What is True Love?

The annual event focused on romance and love, Valentine’s Day has come and gone. I enjoyed the opportunity to communicate in out-of-the-ordinary ways my love and appreciation to my wife. For the many ways in which she is a great blessing in my life. Hopefully, it will not take a whole year before I try to communicate my love to her again. If so, it will probably undermine the message I would try to convey. True love is never a “once a year” type of thing, though I am glad for an annual day to enjoy celebrating in some special way with “our valentine.”

I thought it might be appropriate for us to understand true love from God’s perspective. God describes His love to us and for us in the Bible in many different ways. He speaks with clarity on the subject in ways that need no explanation. 

This is what genuine love is all about. His Word. His love letters to us. So, let me simply share these scriptures without comment. 

• In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. I John 4:10

• Beloved, let’s love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God because God is love. I John 4: 7-8

• Greater love has no one than this that a person will lay down his life for his friends. John 15:13

• I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another; just as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples: if you have love for one another. John 13: 34-35

• You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Matthew 5: 43-44

• Little children, let’s not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth. I John 3:18

• For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16

• If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part; but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. I Corinthians 13

What it means for us, however, is that every day, in every situation, we have a new opportunity for God’s transforming grace to work in our lives. Our perspective can be new; our attitude can be new; the surrender of our lives and circumstances into the hands of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-wise God can be new. The chance to trust God and believe in the absolute goodness of God can be new. Even with everything the same, our lives can be new.  

So, “What’s new?” Either nothing or everything. The God that is neither new nor different extends His mercy to each of us every morning. The choice to receive it and walk in it is up to each one of us, and that is what will determine our answer to the question, “What’s new?”