WHAT IS LOVE?
By Steve Behlke
June 16, 2008
The last blog on "Fear of Rejection and the Grace of God" addressed this same subject from the fear side, the fact that we fear rejection. Positively stated, the fear of rejection points to our desire, really our God-given need to be loved. Even the roughest and toughest men in the world have a deep-seated need and longing, a pining to be loved.
But what is love? This is the first of two questions: (1) What is love? (2) How do we live in the realm of love?
(1) WHAT IS LOVE? The Bible says, "God is love." One might look up Romans 12 or 1 Corinthians 13 for a more detailed definition of how love looks. But simply put, "God is love." And Jesus Christ is the divine face of love. Jesus is Love incarnate.
So to know Jesus Christ is to know God's love.
This raises the question, How well do you know Jesus? I'm not talking about how well you know some of the stories about Jesus or His cultural background. But how well do you know — personally, as a friend — Jesus Christ? Another way of asking this is how secure are you in God's love? Again, what is love?
If it's true that to know Jesus is to know that God loves you: Do know that God loves you even when you are covered in the fresh guilt of your worst sin? Do you know that God loves you even when you act unloving or when others don't seem to love you or when your circumstances are so crummy that you might be tempted to think that God does not love you?
To know Jesus is to know that God loves you. "For I am convinced that... nothing can separate us from the love God that is in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:37-38). And to know Jesus in a real way, is to experience and live in the realm of God's love.
But let's look at love in another way too,
WHAT IS LOVE? Love is the meeting of our needs. Love is the commitment to meet the needs of the beloved* - not the wants, not the desires, but the real needs of the beloved.
Our biggest need, before trusting Jesus Christ, was for the forgiveness of our sins and the gift of eternal life, the restoration to a favored, everlasting, soul-satisfying, God-glorifying relationship with God as Almighty Dad. As an act of needs-meeting love, God committed Himself whatever the cost to fully meet these fundamental needs: For God so loved the world that He sent His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life" (John 3:16).
So love is the commitment to meet the needs of the beloved.
Now, consider the previous blog. Our fear of rejection signifies that we all have a genuine need, but for what?
We all have a basic, God-given need for acceptance, to be fully known and fully accepted. This need hit crisis-mode in the human race through the Edenic Fall! There we rejected God and experienced the unthinkable, God's rejection. We also experienced human rejection. This new experience is part and parcel of the human condition apart from God's needs-meeting love in Jesus Christ.
Since we now fear rejection we hide the things about us that are not considered attractive, things that might warrant rejection. So we buy Head & Shoulders to get rid of our flakey white stuff. We wear clothes that are more flattering to our body. We buy impressive cars that we can't even afford.
In light of this human condition, WHAT IS LOVE? Love is the commitment to accept the other! Where you fear rejection, love betrothes itself to you forever. Where you fear being known and rejected, love fully knows and fully accepts you. Love means never having to fear the Lover's rejection.
Again, God is love and Jesus Christ is the face of Divine Love. God fully knows you. And through Christ and the work of the cross, God fully accepts you, unconditionally. He chose you. He gives you eternal life with Him. He gives you His Holy Spirit as a pledge of His eternal commitment to accept you. Where you fear rejection, Christ commits to accept you, to delight in you, to never leave you or forsake you.
We have other needs to, which God commits Himself to love us in. In your weaknesses and fears and vulnerabilities, love is the commitment to protect you, to defend you, to be strong for you.
In your fear of poverty and need, love is the commitment to provide for you where you lack.
The list is as long as our God-given needs. Love commits itself to meet the beloved's needs. We know we are loved then, when our needs are met by another.
(2) How do we experience God's love, how do we live in the realm of God's love? A couple of words come to mind: Trust and Humility. A Person comes to mind too, Jesus.
God loves you! He revealed His love on the cross, through His Son. He wants you to know Jesus and to trust Him and to never doubt God's love.
We live in the realm of love by trusting Jesus and also by humbly owning up to our neediness in light of God's commitment to love us.
In other words, "boasting in our weakness," we look to Jesus and allow Him to love us, to meet our God-given needs however He chooses to. Humility allows us to approach God with empty arms and open minds and hopeful hearts, because we know Jesus and trust God to do what He loves to do.
We further clarify God's love in our lives and live in the grace of Divine Love, when we are in a community (a family, church, small group, close friends) that gets this about God, that gets this about our needy selves, that gets love and grace, and commits to love, to accept, to speak truth to, to affirm, to protect, to nurture, to be there for, to listen to, and to help out one another. We live in the realm of love when we live authentically with others who know Jesus in a way that fulfills them.
Finally, we experience God's love when we are able to love others in the same way as God loves us. This is when love is perfected or completed (1 John 4:12). When God's love meets our real needs and fills our hearts to overflowing grace and when we act in needs-meeting love toward others.
Where are you at in this?
* Bill Thrall and John Lynch are instrumental in this understanding. See also the book True-Faced by the same.
It sure is refreshing to read things like this from you. I can't take it for granted when a lot of Christians I know think "emotion" has no part in our relationship with God. How can we love God with all our heart, mind and soul, and not be engaged emotionally? Yet some repeat, "If you love me, you will obey my commands," as if it's not a warning against hypocrisy and lip service but the sole description of what loving God means. It's a both/and statement as far as I can tell.
In your sermon yesterday you made the point that emphasizing grace does not mean taking a weak position on sin, but taking it the most seriously in pointing only to Jesus as the source of salvation. Excellent! C.S. Lewis said, "The problem with looking down on others is that you can't see what's above you." There does seem to be a direct relationship between our knowing and receiving God's love and grace, and extending it to others.
