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The word love is used to describe our passion for everything from chocolate to people that are important to us. Love in many ways is based on our opinions. Does something taste good, make us feel good about life, benefit us or promote something we think is important? That is the criteria for whether we love or not. But is that really love?
The definition of love is given in 1st Corinthians chapter 13. The Message Bible puts it like this: Love never gives up, cares more for others than for self, doesn’t strut or have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, and isn’t always “me first,’. Love doesn’t fly off the handle, or keep score of the sins of others. It doesn’t revel when others grovel or take pleasure in the flowering of the truth. Love puts up with anything. Then it says love trusts God always and looks for the best, never looks back but keeps on going to the end. Love never fails.
My short definition of love is simply a decision we make to do the right thing. All of those things listed above are the right thing to do. Love starts with God and when I think of the love of God, those words describe who He is.
We Christians are getting married someday. We are the bride of Christ. I remember when I first met my wife. I did everything that I could to show her that she was important to me, that I wanted to be with her and do things that she wanted to do. I wanted her to be happy. The only reward I desired was the smile on her face.
Throughout our relationship, I learned to trust her with my heart. Trust is the offspring of love. Everything she does reflects her care and love for me. The same is true for God. His actions demonstrate His love for us.
We say we love God but we have to ask ourselves, are we loving Him in the way I just described with my wife? Do we read His Word so we know what pleases Him? Do we trust Him with our money, our health, our future? Like King David, is it important that we don’t sin? Are we proud of Him. Do we tell others of His goodness?
Christ allowed himself to be formed into the image of mortal flesh. He left the privileged heaven he created and forever became a man. He decided before creation to place himself in the perilous position of being a man. It’s been said that God cannot learn and the maker of the universe surely can’t be taught anything. But I think it was through the incarnation that God felt what it was like to be a man.
Life was hard, sin and its consequences were everywhere; man was suffering and in hardship ever since he was driven out of Eden. There was no hope that anything would ever change. Jesus had compassion on people, healed them, fed them, and even raised them from the dead. He felt as a human feels and wept because men lived under such bondage to sin.
We must do the same for God. We’re born into this world. We find ourselves wrestling with sin. We see a knight in shining armor, one who can deliver us from our plight. We choose to leave ourselves at the cross and follow Him, pursue Him till we are united with Him in Holy communion.
Jesus pleaded with God if there was another way besides the cross to rescue the souls of men, let’s do it that way. The reality of the suffering He would endure he had seen before. Men were brutal, savage in their treatment of each other. He knew what awaited Him. It had to be terrifying for Him. Jesus was to experience what God could not. On the cross, Jesus said, God why have you forsaken me? On the cross, He had become one of us.
We, like Christ, must leave the world we came from.
To love God we have to trust him. The bride believes what the groom has promised. He can be trusted. He will be faithful through sickness and health, rich times and poor times, better or worse. With Christ, there is no death do us part; he died for us. He is forever faithful and at the marriage celebration, we will be like Him, forever faithful.