Even though this week is the first week of October, today I would like for us to move backward in time a few months. OK, today let’s think back into the past — hopefully not too far into the past, although for some it may be farther than for others. Today, I want you to think with me about love letters. Have you ever received one of those? Tell me please, if your memory will allow, what was the first thing you did when you received one?

If you are like me (if I ever received a love letter), the first thing I would do is smell the envelope. Love letters tend to have been (oftentimes) drenched in some sort of perfume! But then, you normally will read it once, then throw it away, just like that ad you received from another company trying to get you to sign up to get gutter guards to keep the leaves out of your downspouts!

No, when you get a love letter or Valentine’s card, you definitely did not throw it out immediately, if ever. But what did you do with it, besides hide it from the kids? Usually you read it over and over again. You read it fast. Then you read it ever so slow. You read it silently. Then if able to do so privately, you read it out loud. And as you read, each time you read it you analyze every word, every punctuation mark, even trying to understand what the writer meant when she dotted every “i” with a small heart.

What do you feel when you read a love letter? Hopefully, you feel loved. You feel accepted. If you eventually married the author of that letter, you feel gratitude that God brought your spouse into your life. Though the ability to read comes from the brain, you really read a love letter with your heart. Above all, you cherish it as something intensely personal.

I’ve been transformed by the love of my wife. Her notes and cards and words to me over the last 50 years have not been what has transformed me. They have merely informed me and reminded me of the depth of her love. It has been in knowing her, and living with her, and being deeply loved by her that I have been changed. I am not the same man she married, and that’s a good thing!

So help me work this one through. The Bible is the greatest love story ever told. Yes, it contains instruction on how to live, models for us to follow, and examples of those who both rejected God’s love and received it. Sure, some of it is hard to understand. But at its core, it is a love letter. From cover to cover, it is the ongoing story of an unconditional, patient and gentle lover seeking to win the hearts of reluctant, wandering unfaithful people like you and me. Yet we seldom read it as if it were the words of a faithful lover calling us to intimacy.

Have you read the love in this love letter lately? If you are someone who has never experienced that love, or have rejected that love or the lover of your soul, please do not throw away or otherwise discard the love letter He has written to you. He wrote it to you out of the deepest love and respect for you that you will ever sense from anybody anywhere.

Once you have experienced that love, you’ll know what to do. Until then, nothing you do, no matter how righteous, really matters.

Psalm 1:1-3 — How blessed is the man [whose]… delight is in the law of the Lord, and in His law he meditates day and night. He will be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in its season And its leaf does not wither; and in whatever he does, he prospers.

God bless…

Chuck Tabor is a religion columnist for The Times-Gazette and a former Hillsboro area pastor who now resides in Florida. He can be reached at [email protected].