The love of God is indeed powerful. We are told to keep ourselves in the love of God (Jude 1:21). We are told to stay rooted and grounded in the love of God (Eph 3:17). Jesus tells us to abide in his love (John 15:10). There is reason for this.
We can't have true relationship with God unless we live in his love. Too many live by law, not in love, and the two are mutually exclusive.
You can't know the love of God living in the law of God. Also, God's love produces faith, and a sound mind.
Let's look at these more closely, and see true spiritual power at work.
THE LAW OF GOD
The law of God is the center of the Old Covenant. The love of God is the center of the New Covenant. We are intended to live in the New Covenant only, to the exclusion of the Old (Heb 9:9-10, 10:9). Jesus said, "Don't pour new wine into old bottles." In other words, don't mix the New with the Old.
We are to be ministers of the New Testament only, because the Old merely produces condemnation (II Cor 3:6). Besides no one could live by it (Acts 15:10).
THE LOVE OF GOD
The love of God is the most powerful force in the world. God approached us in love through the person of Jesus Christ, and gave us his gospel to live in which reveals God's love to us. It reveals his grace. It reveals God's righteousness in us. It is God's love that produces his peace and his joy in us, regardless of earthly circumstances.
RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
God's love produces true relationship with him. We can't have experience true relationship with him if we don't abide in his love, just like the branch abides in the vine (John 15:1-5). Everything begins with God's love. "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son."
If we don't know God's love for us, then we live in SELF, and our vain attempts to receive the love of God by means of what we do: our performance.
This is always motivated by laws and rules.
Love produces fellowship with God in his gospel (Phil 1:5).
FAITH AND LOVE
Galatians 5:6 says, "Faith works by love." This is not talking about our human love, but God's divine love. Human love is shallow compared to God's incomprehensible, unconditional, eternal love.
When God's love is joined with the faith of Christ in us, as Paul says in Galatians 2:17, 20 (KJV) and elsewhere, it is a dynamic power working in us. If we don't know God's love, because we live in law - and thus don't know the faith of Jesus working in us, we can't experience this dynamic power of faith working through love.
LOVE = A SOUND MIND, POWER OF THE MIND
I say it a lot: the gospel is intended to straighten out our thinking. Jesus said to repent of ALL other beliefs, and believe the gospel (Mark 1:15). Gospel truth is what the whole ministry of Jesus was about (John 18:37). It must be preached in all the world before the end will come (Matt 24:14).
The gospel is what reveals God's love in us.
"God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind" (II Tim 1:7). So much is said about the power of the mind today. It is being separated to gospel truth, as Paul says he was in Romans 1:1, that creates in us the power of the mind - resulting in a sound mind.
God's love is like the seed that is planted in us that produces a strong root. Then, this strong root produces good fruit and good consequences in all areas of life.
Paul says it is the gospel that does this (Col 1:5-6).
Love propels us into righteousness (II Cor 3:9), and reconciliation (atonement or 'at-one-ment') with God (II Cor 5:18).
It is God's love in us that causes us to continually increase in his love, and then spill over and abound over with it to others (I Thes 3:12).
RELATIONSHIP, FAITH AND A SOUND MIND
When we truly get a revelation of the power of God's love in us, then we truly live in intimate relationship with our Father, as we all long to.
His love then produces his faith in us. His love then produces a sound mind in us - which only a life lived in the gospel can produce.
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