What is love? Part I

At the risk of dating myself, I can remember growing up during the 1980s and hearing one of the more famous pop stars of the time lamenting in one of his songs, "What is love anyway?  Does anybody love anybody anyway?"  As I'll explain later, his cynical lament over love lost seems to represent the one main type of love song.  The other main type sings about the euphoric feelings that happen at the point where a person falls in "love".  But are these feelings really "love" or are they something else?  In other words, getting back to the question of the famous pop star, what is love, anyway?  And how can this knowledge help us understand and benefit us in our relationships with others?  I intend this understanding to benefit Christians and non-Christians alike, as well as anyone of any age whether single or in a relationship.

This past year in the area where I live, I have witnessed the downfall of three marriages in which at least one partner in the marriage claimed to be Christian.  Now I'm not here to debate whether any of these people were in fact really "Christian", but it was a tough time for my wife and I to see such marital disintegration so close to home.  I personally was frustrated at how people claiming to be Christian could have allowed their most important earthly relationship to slip away to the point where it seemed beyond recovery, but then I realized that this can happen to anyone - even me.  Nevertheless, I was bothered by this because I reasoned that divorce should never happen amongst Christians, yet it's sad but true that one of the most widely known statistics about divorce is that it happens about as often inside the body of Christ as it does outside.  And so, being the inquisitive type, I struggled to wonder why.

Then one day this past summer I was listening to a song when suddenly the thought leapt to mind about how nearly all "love" songs seem fall into one of the two camps mentioned above:  when a person falls in "love" and when a person falls out of "love".  'Why do songs never seem to be written from the standpoint of a happily married couple?' I wondered.  As I thought more about this, I realized that not just songs but books, plays, movies, TV shows, etc. all seem to focus exclusively on these two "love" situations as well.

Moving deeper with these thoughts, I began to think about how these types of media form the basis of our pop culture, and how this in turn has such a massive influence on our society's understanding of love.  And then suddenly it struck me about why Christian marriages are just as likely to fail as non-Christian ones.

I remember a breakthrough in my understanding of love while listening to a Focus On The Family radio broadcast a few years back, hosted by Dr. James Dobson.  From that day forward, what I learned helped me to understand so much about why relationships survive and fail, and hopefully my summation of this understanding can help you as well.

Basically, Dobson explained that the giddy, floating-on-air kind of feelings the first year or two after meeting that special someone is not love, but rather "infatuation" or "lust".  Any of you who've watched Bambi might remember the term "twitterpated" being used to describe these feelings.  The saying "Love is blind" was coined, in my opinion, by someone who did not understand what true love really is; this person was instead referring to a state of infatuation.  At a marriage seminar last fall, one of the speakers mentioned how these feelings have been scientifically discovered to be the result of a chemical release from the brain, and it takes one to two years for its euphoric effect to wear off.  This is the point where people claim that they have "fallen out of love", failing to realize that they had actually not been in love in the first place.

Anyhow, true "love", continued Dobson, is NOT blind, but rather it's the kind where you choose or decide to love someone long after the honeymoon no matter how they look or act.  Our world gets the two terms "infatuation" and "love" reversed/mixed up.  In actuality, infatuation is a self-serving emotion but love is a selfless choice or decision.  Love, in its truest sense, is not a noun but a verb - it requires action.

So while considering this misunderstanding of love, I also considered how so many modern Christians fail to block out the influences of pop culture.  Our Lord warned us to basically be in the world but not of the world, yet we so readily listen to the same songs, read the same books, and watch the same visual media as the non-Christian "world".  And in so doing we form the same perceptions of love (among other things) as the world does.

So when I mentioned before how I was suddenly struck about why Christian marriages are just as likely to fail as non-Christian ones, it meant that the little Christian girl who watched "Cinderella", for example,  likely carried some of those fantasy-based misconceptions of love into her marriage with her.  And when the chemicals that sparked the euphoric emotions toward her new husband have worn off - what people jokingly refer to as "after the honeymoon" - she begins to wonder if she married the "right person".  Now that the chemical-induced "blindness" is gone, she now no longer laughs as much at and is instead more annoyed about his less-than-flattering appearance or behavior issues.

I am absolutely convinced that nearly every divorce in the history of the world has been the result of this misunderstanding of what love really is.  The infatuated person is used to having been self-centered to that point in a relationship.  That person spends as much time as possible with the person they're infatuated with because s/he wants to fuel the emotions even more, to bring them to even greater heights.  Any selfless acts in this regard are usually done so the recipient can do something good back to them that fuels their euphoric emotions even more.

But once the chemicals wear off and the 'honeymoon is over', so to speak, a person has to decide whether they will stick with their spouse through thick and thin because their motivation is no longer chemical.  They have to now choose to stick with and support that person, they have to decide to serve the needs of that other person.  This action to do so is true love!  And when even one person in the relationship decides they want to stick to their self-serving ways of the infatuation period, the relationship starts to disintegrate unless things are realized and action is taken.

Even before I had this understanding of why Christian marriages fail at about the same rate as non-Christian ones, I had observed that every divorce I had analyzed was the result of stubborn selfishness on the part of one or both people in the marriage.  Now that I have had this observation confirmed, I hope you can benefit from this understanding if you're wondering 'whether anybody loves anybody anyway'.

I hope to discuss this issue of love from a different angle in a follow-up to this post.  Stay tuned.

"Indoctrination!"

I find it interesting when non-believers accuse Christians of "indoctrinating" their children to believe in Jesus, as though this is some great injustice.  I touched upon this idea several months ago when I referred to "brainwashing" in another post, but now I'd like to expand upon this in the context of raising children.

