The month of February is known by many as the season of love. No doubt, this is due in large part to the highly romanticized celebration of St. Valentine’s Day. I for one enjoy doting on my wife with the traditional gifts of flowers and chocolates. And even though husbands and wives don’t need a reason to display their love for one another it’s nice to have day on the calendar anyway. So also, St. Valentine’s day affords us the opportunity to consider the idea of love in general.
Of all the words in our vernacular that are abused and misunderstood, love certainly is at the top of the list. Modern definitions of love mainly center on the idea of love as a romantic feeling or deep affection. It’s a sensation that can’t necessarily be articulated, nor should it be. As they say, “love is love”. But in this definition of love what is most significant is the emotion itself, not the “what” or the “who” that this emotion is directed towards. Thus, it doesn’t really matter if the object of such love is something wrong or destructive, because feelings trump morality. For many love can never be wrong, or as they also say, “love wins”.
And yet in the Scriptures, God our Heavenly Father, offers a very different definition of love. In the famous passage of John 3:16 we read, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Here God describes true love in terms of service, action, sacrifice, and even death itself. Likewise, we read in 1 John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” True love is known only through the lens of the cross. It is made manifest to the world in the person and work of Jesus, whom the Father sent to suffer and die to cleanse us from our sins. Here is love that goes beyond emotion, beyond reason, and beyond anything we can even imagine. God loves us by dying to save us.
