What is love?

And now that I've succeeded in getting A Night at the Roxbury stuck in all of our heads (for which I do sincerely apologize) I aim to proceed to matters of much greater significance. Lately I have been caught pondering and imaging the depth and power of this crazy little thing called love (*cue the Elvis music).

For those of a certain level of maturation, love is little more than an emotion. It is a good feeling and promotes thoughts of attraction and affection. This love lacks power, finality, and worth. Love is an emotion, that is true to a certain degree. But love is so much more than an emotion. The butterflies in your tummy and that light-headedness are just feelings. These feelings can act as indicators of something more, but love itself does not flow from these things. No, love is the base from which all other indicators flow.

Many have heard Paul's definition of love from 1 Corinthians chapter 13;

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.

I don't know what images that passage conjurers up in your mind, but grab a hold of your first thoughts and run them through the passage. Use it as a sort of sieve. It should offer a very polarizing tool with which love can be accurately distinguished.



Now, I willfully admit, that my conceptualization of what love is has been radically altered in the past year of my life. As my previous post alluded to, I have fairly recently become engaged to Carissa Curtis. Naturally, since we are to be married, it makes sense that we are indeed in love. And we are deeply in love. And how do I know that? How can I be absolutely certain that this love I feel for Carissa and the love that she reciprocates to me is in fact genuine, real love? Like all questions, I test it with what scripture says love is.

Love is patient. Is patience evident in our interactions with each other? Am I willing to listen, to wait, and to support her in any task for any duration? I am.

Love is kind. Is our love marked by kindness? It should be devoid of harshness and sarcastic jabs. Love must be sincere (as it says in Romans 12:9). Am I genuinely striving to be continually kind to her? I am.

... I could go on and on through all of these things, but I do not mean to exalt my relationship with Carissa over anyone, nor do I feel the need to prove some sort of perfection for some sort of "holiness test". Rather I give these examples to encourage you to think. If you are in a relationship with someone, test it by the spirit and the Word of truth. Does it stand? Now, there is grace abundant in Jesus. No one can love perfectly. For if God is love (1 John 4:8) and Romans 3:11 says that no one seeks God, how can we possible proclaim to love perfectly if we don't seek to know love?

I will be first to admit my tendencies to selfishness and resentment. I am not always willful to lay down my "right" to insist on my own way. I am far from perfect.

So if we cannot achieve perfect love, then what really is the difference between the love of attraction that I cited at the beginning of this post and the love which we broken people are left with, even as we strive to achieve the purity of love that Paul exults? The difference comes in that final verse I included from 1 Corinthians 13, verse 10, which reads "for when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away." The difference between genuine, sacrificial love and a fleeting emotion is time. Lust and emotion are chemical states created through the mind and the body which were never meant to last. They are temporary, designed to be reactions to certain stimuli. The love Paul describes is eternal.

Love does not pass away. It does not fade. You cannot "fall out of love". Sure, you can run as far as you'd like, but in the end everything else will fade and there will be nothing left to hold on to, save love.

My heart in writing this is reactionary after noticing a trend in our culture that idolizes this concept of love. But this is not a love that is eternal and self-sacrificing. Our culture promotes a love that is me-centered. Love that emanates solely from how I feel is not love. This "love" is adamant about having things the way we demand. "If this person doesn't continue to make me happy then I'll move on to somebody else" is a message that rings throughout our world today. From a boyfriend or girlfriend you've been dating for a few weeks to a spouse that you've been with for 20 years, nothing is off limits. "Love" in our world is self-serving, demanding, and inward focused on personal happiness at all costs.

Friends, we must not idolize the love that comes from our world, but rather we must let the love that comes from the Father dwell deeply inside of us. Worldly love does not last. It is partial, and it will pass away. In the Garden man took a place that was created by God for the purpose of unifying God and man in a perfect experience of harmony and worship and altered its purpose. When Adam and Eve sinned, they took the focus off of God, and put it onto themselves. They wanted to be equal with God and to not be bound by the limits that God set in place for their own good. This fracturing of purpose created the same dichotomy that exists in the world today. Adam and Even replaced the center of the universe, God, with themselves. Biblically, Godly love exists as a perfect union of self with an eternal purpose that produces worship and fruit. Self is set aside and this love exists to make much of the God who created is. Worldly love seeks to eliminate God and make love about one's self. Worldy love is selfish and centered on man.

I urge you brother and sisters, test what you to be love in your life. If Godly love is examined, you will follow its fruits all the way back to God and will end in worship. If worldly love is looked at even on a cursory level it quickly can be found to degrade to emotion, temporariness, and selfish desires. These selfish desires bring forth death. Godly love produces life.

So what is love? Love is a heaven focused state of being that seeks to unite the broken man with a holy God which can only be achieved through humbly accepting the sacrificial work of Christ who came to define what love really means through his selfless purchase of human life on the cross. I love Carissa, but only because I see that this love embodies the eternal purpose of a yearning to make Jesus' Name famous in all the world and believing and seeing her life strengthen and encourage me, and my life the same to her, to become more enamored with the love that God has for us. Godly love is attractive. It seems that I just happened to luck out that Carissa is not only in love with God, but also the most beautiful girl in the world.

I hope this challenges and encourages,
-Matt