What is love? Part II

The following passage on love is a favorite at most weddings:

"Love is patient; love is kind.

Love does not envy; is not boastful; is not conceited;

does not act improperly; is not selfish;

is not provoked; does not keep a record of wrongs;

finds no joy in unrighteousness, but rejoices in the truth;

bears all things, believes all things,

hopes all things, endures all things."

Some people are surprised to learn that this beautiful passage is from the Bible.  Actually, it is an excerpt from an entire chapter of the Bible, referred to by some as "The Love Chapter" (chapter 13 in the book of I Corinthians), with this excerpt being the most popular portion of the chapter spoken at weddings.  Despite being in the Bible, this passage is so popular that I've not only heard it read aloud at non-Christian weddings, but even at weddings where neither spouse is a believer in God.

I thinks it's great that this passage is so popular even at these kinds of weddings.  But I wonder if either marriage partner actually thinks that he/she believes they can be consistent at living out more than a couple of these characteristics over a long period, especially if the true source of love - God's spirit, or the Holy Spirit - isn't living within them?  So although it's nice for a couple getting married and their audience to learn about the characteristics of what true love really is, living it out is very difficult - even for Christians.

In my previous post on this topic, I mentioned near the end how true love is choosing to stick with and support a person and deciding to serve the needs of that person.  In other words, it is a selfless act of service to another person, even when it's inconvenient and even painful.  Now I didn't just pull these observations out of thin air.  "The Love Chapter" is but a small taste of what the "Book of Love", i.e. the Bible, has to say on this subject.  So no, I'm not some kind of 'love guru', but I'm merely relating concepts recorded in God's word (the Bible) by the source or originator of love, God Himself.

So where am I going with all of this?  Well, since the Bible is authored by the source of love (men did the actual writing, but God revealed to them what they should write), then it should contain the best and most comprehensive examples of what true love is and how we should live it out - whether we're believers in God or not.  In other words, what's the point of having a passage read like the one above on a wedding day with no follow-up on what it is and how to live it out?  An understanding of this could save many marriages from disaster.

I'm sure most people have heard the phrase, "God is love" (I John 4:8), and the Bible is filled with examples that prove this.  Here is what God's Son, Jesus Christ, has to say about the ultimate gift of love to mankind:

"For God loved the world in this way:  He gave His Only and Only Son [Jesus Christ], so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish [spiritually] but have eternal life."  (John 3:16)

So God's gift of love to us is being able to live forever simply by believing in the One He sent to earth for us, His Son Jesus Christ.  One definition I've heard of "believing in" is putting the full weight of your trust in someone or something, in this case in Jesus Christ in order to save you from the penalty of your sins:  eternal punishment/damnation.

But later on in the same book of the Bible, John's Gospel, Jesus gave a command to his disciples during the last meal He ate with them before his crucifixion:

"This is My command:  love one another as I have loved you.  No one has greater love than this, that someone would lay down his life for his friends.  You are My friends if you do what I command you."  (John 15:12-14)

There's so much that Jesus tells us about His love for mankind in this passage, but the main thing is that the greatest act of love one can do is to die for someone else.  We've all heard this in many love songs and poems, but it's one thing to tell someone you'll die for them and entirely another to actually do it!  Well, Jesus actually did it, but not just for the sake of those disciples that He was eating with at the time, but for the sake of everyone who has ever lived.

By voluntarily being nailed to a Roman cross and dying for the sake of all humanity, Jesus performed the greatest act of love in history.  I'm sure that other people throughout history have sincerely given their lives in order to save the lives of others, but only Jesus' death meant something beyond this life:  if Jesus didn't die in our place to pay the penalty of our sins, NOBODY would be acceptable before a perfect, holy God and therefore nobody but Jesus would be able to enjoy an eternity with God after their bodily death.  Jesus' death was the fulfillment of God's love for humanity.  There is certainly no better example of sacrificial love than this!

Now that we know what true love really is and who the source of it is, let's relate this to how we should live it out while here on earth.

As I alluded to before, a person is truly incapable of loving another person apart from the help of God's Holy Spirit living within them.  And the Holy Spirit only comes to live within a person once they've been cleaned or forgiven by God.  How is this done?  Again, believing in Jesus to forgive you of our sins is all it takes:  no religious rituals, no regular church attendance, no amount of trying to be clean or perfect, no amount of giving or serving.  If you've done all this and not asked Jesus to forgive you of your sins, you'll be one of the flabbergasted and horrified try-hards that Jesus describes in Matthew 7:21-23!

So does this mean that only Christians - those with the Holy Spirit living within them - are capable of expressing true love?  No, but it's a whole lot harder to express it without Him living within you!  I guess my real point here is that Christians have a much better understanding of true love because they've read many examples in the Bible of what this is and how to live it out.  I'm not saying that Christians are much better at living it out - God knows how selfish people professing to be Christians have withheld love and even harmed others throughout history.  I'm just saying that Christians should know better because they've been exposed to so many teachings about it.

Even if you're a non-Christian or non-believer, learning to better express true love to others involves opening your mind to some of the lessons in the Book of Love, the Bible.  You don't need to read or believe the rest of it, but the following passages might be of help in learning how to express true love to others:

"Husbands, love your wives, just as also Christ loved the church and gave Himself for her"  (Ephesians 5:25)

In other words, husbands need to express love for their wives in a selfless, serving, sacrificial manner.  I'm pretty sure that God would want wives to likewise love their husbands.

"... husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.  He who loves his wife loves himself.  For no one ever hates his own flesh, but provides and cares for it, just as Christ does for the church, since we [Christians] are members of His body." (Ephesians 5:28-30)

I've always chuckled as I read this verse, because Paul here is playing on the vanity of men.  Come on guys, I'm sure most of you have struck a pose in the mirror many times!  You've either checked out your hair or looked at what effect a workout (hopefully) had on you.  But all this passage is saying is that you need to also get your eyes off of yourself and onto the love and care of your wife.

"To sum up, each one of you is to love his wife as himself, and the wife is to respect her husband."  (Ephesians 5:33)

Even though these last few passages have been geared toward married couples, it is my hope that believers and non-believers have been encouraged by learning about true love and how to live it out with all people, not just their spouse.  There's no question that our world would be a drastically better place if each one of us would strive to show just one act of true love per day.

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.