For decades the cold, gray days of winter have been warmed by the love of Valentine’s Day.  But this year it seems that the red and pink hearts, flowers, and heart shaped boxes of candy have been overshadowed by face masks, hand sanitizer, and a pandemic whose numbers seem like a bad Hollywood horror movie. Even cupid with a bow and arrow can’t chase away this cloud.  But where has the love actually gone?

What is love?

The world would tell us that love is an emotional response to favorable conditions. When things are going well from our perspective we have positive emotions and feel happy.  When things are not going well there is nothing to produce good feelings and the happiness fades away taking the love with it.  Love then is an emotion created by circumstances over which we may have little or no control.

For Christians love is something very different.  The Bible teaches that love is an act of our will, an action, a verb. Perhaps the best known usage of the word love in Scripture is found in John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son…” To diagram that sentence God is the subject, loved is the verb, and gave is the object of the verb. Thus, Biblical love is giving.

The foundation of Christianity is love, first for God, and then for others. Early in the Lord Jesus’ ministry He was asked the question “Good teacher, what is the greatest commandment?” His answer in Mark 12:30-31 was that we are to love God with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength; and then to love our neighbor as our self.

Looking for love in all the wrong places…

As Believers our primary relationship is with the Lord our God, and we are to love Him with all that we have. Love is giving and the two primary things we can give Him are our trust and our obedience. We cannot love a God we don’t trust, and we cannot trust a God we don’t love. Our obedience is the logical result of our trust. To trust Him we must believe what the Bible teaches: that God is good, that He is sovereign, that nothing can separate us from His love, that He will keep our heart in His perfect peace as our thoughts are focused on Him because we trust Him, that His love will cast out all fear. Maintaining this relationship with Him requires hard work and discipline on our part but is the firm foundation upon which all other relationships can then be built. Much of the unhappiness in life is because we look to other people or things to fill the voids in our hearts that only God can fill. Because people or things can never fully satisfy us, we move endlessly from one heartache and disappointment to another. Our heart’s true rest can only be found in God alone.

Because God is eternal, immutable, the same yesterday, today, and forever, His love never changes. Our relationship with Him cannot be affected by external circumstances. As the Apostle Paul said in Romans 8:35-39: “Who can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble, pain or persecution? Can lack of clothes and food, danger to life and limb, the threat of force of arms?”…”No, in all these things we win an overwhelming victory through Him who has proved His love for us.”…”Nor anything else in God’s whole world has any power to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!” (Phillips translation)

Keeping our focus on Him allows His perfect love to cast out the fears of whatever may be going on around us, and allows Him to keep our hearts in His perfect peace regardless of circumstances.

As we love Him with all of our heart, mind, soul, and strength, He provides the true, genuine love with which we can then love others. In loving our neighbor as ourself it is important to realize that all neighbors are not the same! If we are married our spouse is our closest neighbor, if we have children they are next, then our next closest family members, friends, coworkers, etc.

Love is giving and the Christian life is a thousand choices a day to give what we have that is in the genuine best interest of others. It requires enormous trust in God to put the needs of others first when the world, the flesh, and the devil are telling us to look out for number one!

Only if we are first firmly rooted in God alone is this even a possibility. Only if we are trusting fully in Him, abiding in Him, resting in Him, drawing our life from Him can we then freely give to others. Otherwise we are desperately trying to get from them rather than give. The opposite of love is not hate as is commonly thought, but rather selfishness. All of us are born selfish by nature and by choice, but as Christians we learn to love God and others as we grow and change to become more like Him. Our actions are based on the principles of His Word, choosing to trust and obey Him and then to meet the needs of others in the confidence that He is taking care of us.

Rivers of living water….

The natural result of this relationship with God and others is the fruit of the spirit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The emotions that the world sees as love are really the results of true Biblical love; they are the effect, not the cause. While a romantic dinner, bouquet of flowers, or a heart shaped box of chocolate may create a momentary illusion of love, it certainly won’t be the genuine love that produces a lifelong marriage or eternal security. But a person whose life is built on the firm foundation of the love of God will have a never-ending supply of the true love, joy, and peace of God for their marriage, their family, and others.