This was written by my husband. I read through it this morning and it started churning prayers inside of me…Maybe it will do the same for you.

 sholmes:

Love is such a strong word. Just not in our culture. We love each other. We love our pets. We love food. We love music. We love sex. We love House. We love dancing. We love Jesus. We love America. We love Obama. We love love. 

I just looked at someone’s page. Their picture was of a love movement tshirt or something. The title of their tumblr was f***yeahlove. All their posts were pictures of romantic type love.

So love is romance? Eros is one of the Greek words for love. It’s where we get the word erotic. So it is sensual love. And in America that is the type of love we think of first probably…marriage maybe or lovers or whatever.

Maybe you thought about your family…family is love…

The Greek word that fits here is Storgay, I think…it is the word used for a familial type of love. You love your family..your mom, your dad, your sister, etc.

Maybe you would think of friends when you thought about love….

Phileo is another Greek word for love. The word where we get Philadelphia from. The city of brotherly love. So phileo is love for your friend. You love your friends because they’re always there. Your friends are closest to you outside of family, and sometimes they are closer than family (at least concerning what you share with them).

Here’s the thing….

I’m not convinced that I have a tight grasp of what real love is. I’m not convinced that you do either. Neither does anyone living in America probably (maybe not even in the whole world). And to be honest, I don’t know if it something we can fully grasp until we are towards the end of our lifespan. But here is what I do know…

What I am consistently being fed on tv and by society is not the love I know to be true love. If it is, then love is all about me and what pleases me…not about what I give to another individual. And if it, this love shown to us by media, was based on what I can give to another individual then that individual would have the power of determining whether or not what I was showing them was real love. Again, this type of love is all about self-gratification.

So it just so happens that I am a Christ-follower. I believe that God is the source of love.

God IS love. That is quoted from 1 John 4:16.

O Theos agape estin. That is the transliterated Greek sentence for “God is love.”

Agape is not one of the words I listed above. Rather, it is the word used for love when speaking of an unconditional love, the love God has for us.

But here’s the thing. You can’t just define the “best” or real type of love with agape. You have to know what the source of the word is. And that source is God.

I preached yesterday on 1 John 4:7-21. John likes to talk about love. Twenty-seven times love is used in this passage alone. Each time the word is a form of agape. But John, with the help of the Holy Spirit, makes sure to either confuse the snot out of you or help you see that love and God cannot be seperated as far as trying to define what it is to love. The basic structure of the passage taken from a commentary I used was that the Source of Love is God, the model of love was God giving us Jesus, and then a command to love based upon the source and model given. That only took us to about verse 12 though. So verse 13-21 and even into chapter 5 still talked more about love.

I am still a little upside down in my understanding of the passage altogether, but what I do know is that John paints a perfect picture of how the character of God is the only true definition of love.

That God so loved us…
We love because he first loved us….
If we live in love then we live in God and he in us….

These phrases point to God as the deifnition for real love..

The Beatles song goes “all ya need is love”

Fail. All you need is God. And God is love.

But not the opposite. Love is not God.

Except that is what we have made it to be.

So let us repent, and turn from our sinful thought patterns….and then we can receive the love of God and come to an understanding that God is love, and when we love it is only because we have accepted his love in us which has resulted in a love flowing out of us to others.

LOVE. Knowing God is the real love movement.