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Good stuff, Steve. Parishioner, your summary is excellent.
Apart from the fact that we're typically simply too selfish to love as Christ loves, another obstacle to true love (for God, for others, and even for our enemies) is that love entails risk. It is more comfortable to have a religious safe-haven where I only allow those who look like me, talk like me, like the things I like, etc. than a welcoming, affirming, loving community where I might get "dirty." We risk personal comfort and safety, and even rejection, when we love. However, things come into proper focus when we consider the risks Jesus took in his incarnation and his crucification.
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WHERE ARE YOU AT IN THIS? I am PINING for this as you said. Where is a community or church that GETS THIS!?
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Non Christians experience love too.
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Hi Steve,
I quote you:
"We all have a basic, God-given need for acceptance, to be fully known and fully accepted. This need hit crisis-mode in the human race through the Edenic Fall!"
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As you've said here we do have a God-given need to be fully known and fully accepted, and we were before the "Edenic Fall." This is interesting to me because I have adult ADHD. This is a very annoying brain abnormality that makes socialization difficult. Although I've had this since childhood, I was tested for it in 1994(or 95) and I was evaluated for it and started on Ritalin in 1996. I would go on about this, but it isn't what I'm getting at.
What I'm getting at is that we really do need to be fully known and fully accepted. I'm not making a plea here for you all to accept me, but I want to make a point about what I'm presently reading about and have been discussing with the woman I see for cognitive therapy.
The book I'm reading is titled, "Scattered". The author is Gabor Maté, M.D.. He talks about how ADD begins in the the right frontal lobe of the brain. I'm going to quote a paragraph because it is important to the point I'm making.
"In the human infant, the growth of dopamine-rich nerve terminals and the development of dopamine receptors is stimulated by chemicals released in the brain during the experience of joy, the ecstatic joy that comes from the perfectly attuned mother-child mutual gaze interaction. Happy interactions between mother and infant generate motivation and arousal by activating cells in the midbrain that release endorphins, thereby inducing in the infant a joyful, exhilarated state. They also trigger the release of dopamine. Both endorphins and dopamine promote the development of new connections in the prefrontal cortex. Dopamine released from the midbrain also triggers the growth of nerve cells and blood vessels in the right prefrontal cortex and promotes the growth of dopamine receptors. A relative scarcity of such receptors and blood supply is thought to be one of the major physiological dimensions of ADD."
So my point is that socialization, acceptance, eye to eye contact, total unconditional love, joyful vulnerable interaction are very important for our good mental health. It isn't just for infants, but in God's reality we are infants. How does this tie in with God and the Bible? Well God made us. He gave us our brains and our brain chemistry. He gave us our need to be social creatures who need to receive love, acceptance, and joyful interaction, but even more importantly to be the givers of all of that.
Jesus is our example. He HAD to leave His throne in Heaven and come to earth to give us these very things. He was so full of love that He HAD to come and give it to us. Arguing is not what we are supposed to do with scripture. Scripture is there to teach us how to love each other and to love God. Amen?! I love you all!
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You may also remember the story of the little boy who goes to church with his father trying to understand God. The boy is given an intellectual or even a faith based answer to what knowing God is like- and the little boy's answer to his father was but Daddy " I want a God with skin on him. " Forgive the lack of context for my use of this illustration. I am sure others of you know the story clearer. Yet it is where my thoughts start as I think of these 2 critical questions 1) what is love, and 2) how do we live in the realm of love.
Two of my favorite words in scripture are in Ephesians 2:4. Paul goes through a list of all who were dead in their tresspasses and sins in which they formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of this world, and we by wrath children of disobedience...I find myself there and here are they words that cause my soul to sing.....BUT GOD, BUT GOD
CAn you feel it BUT God- BUT GOD- HE demonstrates His love- Love ACTS. BUT GOD when we were DEAD in our transgressions and sins made us alive in Christ Jesus! But God- not only did that he restored our heritage. He gave us the privilede of being adopted into his family as "sons" and this lanuage is inclusive to mean daughters as well. We had lost it all because of how we have chosen to live and God not only graciously restores it, redeems it, he replaces it with an identity of royalty.
Then it is out of this that he asks us to live differently empowered by his holy spirit. He has already seen, and so haven't we what life looks like without the holy spirits' power. On the basis of these thruths live differently-Romans 12:1- Living in the realm of love is the most difficult for me. We are individuals of one another. We are to defer to one another. To be devoted to one another in brotherly love as Christ did.... I have seen how people respond when they see the love of God demonstrted beteen two believers. I have also smelled the stench of Satan when he has gotten in between 2 God fearing and loving people. And relationships were ruined.
It is an incredible call. Jesus says: that if you love one another, then all men will know you are my disciples, by the love you have for one another. God has won all the victories over all of sin once for all for all time, He call us to move closer to him as we move closer to one another. But God... knows what will arise in our midst
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Edwina;
My name is Kelly Kane. I am so glad that you said what you did. I appreciate it. I am a mental health therapist and I am glad to have the power of God and the Holy Spirit on my side. Additionally, many in our congregations have illness, addictions, mental illness, things they need others to know to grow spirituall but arre afraid to say-which I didn't sense was your situation.
One last thought-did you know that when we worship God the pre-frontoal cortex lights up and fires the way it was intended and repair of normal neural development takes place in the brain.? There truly is healing in Jesus.
Your sister in Christ:
Kelly Kane
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