I want to know what love is, that many-splendored and crazy little thing. We can get lost in the feeling of the power of love, but it’s also more than a feeling. We can’t help falling in love, but you can’t hurry love, either. Even if I knew I loved you, there could be a different vision of love in your eyes. I could try to make you feel my love, promising the best of my love and proclaiming that I will always love you – but wouldn’t it seem like I was just crazy in love if you had lost that loving feeling? Love is a battlefield, a stranger, a wonderful thing, and even an open door. Yet for all the ways we fill the world with silly love songs, what’s love got to do with it?
Love is so crucial to the human experience that it saturates the books we read, the movies we watch, and yes, the music we hear. Yet, do we really understand it? My buddy John, a single Christian brother in Baltimore, summed it up well: “A lot of times when we say, ‘I love you’, what we actually mean is, ‘I love the way you make me feel.’” The world’s version of love is pretty self-centered, based largely on pleasant feelings. That’s why we talk about falling in and out of love. It’s why we hesitate to discipline – or even just to say “no” to – our children. We think love means feeling good because we have what we want.
Love can feel good. Yet to truly know what love is, we have to understand its origin: God. From the beginning to the end of the Bible, love is God’s defining characteristic (cf. Exo. 34:6-7, 1 Jn. 4:7-8). That is why we crave love so much: “God created man in his own image” (Gen. 1:27). Because God is good, He also supplies the love we so desperately need every day: “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:22-23).
That is what’s missing from so many of our stories, songs, and personal experiences of love. We often accept – and even pursue – poor, selfish imitations of love. What we need is God’s patient, kind, giving, humble, submissive, truth-rejoicing, load-bearing, believing, hopeful, enduring, and never-ending love (1 Cor. 13:4-7). We need love the way God shows it to us: a self-sacrificing action motivated not by satisfying wants but by meeting needs (Rom. 5:6-8). Through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice for our sins, we can know what love is: do you want Him to show you? Follow Him, and He will.
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