Getting Better At Love

As we wrap up the year and move towards Christmas, we all know that it is better to give than to receive. Some of us, however, are not great givers when it comes to one of the most important gifts of all; love. Today, we’re going to break down love and help prepare you to love others well!

One of the main reasons that so many of us struggle to love well is because we don’t really understand what love is. Love, as we have said on this channel many times before, is not a feeling. Love is not an emotional response, and that is an important place to start. If love is really an emotional response, then that means that love is always reactive; always predicated by some other catalyst to which love is just the obvious result. In many of our relationships, we treat love in this way – I love someone because they did this or them doing something caused me to feel a certain way. That is not loving the other person, that’s really just loving how they make you feel. Now, don’t get me wrong, feeling good is not a bad thing, but we shouldn’t equate that feeling with love. The word, love, has also been used very manipulatively against a lot of people. When someone says, “if you loved me you would do this...” or “I know I can lose control sometimes, but it’s because I just love you so much.” That is not love. It can be easier to spot these misuses of the term when it’s happening in someone else’s relationship, but what about when it’s happening to us? What about when we’re the ones misusing it?

We need to start with identifying our own areas where we have fallen short in loving others well, first, and not make excuses for it. In Matthew chapter 7, Jesus tells us that before we judge others for the speck in their eyes, we need to first remove the log from our own. Many of us don’t realize that we are searching to be loved without actually loving, which is hypocrisy. Some of us think we are “loving” the other person because we have strong emotions towards them, but do our actions, attitudes, words, and attentions match our intentions? Is love being communicated by more than just words? Does “I love you” come out in more than apologies or when we want something? These are not signs of love, but of selfishness. We love how the person makes us feel, we love the things they do for us, but we are not BEING loving towards them in any meaningful other than the ones that get us more of what we want.

Many of us have heard the famous “Love Chapter” in part or in whole at some point in our lives. We usually fixate on verses 4-7. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” This is a great place to start and, for many of us, we have enough right here to work on for some time. Right out of the gate, Paul starts by saying that love is patient. The implication here is that love happens when patience is necessary, or in other words, when you are put out. When you have to wait to get what you want. He also groups together patience and kindness. Some of us can wait, but we’re not kind in the waiting. When things aren’t going your way, give yourself an attitude check. Would you describe yourself as kind? I know that I am not always great in this area. As we work our way down the list, these shouldn’t be discouragements but challenges to hold us accountable. If this is the biblical definition of love, is the is the measuring stick that God is giving us to keep us growing in maturity, how are we doing?

Before we close, I want to pull us back to that passage in 1 Cor. And look at something that I think we don’t always put together. Starting in verse 11, Paul continues; “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.” It sounds almost like it doesn’t fit with the rest of the chapter. Immediately following these verses, Paul concludes the chapter by saying, “So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” So, before that section, he is talking about love, after that section he is talking about love. The context of giving up childish ways and becoming a man is couched within the overarching message about love. I think this is such an important piece of the puzzle because the concept of being unloving is parallelled with the picture of an adult acting like a child. Children are inherently selfish. I know, I have four of them. One of the primary roles I have as a parent is to guide my kids into maturity and help them to subjugate their selfishness. When they are bickering with one another and they come to me to adjudicate between them, I will frequently point back to how they were treating each other and ask them, “Was that loving?” An adult throwing a tantrum and having a hissy fit because they didn’t get their way is a very unappealing thing. If we could learn to look at our selfishness in this light, as something shamefully immature that we would not want to lose control to, then I think choosing to love others out of the abundance of love that we have received from Christ, then I think we will be able to start seeing consistent growth in our maturity as we love one another.