What’s Love Got To Do With It (series)(250)

What’s Love Got To Do With It? (Series)

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”

‭‭I John‬ ‭4:7-8‬

One of my favorite chapters in the Bible is First John, Chapter Four.  Simply stated, God is love. 

The title is from an old Tina Turner song.  It was a pretty catchy tune while I was growing up. And I may or may not have sung this song, or at least attempted to sing it, many times.  Anyways, there are a couple lines in her song that sing like this, 

“What's love got to do, got to do with it

What's love but a second hand emotion

What's love got to do, got to do with it”

Our world has scrambled the meaning of love like an egg. It’s beaten, stirred and whisked about that nobody really understands what love really has to do with it.  “It” being life.  What does love have to do with life?  Life in this instance, refers to our Christianity. So I could’ve just said - what does love have to do with our Christianity?  After all, love is an emotion right?  And emotions are optional right?

We, as a people, love all kinds of stuff. We love money, cars, chocolate, horses, pretty things, earthly things, many many things.  You could add the words “I love” to just about anything you strongly admire.  It’s become so diluted, seeing love from a biblical perspective is almost impossible. I’ll attempt to shed some light into as we go along. 

I admit, I attached the word love to almost every single relationship I’ve had, meaningful or not.  If It was a long or short term relationship, physical or otherwise, I was definitely in love. Or so I thought. 

It was used intermittently at times with pleasure and lust. I fell in and out of love easily. I’m not boasting, or even proud in any way, shape or form of it.  I didn’t understand it.  I believed that emotions (i.e. feelings) which were coming from physical interaction, was love.  I believed that attraction was love. This supposed love was a bag of mixed emotion; excitement, care, attachment, attention, bonding and physicality.  I misunderstood it so badly.  In fact, I didn’t understand love at all. I wanted it to be love and nothing short of it. So

What was really nothing at all, in my eyes, and heart, was love. Wrong.  All of those feelings weren’t love, it wasn’t anything more than a result of some childhood trauma that I didn’t care to dig up.  

As you read through the Bible, you, or at least I hope you do, attempt to understand what it all means.  When we start reading, we are peeling through information that we may or may not understand.  It’s a bunch of words that sometimes appear cryptic, that we have to reread and sometimes have no idea what any of it means. And while we read and study, we gain knowledge and it starts to come together. No longer are we reading all familiar and memorized verses of our childhood. We are reading further and deeper. And as we continue with all of this knowledge we will desire to understand it. And once we start to understand the words in front of us - we seek wisdom from them. And with all of this knowledge, understanding and wisdom, we look to apply what we are learning to our Christian lives. All so that we can live a life that would honor and glorify God.  It is a time consuming devotion that will help us in all aspects of our lives, if we do it with desire and honor. 

I say all of that to say this. This is why I didn’t understand love or what love had to do with anything.  I was looking at love, and any joy or pain associated with it, from a worldly perspective. Anything I ever thought I knew about love was wrong.  The emotions and feelings I had in my stomach and heart were feelings of loss, abandonment, fear, attachments, attraction, excitement, pleasure, etc.  Those feelings weren’t love, they were a result of something else. 

We attach love to our family, friends, animals and who knows what else.  We have loosely attached love to so many worldly things that nobody understands the biblical meaning of love. The Bible defines love in many levels. And in order to truly understand love we have to look at the origin. The origin is God. Love started with God. 

God is love, is a truth statement. It is absent of anything bad or wrong or anything else. God is love. God is not sometimes love, He is love.  God doesn’t sometimes love us. He is love.  God defines love. 

So what does all this mean?  It means in order for us to truly understand love, we must understand what it means to God. And unfortunately our tiny, limited little minds will never completely comprehend it. Not because we aren’t smart, it’s because we aren’t smart enough.  So even though we will never fully understand it, we can understand what it is through His Word. 

I hope you’ll continue this journey with me through this series on love.  We will dig deeper tomorrow. 

“In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

‭‭I John‬ ‭4:9-11‬