Real Love

Real love is not a warm fuzzy feeling for another person; it is doing concrete things for others. It is sacrificial, in as much as it is an expenditure of oneself for the good of another. This is the kind of love that God has displayed for us in the giving of his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins (1 John 4:10).

2 John 6, says, "This is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands." Love is not self defined; it is God defined. It is not what I think or feel I should do on any given day of the week. It is what God has clearly commanded me to do and shown me to do in his Son, Jesus Christ.

Greg Forster writes in his book, The Joy of Calvinism, "A pastor of mine once said that love is not an emotion; love is a way of behaving. And it's a pretty difficult, strenuous form of behaviour under most circumstances! The emotional experience - the feeling - that we call love is supposed to come to us as the byproduct of loving behaviour. It's partly a support that helps us do the behaviour and partly a reward for doing the behaviour. To make the emotion the main thing you care about, and put the behaviour second - or worse, to want the emotion without the behaviour at all - Is selfish and deeply wicked. Yet that's what we all tend to do. When we separate the emotion of love from loving behaviour in our real relationships, things go off the rails pretty quickly. We get conflicts, we get coldness, we get resentment, we get betrayal. Above all, we discover that the emotional experience of love, which we wanted so badly, has itself disappeared or radically diminished."

This is the great tragedy of our self-absorbed culture. Those who claim to be the followers of Jesus Christ have been called to a deeper level of loving: to love in truth; guided by his absolute commands and Christ's sacrificial life.


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