about a lot of things, and then he comes to church and hears this phrase, ‘reckless love of God,’ and automatically associates it with the kind of reckless love – that is careless, hurtful “love” – that he’s been exposed to.

Do you see what I mean about the potential danger associated with having this phrase used in congregational worship? 

This person was literally formalizing a theology that God’s love isn’t perfect, and the song was well on the way to helping solidify that.