As a Christian parent, I realize that unless I make some radical (i.e. counter-cultural) and tough decisions to "indoctrinate" my children to believe that they are each a unique and special creation of the one true God, they will by default be indoctrinated by our culture via the schools and especially the media (the puppeteer of most modern cultures) to believe that they are each a purposeless mammal whose present form has resulted from billions of years of random mutations, natural selection, and blind chance.  If there is any good in this world today, it comes almost exclusively though people in communities across this globe, especially parents, who teach Jesus Christ and Him crucified AND THEN LIVE OUT THE LOVE OF CHRIST to their family members, friends, neighbors, classmates, co-workers, and complete strangers.

Anyone protesting this claim that Christians living out their faith are primarily responsible for the good in this world might point to the Oprahs and Dalai Lamas of this world and their contributions in the form of humanistic feel-good messages and pleas for a better world.  But these people, despite their popularity and good intentions, are not in the trenches feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and protecting the weak.  They also do not have the power to cleanse my heart so that I am renewed from the inside out in order to have compassion on the poor, naked, and weak.  And they have not proposed a way for me - or for themselves or for the poor, naked, and weak - to 'get right' with the one and only God who created them in order to be forgiven and made clean and thereby enjoy an eternity with Him.  This is because they do not preach about the one and only Mediator between man and God, Jesus Christ - the only Mediator who can give us the forgiveness, love, and peace that we are all really seeking.

Their message is instead one of human well-being here and now, on this side of eternity.  They speak about finding peace and fulfillment here on earth without considering what will happen after a person dies.  They believe the lie that human efforts and intentions that are good and righteous will be enough to get them into heaven "if" God should happen to really exist.  The problem is, their idea of God is not that of the one true God - the God described in the Bible as having a Son whom He sent to save believers in His Son from eternal torment.  Their God is not the capital-g God but any "god" contrived in the hearts of men.  They have the audacity to think that somehow we humans have the power to create gods that in turn have the power to determine whether we live for an eternity or cease to exist after we take our last breath.  Since they assume that the one true God is likewise a figment of human imagination, they create their own gods based on this false assumption, mostly in order to not feel that they have to be accountable to their Creator.  They would rather be accountable to a god on their terms instead of finding out that they have offended and sinned against the one true God.

This concept of "create-a-god" then transmits into how these people and their masses of followers live their lives.  Since there is no one true God in their minds, there can be no one absolute truth and therefore no right or wrong ways of thinking or living.  So Ms. Winfrey, for example, will invite a smorgasbord of guests onto her shows over the course of a year representing all schools of spiritual thought - including sometimes the most sincere Christians - because in her mind, sadly, Jesus is not God in human flesh that He repeatedly proved Himself to be in the historical Biblical accounts.  He is instead, in the mind of all humanists and not just Oprah, demoted to the ranks of simply a "great teacher" or "prophet" and not one of the three persons comprising the one true God described in scripture as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Because there is no absolute truth, more and more people swayed by humanist teaching become less sensitive to practices like euthanasia and abortion while ironically decrying murder and capital punishment and war.  They think that it is justice for the homosexual lifestyle to gain legal and social acceptance but nearly have a heart attack wondering what people will think if one of their children declares that he/she has become a homosexual.  Because there is no absolute truth, no right and wrong, those who are indoctrinated by humanist philosophies and teachings get tossed by the seas of life and wonder why our culture and society are spiraling downward into greater depths of confusion, chaos, and violence.

My children may be young, but they already seem to have a keen sense of the one true God because of the non-religious, biblically-based notion of this God that they have been exposed to since day one.  They realize that they are not perfect, but also how God doesn't expect them to be on their own strength because we all mess up our relationship with God ("sin") no matter how hard we try not to.  But they also know that believing in Jesus means they have been cleansed of their sin, and by this simple act of belief they are new creations; they are no longer condemned by God even when they do mess up and sin because God sees them through 'Christ-colored glasses', as some Christian teachers have put it.  They have been forgiven once and for all (Hebrews 10: 11,12), and nothing can separate them from the love of God (Romans 8: 38,39) after they have put their faith in Him.

So does this mean they deliberately don't care about whether or not they sin, since they know God has already forgiven them?  Because my children know the incredible love of God in their lives, they in turn love Him and out of this love naturally wish to please Him by being obedient to not only Him but also their parents whom God has entrusted as their earthly guardians and teachers.  Are they perfectly obedient?  No more than their parents, who are continually tempted to think they know better than God  and have to live with the consequences of foolish decisions made apart from asking God for wisdom and direction.

Most people in western societies today fail to realize that it was Christians living out their faith who established the first hospitals and universities, not to mention the compassionate aspects of government operations and systems such as the legal system.  It was also Christians living out their faith who created organizations of compassion like the Red Cross, Salvation Army, and Y.M.C.A./Y.W.C.A. that probably all westerners have heard of and benefited from in some way.  The original intention of all these institutions and organizations was to act as means by which the love of God through Jesus Christ could be acted out and preached.  Unfortunately, now that the western world is post-Christian, only the former is true.  These are now humanistic in the sense that they only help people on this side of eternity instead of also preparing them for the reality of meeting Jesus face to face (whether Christian or not) after they die.

So by "indoctrinating" my children about the one true God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - I believe that I am doing the greatest possible service to my local community and to our society as a whole.  I don't believe that my actions will restore our society or world to a place of openness to hearing the message of the Gospel, but I do believe that they will do so - plus slow the rate of moral decay - at least in our sphere of influence.

We as Christian parents may not have the exposure that the Oprahs and Dalai Lamas enjoy, but at least our message is one that will actually change lives for real instead of trying to bandage the gaping wounds in our lives and society through humanistic feel-good thoughts and ideas that ultimately benefit no one - except for the pocketbooks of those who blindly or willingly spread these messages of false, empty hope apart from those found in the Bible.