Wednesday, February 16, 2011

L-O-V-E...love

1 John 3:16 "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.  And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers."

Did you ever notice how confusing love has become in our culture?  We've studied love so much.  We've decided that there are all these different kinds of love.  We've decided there are all different kinds of ways to show love.  Most people we know are in love with this very confusing idea of love.  We think love is all about "chemistry," warm fuzzies, butterflies in our stomachs, or a sparkle in our eyes.  We say that we love people because "they make me smile" or "they're always there for me" or "nobody knows me like they do"  Did you notice the word that re-occurs in all of those statements?  Its the word "me."  I think we have a pretty selfish view of love at times.

Recently, I tried to explain this idea to some kids at youth group.  It ended up starting some really great discussion.  And it most certainly confirmed my thoughts that our culture teaches some really confusing things about love.  The bible says some really wonderful things about love that can clear up all this confusion for us and I'm not just talking about 1Corinthians 13 which is probably the most famous bit about love in the whole bible.  There is some great things about love there but I'm talking about things like this verse in 1 John 3:16.  It basically says, this is how we can understand love, this is how we can define love, by what Christ did for us.  And if we understand that and seek to imitate it we just might get a glimpse of real authentic love the way that God intended it.

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