Are we learning that God not only loves but is Love? As we do, we discover that it’s God’s immutable nature to impart love. Nothing could persuade God to cease caring for any of us for even a moment. These words of God are and always will be true for each of us: “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). 

The healing touch of this divine Love must have been deeply felt by a woman caught in the act of adultery, when Jesus, who so vividly expressed God’s love, declined to condemn her and urged her to “go, and sin no more” (see John 8:1–11). Just a few minutes earlier she’d been in the hands of a self-righteous mob. Now she was completely safe and standing uncondemned by the one individual who could be considered qualified to condemn her, since Jesus alone was “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). Instead, this most spiritually loving of all individuals—this most transparent heart of God’s great grace—clearly saw this woman as able to recognize and act on her inherent capacity to cease sinning. 

The same is true for us today when we struggle, like this woman, with some behavior that misses the high mark of a moral life. Christ, the spiritual idea of God that animated Jesus in all he said and did, is silently assuring us that divine Love knows us as its loved offspring—uncondemned—because our true, God-created nature is free of sin. And it’s this very truth of how God knows us that is the basis for petitioning, as King David did when facing up to his own immoral behavior, “Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me” (Psalms 51:10).