Part 3 - What is Love?
Originally posted: FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 2008
What is Love? Great lyrics for a song right?! Not trying to digress here, however the next line of lyrics in that famous song by Haddaway are “baby don’t hurt me…”.
I think we have lost the true meaning of love in our lives. We now have the perception that to love someone means you will inevitably become hurt.
We guard our hearts (and not in the biblical sense of guarding our hearts) so strongly that we no longer allow anyone into our imitate zone and keep people at a distance. Or, if we do allow them in, we expect them to hurt us and so when they do our deepest fears are confirmed and the wounds go deeper.
In relationships, another famous lyric from a song pops into mind, “what’s love got to do with it, but a second-hand emotion”. Is our perception of ‘love’ so jaded that we can’t even allow ourselves to love or be loved?
I feel that we actually use the words “I love you” as a throw away line and in some circumstances use this to get our own way in a situation.
We have become desensitised to the true meaning of the word love and we can't accept it when someone says ”I love you”.
I think this lack of understanding of the true meaning of love has caused us to be ignorant of Gods’ true nature and what He means when He says He loves us.
So lets go back to the basics of love.
What is love?
To examine the God-kind of love further lets go to the Bible itself and explore Gods definition.
The whole of 1 Corinthians 13 describes in detail Gods’ meaning of love and how this manifests in our lives. This chapter is so critical and I believe foundational to understanding love and how we are to live our lives based on this love.
The most fundamental part of this chapter is v13; And so faith, hope, love abide [faith--conviction and belief respecting man's relation to God and divine things; hope--joyful and confident expectation of eternal salvation; love--true affection for God and man, growing out of God's love for and in us], these three; but the GREATEST of these is love. {CAPS mine}
In the break-down of 1 Corinthians 13 I will only refer to the verse number rather than including the verse, please select the verse link to get the detail.
V1: Even if I can minister to people with words, prophetic or otherwise, but do not convey those words from a position of love, and love that person in the same way that God loved us first, then I am wasting my time.
Even though the words that depart from my mouth may contain the mysteries of God, or may be designed to help the person, they will not mean anything to the recipient as they will be jaded by my intentions. The recipient just ends up hearing words without impact and you may as well be talking to the proverbial wall.
People receive whatever is said to them from their perspective and translate the intent of the words conveyed based on their perception of the ‘tone’ used. They can also misinterpret what was said, even when said in love, due to their own insecurities etc.
So if the meaning can be lost when conveyed in love, how much more should we speak in love to ensure that we do everything in our power to correctly convey ourselves?
So our words have different meaning based on our tone and motivation. Telling someone about Jesus can be lost if the words used are conveyed by, for example, a judgmental attitude. In other words, speaking to anyone out of anything other than love, causes the meaning of your words to be lost and received completely differently to that which was intended.
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