Serving several months as interim minister in a church for a somewhat troubled congregation, I was quietly startled by the remark of a little lady well into her middle years, when she offered me unsolicited counsel. Do not come in here and preach about love. I have heard so much about love I am ready to throw up. I have never been able to throw off her words. I wish I could. I soon learned that there had been much said about love in point of time given to it, but it was said to persons unprepared to give much attention to the subject, and it was said by a pastor or two who had, like many others, treated love in so pedestrian a manner that the people really did not have a depth perception about love. For them love was something that happened, or it didn’t happen, and they were not prepared to discover love in its real meaning and original source. The people had missed personal and corporate love orientations. They needed the Christian will to believe.
With the verbal flood about love, we seem to know little about it as God-originated. What appears in philosophical conversation has been well ranged and worked over, but conclusions have been given little attention, therefore inadequate application. Edmund Burke stated that love, with its mode and principles, is of the utmost importance to the morals and manner of every society. One would believe that Burke, in the 18th century, was looking in on current society, when he wrote that the French had infused into their youth: an unfashioned, indelicate, sour, gloomy, ferocious medley of pedantry and lewdness, of metaphysical speculations blended with the coarsest sensuality. Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Frenchman who took some umbrage at British Burke’s observations, admitted that it was difficult to talk in French about this matter during his day without appearing obscene rather than sublime. That may be what has happened to us in our time. The language of love is such a mixed stew that one wonders what it is. Hollywood love is on the menu, and it doesn’t nourish us. There is so much that is obscene.
If God, as to his nature, is love (1 John 4:8), as the Apostle John affirms he is, we can be sure that love is not simple. If love is as universal to spiritual context as oxygen is in nature, we can be sure there is abundance from God. As I breathed oxygen before I was aware of creation, so I may have love long before I understand its constitution. From God, love enters the nucleus of our spiritual lives. Cells have life because they ingest nourishment, and release waste. The Christian believes that he or she is nourished in love through the Holy Spirit, Scripture, prayer, and practice. The waste is that which does not belong, and is eliminated through confession, forgiveness, and righteousness. Basic to the processes of love is found in God. Love is spiritual blood flow. Without love, one could not be forgiven. Humanly speaking, without love one cannot enjoy the sanctification of the relationships that love engenders. Such love carries into marriage and family, into relationships with neighbors and colleagues, with all that is living, but especially love for God, whose nature is alive with love. So to love God is to join the journey of all other pure love experience. God knows this is a bit much for us to take in without help. So he helps by loving us first. In part, we may take it from there, but there is much to be done to gain the maturity and breadth of love. I learn about love from God. What does his love make him think and do? It gives to him concern, action, protection, sacrifice, communication, steadfastness, empathy, and in supposition, additional contributions to his work in the universe. It is at work in his distaste for evil, for suffering, for degradation, for loneliness, and the like that also fills a human list. God is worshipped in the human effort to follow in the model of his love. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020