Rev. Aaron Long: What is Love
Back during the nineteen nineties a musician named Hadaway had a song entitled What is Love. Now Will Ferrel made the song famous with his Saturday night live skit but the title and chorus of the song asked an important question each and everyone of us has to ask ourselves, what is love?
In the modern world the term love has been equated with two equally wrong definitions that have screwed up our entire perspective of the world, sexual attraction and nicety. Neither of these things has anything to do with love, they are human emotions and experiences that grow out of our interrelations with each other and because we have mixed the word love up with them we have a false view of God and of our relationships with each other.
I blame the boomers form mixing sexuality up with love, their summer of love, and free love, and all the rest of that hippie mess has just simply turned into degeneracy and hedonism and has made love an excuse to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh and such instead of it actually being love. Sexual pleasure isn’t love, it is simply hedonism in its most base form therefore it actually is selfish, it is self-centered and without true love sexual intimacy ends up becoming destructive over time.
The second way the word love has been messed up in the modern world is people have confused the word love with nice. This is what is behind the more progressive political views of love, how we are to accept everybody just the way they are, affirm people just the way they are. The modern world teaches us that we aren’t supposed to hold people accountable for their own deviances and problems. We are afraid to say anything that might be offensive because it might not be seen as “loving,” this isn’t love, it is detrimental to the human condition.
What love is is putting others before ourselves. Love is doing hard things to build people up. Love is about self-sacrifice, not self-aggrandizement. Love is about saying things to help people, not just saying things to people that make them feel good. Love is dying to self to make others and the world better.
The greatest example of what love is in all of history is Jesus. Jesus showed us love by giving up heaven and coming to dwell among us, God with us. Jesus shows us love in how He walked with us, talked with us, lived with us, cried with us, and healed us. Ultimately Jesus shows us what love is when He dies for us so we might be made right with God.
If you will notice this has nothing to do with sex, it has nothing to do with saying things that affirm people, in fact, Jesus said ugly things to people all the time, He said hurtful things because He loved us and wanted us to be better.
What is love? Love is truly giving up on ourselves for others. Love is self-sacrifice. Love is fully and completely giving ourselves to God, then modeling our lives after Jesus, and pouring ourselves out for the betterment of others and the world around us.
