REFLECTIONS

More About Love

Perhaps no other word is more powerful than love; yet there may be no other word more misused. We use love as a term to express feelings about so many things that have nothing to do with its real meaning. We love chocolate, football, movies, books, and so on. But love is not a fitting term for those. As my grandmother used to say, “Love is always about people. You shouldn’t love something that can’t love you back.” So, what is love anyway?

In Reflections dated September 13, 2009, I quoted Keith Miller’s recall of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane:  

“…Jesus was evidently not filled with a warm feeling of loving desire to die for man.  As a matter of fact, our term for extreme discomfort, ‘sweating blood,’ likely came from His experience that night. He evidently ‘sweated blood’ and prayed three times for a way not to perform this most loving act. And when He did agree to go, the love was expressed not by His feeling but by the fact that he acted out of love for His father whether He felt like it or not!…

“If this is true, then Christian love is not based on the feeling I had always longed for. Christian love is simply “an act of the kind God wants performed for another person’s health and wholeness to help fulfill His will for that person…” (Italics added.)[1]

But I believe love does carry warm feelings with it. We call it joy.

Joy includes those times, both troubled and pleasureful, filled with gladness for having been a part of it. John explains love best:

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him: (1 John 4:16-18)

“You are the light of the world.”

Richard +

www.reflectingthesavior.org

[1]Miller, Keith, A Second Touch, Word Books, 1967, p. 86

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