Meditation – What is Love?
by Isaac Overton
What is love? What does that word mean to you? When you get beyond the sentiments and fuzzy ideas, what are we actually talking about when we use this word? Go on, try and answer it for yourself: What is love? Write down your answer in a sentence or two (go ahead and use the margins of the page – that’s what the blank space is there for!). What is love? In John 15:12, Jesus said to his disciples: “This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you.” If the significance and importance of love was not already self-evident, as Christians these words from the mouth of our Lord ought to immediately arrest us. If we’re going to pursue obedience to the Lord in this commandment, then one thing becomes immediately obvious: we need to know what love is. So I ask again: What is love? In this first meditation, we’re going to pause and try to answer just that question.
When you look at the culture around us, and then open up your Bible to see what it says about love, it’s not hard to see that something is missing in the world out there. The world will tell you that that word “love” mostly refers to sexual relationships, and furthermore that it is almost exclusively associated with feelings. People speak of “falling in love,” and then of course when things don’t work out, you fall “out of love.” In the Miriam-Webster dictionary, we find this definition: “love is a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person.” But is this it? Is this really what love is? Can you imagine if love in the church operated only on the basis of feelings of affection for our fellow believers? As we seek to discern what God says about love, we’re going to see that these sorts of assumptions not only need to be challenged, but that they need to be turned completely upside down.
The first thing that we need to see about love is a truth that is both offensive to the world and perhaps surprising to us. What is it? It’s the truth that the world does not actually know what love is. Why do I say this? Well, in 1 John 4:8 we read: “ anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” In John 1 we also read that the world does not know God. The conclusion you come to when you put these two things together is not hard to draw. Since God is love, and the world does not know God, therefore the world does not truly know love. In fact, in Romans 5:10 people are described as enemies of God, and so as enemies of God in our natural state, we have to say that we are also enemies of love – because God is love. It’s a fairly startling conclusion, but also inescapable.
This insight also applies to us personally, because it shows us that – outside of Christ – we simply don’t have love in and of ourselves. We are born as sinners, and sinners – as enemies of God – do not know love. And so the answer is very clear here, and the answer is this: we need God to give us a new heart and teach us to love. In fact, even as Christians, as we consider this question of what love is, it may be helpful for us to start with the assumption that we know very little of love at all. Because even as Christians, sin remains in our hearts and wages war against the Holy Spirit within us (Gal 5:16-18). Sin persists within us as a powerful force opposing God and, by implication, opposing love. And so right here at the beginning, start with this assumption: I am most likely very ignorant of love. I most likely don’t understand it, and I most likely am immature in it. Now maybe that’s not the case, maybe you are very spiritually mature and truly are walking in the ways of love – all praise be to God! But even so it is nonetheless healthy to start with the assumption that we have much learning and growing to do yet. “Let the wise hear and increase in learning, and the one who understands obtain guidance” (Prov 1:5).
There is an obvious application that flows out of what we have just learned, and the application is this: if God does not give us love, then we will not love ourselves. It is beyond us to tame the wild selfishness of our own hearts. Our sinful passions are like wild horses that cannot be controlled. Do you ever feel like that? Like some sinful or selfish passion consumes you in a moment. Like a forest fire in a windstorm it is whipped up into a frenzy, and before you know it there is devastation everywhere. And it happens again, and again, and again. We must pray and ask God to fill our hearts with love! Seeking the gift of love from the Lord. Are you praying to grow in love? A helpful book to grow further in this is Jonathan Edwards' "Charity and it's fruit." Grab it now from the church library!
SDG.