What's Love?-part 1

Hi everyone. Thanks for checking out The Mixblog this week. We are starting a new teaching series that will take us through the rest of January. We are calling it "What's Love?". No...there is no "Got To Do With It" on the end (that's Tina Turner) or "How Do We Know When It's" at the beginning of it (that's Van Halen). I tried to crack a joke about this at The Mix this week and about 2/3 of the way through the joke, it dawned on me that none of these high school kids were born yet when either of those songs came out. Almost daily I'm reminded in some way how old I really am. But on to "Love"...

First of all, how do you really define love? I'm talking about all kinds of love...romantic love, love between friends, love between parents and their kids, love for God, love for other people in general. It really does depend on who you ask. We hear about love all the time, see movies about love all the time (although I do have an anti-chick flick gene that keeps me from being able to enjoy these), listen to music about love all the time, see "love" thrown about on TV all the time...you get the idea. Love seems to be everywhere and yet we have a really hard time explaining what it is. Some would say its an emotion...some would say an action...some would say a feeling...a choice...a commitment...a destiny...a tennis score. Does it happen "at first sight" or after lots of "sights"? Can you choose to love someone, then not love them...then love them again? How do I know if I really love someone? How do I know if I really love God? Well before we can dive into the 'love discussion', let's establish a couple of really important things first:

• First, most of the good things that God allows us to experience in our lives are symbolic pictures of spiritual things He wants us to experience as well. For example...marriage. The Bible seems to indicate that one of the biggest reasons God invented marriage (which He did invent by the way) is to give us a physical picture here on earth of what a covenant relationship is like...the kind of relationship God wants to have with us. Its hard for us to understand things that we can't see, smell or touch (like a relationship with God). But marriage helps us to have a deeper understanding of what a deep level, intimate, covenant-based relationship is like. Its a physical symbol of a deeper spiritual understanding. This is also true of love. God allows us to experience 'love' so we will understand just a little bit, how He feels about us.

• Second, since God designed the concept of love, built us to be able to experience love, and showed us the first example of what love looks like...it only makes sense that we look to Him for the correct definition. We get lots of definitions of what love is from lots of different places. The best definition of something always comes from the inventor of it.

So what is God's definition of love? Lets check out the instruction manual: 1 Corinthians 13:4-8.

So how often do you love someone like this? I mean, the 'love' that I show to people a lot of times is more of a "love is usually patient when they do things my way, love doesn't envy unless I deserve it more than they do, love doesn't boast unless I'm really better than they are, love isn't rude unless they seem to really want me to be rude to them based on the idiotic way they are acting, love is not easily angered unless its those certain people...you know who you are, love keeps no record of wrongs (except all the people I deleted from my Facebook account and the ones I stopped sending Christmas Cards to this year...but they deserved it)...sometimes protects, rarely trusts, occasionally hopes, and actually perseveres sometimes"...kind of love. Anyone else in my boat? I think probably if we all got honest, we're all in the same boat if we are trying to love anyone in and of ourselves. In the flesh, Biblical love is absolutely impossible.

And then to make matters worse, God throws another log on the fire by saying that 'love' is more important than alot of other things. Read 1 Corinthians 13:13. God says strengthening my faith is important..but not as important as love. God says trusting in Him for amazing and powerful things is important...but not important as love. I gotta get this 'love thing' right!

So this causes me to ask some really tough questions of myself. Why do I love Jesus? Really...why do I love Him? If I'm not careful, here's some wrong reasons I can love Jesus:

• He's a good luck charm. If I keep Jesus around, good things will happen.


• He's a vaccine against 'bad stuff' in my life. If I love Jesus, he'll make sure life is a little easier for me.


• He's a Spiritual Walmart. If I keep Jesus around I'll be able to get everything I think I want or need all the time. One stop shopping...Always Low Prices-Always!


• Because someone else told me I should. Everyone thinks I should love Jesus so I do.


• Because someone else expects me to. I need to love Jesus because others will be disappointed if I don't.

Some of these are things that can definitely happen as a by-product of loving Jesus but if my love for Him is based on these things, I'm going to decide I don't love Him anymore when He doesn't do what I thought He should.

OR...I could love Jesus:

• Because I realize who He is and what He has done for me by dying on the cross and allowing me to have a relationship with God forever.

All too often, I think we decide to love Jesus based on what we hope He will do for us in the future. Instead, we need to love Him because of what He has already done for us. Our love for Him is based on the fact that He loved us first by taking the punishment for sin that we deserved. He rescued us from a spiritual death! And for that, we should love Him!!

If our love for Jesus is based on what we want Him to do for us in our lives, we will eventually turn our backs on Him. Sometimes He does what we want Him to...but sometimes He doesn't. He never stops loving us and He never stops showing that love to us. But He also doesn't always do what we think he should. What then? Unfortunately, I know way too many Christians who only loved Jesus because they thought He would always make life easier for them or give them everything they wanted or keep bad things from happening to them. And when it didn't happen this way, they tossed their faith out the window and turned their back on God, who loves them very, very much...and decided they didn't want to love Jesus anymore.

Please don't misunderstand. We should definitely believe for God to do awesome things in our lives...and He wants to. BUT...if He chooses not to, we must make sure our love for Him is based on what He's already done for us. I love to study the Apostle Paul. Paul was a guy who was an absolute jerk before he knew Jesus. He was more than a jerk...he was evil! He was basically the 1st century version of Osama Bin Laden. He wanted to kill as many Christians as possible and see to it that Christianity died off. Then when Jesus got a hold of Him, everything changed. But the thing I like the most about him is that he never forgot why he fell in love with Jesus. Here was a guy that God used in miraculous ways...he wrote 13 books in the New Testament, started churches everywhere, healed the sick, saw 1000's saved...God used him powerfully. But his life was anything but easy with Jesus. He also got beat with a cane, flogged with a whip, stoned until they thought he was dead, thrown in prison several times and eventually was beheaded for his faith. That's not exactly the path of least resistance. That's not the easy road. But it is the path of most fulfillment. The path of most purpose and destiny. And in Romans 7:21-25, we see Paul remembering all over again why he loves Jesus. It wasn't because Jesus made his life easy, its because Jesus gave him life to begin with by exchanging the sinful stuff inside of Paul for the perfect-ness of Jesus. That's a good reason to love Him!

Next week, we are going to look at what God has to say about loving people. I have a feeling I might need to work on that part too... Thanks for reading! See you next time.

--Bob