When you hear the word love, what comes to your mind. Romance? Sacrifice? Brotherhood? Maybe something else? To me, loving another means to willingly place the wants and needs of another ahead of our own wants and needs. I choose this definition, because I believe it best captures all of the aspects we know as love.
First, love must be willing. If someone comes up and takes my lunch away, I may tell myself that they need it more than I do, but at the heart of it, I did not give my lunch away willingly. I do not think that anyone would consider my act toward the bully to be an act of love. Likewise, if someone holds a gun to my head and tells me to worship God, I do not think anyone would consider my worship to be an act of love. Thus, a key requirement of love is that the act must be voluntary. The importance of this is that God created us to love him, and he knows that to force us to love him would make our worship invalid. Thus, God treads very carefully in this area. He wants us to love him, and if he reveals himself to us in full, that might destroy our free will, and with it, our ability to love.
Second, love is about priorities. This is what really separates love from like. For someone I like, I might hang out with them, but I don’t put their needs above mine. For someone I love, the inconvenience to me ceases to matter. This is why the word sacrifice is related to love. If I had a single meal, I might offer to share some of it with someone I liked, but for love, I would give it away in full.
Third, love is an action. To love someone takes more than just the desire to help them. As much as I tell myself that I love my family, there are days when that is simply not true. In deed, I put my own needs ahead of theirs. As much as I care for them, I fail to love them as I should. Thankfully, they forgive me, which is in itself an act of love toward me, but that does not change the fact that in my selfishness I chose to love myself over them.
Our ability to love God and others is the one thing that marks our maturity as followers of Christ. The greatest two commandments center around love (Matthew 22:36-40), and Paul talks at great length about how love must be the motive behind everything we do in the kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 13). Loving others is at the center of everything it means to be a Christian, and that means we must first understand that love with a willing act of putting another’s wants or needs ahead of our own not just in words, but in action as well.
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” -John 13:34-35
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