just random bits and pieces from my QT...
what is love?
The world is desperate for love. But often we misunderstand the meaning of true love. So we use the word love very casually: I love pizza. I love my Honda. I love my baby.
i distinctly remember this sonnet by Shakespeare from my high school days...think in grade 10...
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
To find the meaning of true love, we have to go back to the Word of God because God Himself is love. The word agape is one of the rarest words in the ancient Greek language and literature, but it's commonly used in the New Testament.
Unlike our English word love, agape never refers to romantic feelings or sexual love. It doesn't refer to brotherly love or having warm feelings about someone or something.
Real love-agape love-is a God-quality. We don't have it naturally. We have to have God in our lives to have agape love.
Someone has said that genuine love is totally giving of ourselves to meet the needs of others, without expecting anything in return. It's easy sometimes to meet the needs of another person, but often we have a hidden desire for that love to be reciprocated. We're serving so that we will receive in return. But genuine love doesn't expect anything in return.
Romans 5 tells us that when we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. When we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son. God loved us not because we deserved it, but just because He is love.
Jesus came to help us see what the love of God looks like. Jesus is God Incarnate, God in the flesh. John 13 tells us that "having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end" (v. 1). He loved them to the full extent of love. And how did He demonstrate His love? He got down and washed the disciples' feet.
Love is selfless, humble service to meet the needs of another person, no matter how lowly or menial that service may seem-and no matter how undeserving is the recipient of that love. Scripture tells us this kind of love ought to be the supreme characteristic of the people of God. In fact, Jesus said, "That's how people will know that you belong to Me" (John 13:34-35).
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Real Love Hurts
This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. 1 John 3:16, NIV
So THIS is love, I thought.
I was only about nine years old at the time, but I just KNEW that I was experiencing real love when I gazed at my first crush. He was a good church boy with blond hair and brown eyes. I don't remember his name now, but at the time I just "knew" it was written on my heart.
A few years later, seasons and feelings had changed and another church boy caught my attention. He was new to our congregation and a year older than me. And when he sang a duet with his older sister in our Sunday evening service, I was hooked.
I would pine away for this boy 'til we were both in high school. And finally, FINALLY, when I was 15, he asked me out.
Real love? Hardly. It was infatuation all the way. And I ended things with him a few months later when I got "tired" of him. I did more of this with other young men as the years flew by, usually as preemptive strikes so that I would never get hurt.
See the pattern? Well, fast forward a couple of decades to last year when my tried-and-true method didn't work out so well for me. I got dumped first! And I never saw it coming. I was pursued, wined and dined and showered with gifts. But these outward actions were not very tell-tale of what was going on internally with my suitor. It was all a whirlwind act that couldn't last more than a couple of months, and it didn't.
I was crushed. Hurt beyond measure. But by what? By real love gone wrong? Not really. There was no love there-just selfish desires connecting two emotionally unhealthy and hurting people for a short while.
It took this dumping for me to finally wake up and see how I had been treating others for all of these years. I only stayed in a relationship until I got what I wanted, and then I was out. This is and was not love. It's not what I'm getting out of a relationship. It's about my will, my choice to love others and give of myself even when I don't want to and it hurts.
The Lord wants us all to see what real love is and that it requires great sacrifice and that it does hurt and make us uncomfortable to love in the way he has loved us. In short, real love is this: A Savior, who became a man and died for the sins of you and me and the rest of the world.
May we all be encouraged to open our hearts, sacrifice and show real love toward one another because He first loved us..
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