What Is God Teaching Today
10/12/2020
What Is Love
Last week n my pest control route, I had to wait an extra twenty minutes for a gentleman to come an open up a church for me.
We he finally arrived he was very apologetic, and remorseful for being late.
I kept on assuring him it was ok, things happen all the time to cause us to be late.
He continued to explain he was at the local nursing home. I excitedly chimed in asking if he was visiting the residents.
In his elderly kind voice he said "No, I was feeding my wife."
At first I felt taken back and a little sad, but then I thought about what that kind of love must feel like, and how it must look.
Then I realized that I wanted to be that kind of husband, not just on Valentine's Day, but until death.
So it got me thinking, and praying.
The word “love” is overused in today’s society. We express love for anything from the perfect shoes to pepperoni pizza.
When the object of our affection wears out, then we move on to something new.
This kind of love comes and goes. It moves from object to object, concept to new idea.
Loving another person is not supposed to be so fluid. When we love another person, we SHOULD want that love to last forever.
There’s something in us that craves a relationship with that one special someone who knows us like no one else.
We want that one person we can share life with, do life with… and finish life with.
I believe that this longing we all seem to have is just the thumbprint of God on our souls.
It’s a desire God placed in us, as part of our being created in his image. It makes us want to fall in love and stay in love with one person forever.
The falling in love part is easy enough — most of us have done it a number of times.
But the staying in love… now that’s another matter. Glancing around at the marriages we know, and taking in what our culture tells us, we don’t find much, if any, evidence for the kind of long-lasting relationships we crave.
The standards of what we expect from a relationship are as high as ever — we want massive doses of respect, encouragement, comfort, security, support, acceptance, approval, appreciation, attention, and affection.
We come into a marriage feeling our own deficits in many of these areas, and expecting our spouse to make up for them.
Moreover, our culture has a very low threshold of relational pain. We’re constantly told that if we find ourselves unhappy in a relationship, it’s because we chose the wrong person, so now we need to abort that relationship and choose someone else.
Into that kind of relational chaos, Jesus has spoken. Two thousand years ago, He gave us the foundation for romantic love relationships that endure. This foundation is crystallized for us in the words of Jesus in John 13:34 —
A new command I give you
"Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another."
It’s simple, yet counterintuitive. Jesus takes this word love — which we normally perceive as a noun, something we fall into, or a feeling we experience — and He highlights it as a verb.
It’s something you do, an active choice you make. And once you do, then the feelings will follow.
Lonnie...
