Can you see through all the flashy Valentines messages to the lies about love?
The lies are tucked tightly into the Hallmark cards and movies and commercials and advertisements and stories and novels and do you see them? Do you hear them in the songs on the radio?
Ever find yourself thinking about what you’re not getting out of a friendship? from a family member? What you’re not getting from your spouse? I do. if I’m honest.
Our whole love story with Jesus is written in red, in a language of suffering and selflessness and sacrifice that cost Him everything, and we turn around and expect to write our love stories with glitter and magic and fairness and equality and fun memories and romance.
That’s all a gift… it’s all wonderful. But it’s not the essence of love. We cannot forget.
For here is the essence of love: “No one has greater love- no one has shown stronger affection- than to lay down, to give up, his own life for his friends”.
John 15:13 Amplified Bible
The purest love ever seen on Earth poured out of nail-pierced hands and a sword-slashed side. It probably spilled out onto His torturers and stained their shirts. Why do we buy into the lie that love shouldn’t hurt? Why do we strive to build and maintain relationships upon feelings that fade and wain? Why do we withhold love when we experience pain and rejection? Are we even remembering the Cross? How could we forget?
Isn’t love felt the deepest when it is felt most undeserved? I just think about the way it was when I experienced the love of Jesus for the first time… my sin stood like a skyscraper in front of me, making me most unworthy. I was twelve. I was so laden with shame and guilt. But Jesus came to me in my filth and offered me forgiveness and freedom from the shame. He promised me steadfast love forever… that would cover all my past, present, and future failures. I wept and laughed and danced in the light of His Love that day! I have never been the same! My sin is covered! My shame is gone! I am loved because I bear His name, not because of what I do and don’t do.
Oh, to think about this love again as I write. It makes my eyes fill with tears and my heart ache for the way I have lacked in love. I say that I love my husband, my friends, my family, my enemies, my neighbors, the poor and the needy. Do you say it too?
How far are you willing to go in that love? How much weight do they have to pull to deserve it, really?
Before you can love your husband with all of his failures and sins and before you can love that friend who wounded you so deeply, maybe even gossipped about you and betrayed you,… you have to be “rooted deep and grounded securely on the love of Christ“… the bed of blood at the foot of the Cross, that you didn’t do anything to deserve and that bought you Life on earth and for eternity. Once you uproot anything else your identity is planted in, and re-root yourself today in HIS LOVE, the Scripture goes on to promise that “you will have the power to apprehend and experience that love… that you will come to know it for yourself practically, through experience for yourself… that you will be filled throughout your whole being with the fullness of God!…and become a body wholly filled and flooded with God Himself!!!” Ephesians 3:17-19
Please don’t hear me say that romance and roses are false expressions of love… I am madly in love with a hopeless romantic. But these alone hold no power for true love.
If you want to love powerfully today, you have to turn to John 15 and then to Ephesians 3, and root yourself in the Love that Jesus taught you on the Cross. Learn from Him, dear friend… and watch Him fill you with fullness of God like never before.
