Redefining Love: Part 1

What do we believe about love?

 The world teaches that love does not have to be consuming. It teaches that love that is just full of fun and passion; It does not change our hearts.

 The world teaches that love is a rite of passage- something you had to find by age 16 to have the same maturity and experience as our peers. The world teaches that the certain kind of sadness that comes from not being loved in the right way was good thing, that it gives you an interesting story. 

The world teaches that love is selfless to a fault. It teaches us that the more we are willing to be hurt by someone the more we love them. Most of us would wait years on people who do not notice or who treat us poorly.

 God has been working on my heart in this area for a while, and as I pressed into what God believes about love I found more and more that my ideas of love were being changed all over again.The world (including myself) is using love in a way contrary to how God designed it. 

He is love.

God designed a love that does not give up. Ever.

God designed a love that is beautiful.

God designed a love that is changing and powerful.

God designed love to be a reflection of His passion for his creation.

God is passionate and His love is demanding.

Recently during worship I was listening to a song by the Sidewalk Prophets. One of the lyrics is “When did love become unmoving, when did love become unconsuming?”.

News flash: we cannot change God’s design for love.

Love was designed to be relentless, so it will be relentless. Love was designed to be changing and consuming and life altering and it will be. Just because we believe that love can be casual and flippant does not make it so.

When we accept as a culture that relationships are just for fun or just casual, when we let the “just friends” culture run rampant, when we enter into a relationship with no definition other than “talking” we are directly in contrast to God’s plan for love. That is why these relationships will always hurt. If you really care about someone, if you do love someone truly, that love does not give up. It will change you. It will demand things of you that you may not be capable of giving.

This is why I believe repeatedly in Song of Songs, the Beloved begs for us not to awaken love till the time is right. Love is powerful and it can be dangerous if it used in the wrong way. It is against the very nature of love to just stop loving and move on.

The world teaches that love is something necessary to become a mature adult of the world. It teaches that there is no way to be seen as deep or wise if we haven’t had some great heartbreak.

You do not need a great heartbreak, because you are involved in the greatest love story of all time.

Why choose to dwell on a past hurt when we have daily reminders that the creator of the universe is passionately in love with us? Why chose pain over joy?

 The world teaches us that love is more beautiful and tragic the more we give up. We try to prove that we are worth loving because we give up so much. We try to repeat what has already been finished. Jesus waited years for us when we did not care. He suffered wounds beyond what I can imagine. But it is finished. When we set out to give, give, give to prove that we are worth it, we are not showing a love that is Christ-like.

The difference is that Christ’s sacrifices were not self-serving. He did not die on the cross to prove that He cared. He did it because He knew we needed it. He did it because He knew it would save us. His mindset in sacrifice was not to serve Himself at all, but to serve others.

God will always be working on my heart in this area. But I am excited to see where the journey takes me. God has a beautiful definition of love that He wants you to understand. Ask God what aspects of love you have distorted, and ask Him to reveal what His real thoughts are.