To Deserve Love

Love...oh boy. It's a crazy word that gets thrown around like loose change these days, and it seems to come with a variety of forms and meanings. The spectrum of cultural usage of the word covers everything from "Give me sex!" to "I would die for you!" Being individual humans who are affected by experience and emotions, we often misuse and mistranslate the word in it's use. It also doesn't help that we are detached from each other in such a way as to be unable to feel the emotions or hear the thoughts of the speaker.

In my neverending desire to over analyze everything, I started thinking about love and it's biblical definition. It came to my attention that I am no expert on loving. Sin, in it's never ending distortive nature, has greatly diminished my understanding and expression of love. In my pride I even had the thought "I deserve to be loved!" and "After all that I've done for _____ (God, friend, family, etc) I should be loved more than I am!" These are false statements on multiple levels. 

First, love that is given for the sake of love received is, in fact, not love at all! Love is given without expectation of return; anything done with the demand or with the goal of a return is not love. Love is not currency, and therefore you do not spend love for love. If it something that is not to be demanded and, by it's very nature, doesn't demand anything, how can we possible "earn" or "deserve" love" We can't.

A child doesn't earn his/her parents love. Either the child is loved or the child is not loved. Satisfaction and affection is often earned, but love itself is not; satisfaction and affection are often naturally given sub components to one's love for another but can be withheld for personal health and emotional safety from the person they love. 

So knowing that love can not be earned by means of action or the like, we must then begin to look at how we treat others and how we understand Christ's command to "Love God and love your neighbor as yourself." Love is more than chemicals, but it is also action and choice. Love is struggling and wrestling. For some it is easy to give and for some it is not. It is struggle because of sin, but God is sinless! God loves perfectly and without the hindrances of sin and distortion. 

Being that God loves perfectly and we don't, we cannot begin to comprehend the fullness of God's love or the actions that His love produces. It brings a whole new level of awe to the death of our Lord and forces us to rethink about our beliefs about salvation and the relationship between God and man.

God loves us regardless of our actions because our actions do not generate love and that is beautiful reality. We are loved perfectly by the great Creator of the universe despite all our flaws and our sin nature. God choose to bestow upon us His perfect love and out of that love paved a way for us to be reconciled to Him through the cross. The cross is an act of grace. We can rest assured that though God will one day judge our works, our evil will not diminish His love for us.

Grace and Peace,

Stephen