The Ways of Love 2.0

Love is crazy.

I don't mean "I love this hotdog" crazy or "I love this song" crazy. I mean "I'll give up my rights to myself" crazy


I mean LOVE. Love, is crazy. God has defined love, real love, for us in the Bible and it's absolutely crazy.

We don't often think about it because we're desensitized to the very word. We love long walks on the beach, we love Penne Rustica at our favorite Italian bistro, we love our cats, dogs, goldfish, Wii and PlayStation games, and we love a good B.M. I'm certain that most of you were on board until that last one, and then you respectfully jumped ship to escape the imagery. "That's a little gross," you think. It's uncomfortable because I mentioned human waste in a post about love, and you can't make the same connection I did. Well, here it is, spelled out: we use 'love' like we use our personal refuse. It's momentary, it serves its purpose and it's gone. "I used to love cats, but then one scratched me and I don't anymore." Love like that really isn't worth having is it? Much less worth talking about.

That's why it's not love. We call it love, because the word is convenient and available, but it's not. We talk about our preferences and joys and hopes with a term like 'love' until the common (colloquial, for my college peeps out there) understanding of love is more, to us, the definition than what love really is. The result is my hearing women or young girls say there's no such thing as love because they've been hurt or abandoned or neglected by the ones claiming to love them; guys saying love is the word to use to get what you what; me saying I'd love to be given 10 minutes alone in a room with those guys and a green light from God. But even more difficult is when the very reality of love is called into question because of its many abuses throughout the years and in our personal relationships.

But can we do that? Can a definition for love be determined by consensus usage, or hopeful wishing on stars, or even reliance on human compassion, grace, and forgiveness? Can we redefine love to suit our purposes?

The simple answer is yes. Logically, we can do whatever we want to and get whoever we want to follow us if they want to follow us. But if we want to walk that road, doesn't such a course of action leave us somehow, well... wanting?

The complex answer is no. We can't redefine love to fit us personally because we are all, personally, different. Love cannot be defined as one thing to one person and be something totally different to another - not in essence. That's not necessarily love. It could be, but it isn't love because it's your personal understanding of what 'love' is. So love can be shown in different ways but it cannot be fundamentally understood differently.

God tells us that love means sacrifice. Personal, emotional, egotistical sacrifice. Love sacrifices personally for the objects of love. Emotionally, love suppresses any number of personal hang-ups to the benefit of others, and many times at the expense of the self. Love does not assert some egotistical right or self-serving plan for dominance.

Love is described throughout scripture as God's affection for His people - and in the New Testament as actually God. God set apart the people of Israel as a platform to make His name great among the nations, to exalt, to lift up, His great name. Why? So the other nations would come to the only true God and see how great was His love to those who follow Him. So God could lavishly bless these people - yes, Israelites and 'foreigners' alike - and receive glory and honor for His great provision. Why did God set apart Israel to be His chosen people? So this inconsequential, weak-minded, unfaithful nation - if one could call such a small people a 'nation' - would show, even in their failures, that God was their strength and shield. Why did God choose the weakest to represent Him? So His greatness alone could be the reason for their success, for their survival, and so they would be a people-picture of His own step into history as a seemingly inconsequential, supposedly weak, and most definitely faithful servant of God.

After centuries of us rewriting what God should be doing in the world, God slipped into our ranks in the person of a man named Jesus (actually a common name at the time) to show us what God was doing in the world. And we didn't even know it.... We'd flipped the script so completely that our view of God's love was some kind of utopia on earth with the charred bones of our oppressors rising as a fragrant aroma to Him. The shackled 'powers that be' would serve us underfoot as God had originally intended. Or so we thought. But God taught us service without return, sacrifice for the ones who hate you, and love for all... even your enemies.

Especially your enemies. So what if you love the ones who think you're great? Everyone does that. Here's a cookie. The way of love means the death of all we think makes us, well, us. We have to die completely to the flesh that will fight to the death to protect itself, to get what belongs to it, to scratch and claw it's way to the top before turning back and loving from the rank and file of leadership. Love says that kind of attitude leaves everyone lonely and broken and abused and disillusioned and angry and, eventually, in more torment than your own personal hell. Love tells us to do what is counter intuitive, to sacrifice self for another, and to die for those who don't deserve your affection. Just like Israel. Just like us. They didn't deserve open and vulnerable affection, and neither do most of us most of the time. But God gives it anyway - unadulterated love.

That's because love is crazy. If we wrote the book - the dictionary I mean, not the Bible - we certainly wouldn't describe love in those kinds of uncomfortable ways. In fact, one of our own did write that particular book and came nowhere near the transcendentally beautiful definition of love that God gives us. And none so unswerving or resistant to sentimentality. Such love stands not as opinion but as truth.

Truth is also crazy. It's like pure alcohol or pure drugs. You take pure alcohol or drugs into your system, you're going to die. In the same way, if you take pure truth into your body you're going to die. Your flesh is going to have a fit, you'll convulse, you'll fight the inevitable, and then you are going to die. Truth outlives lies and falsehood, even if we're not around to see it. Truth kills whatever is not permanent. Because truth is permanent. The very definition of truth assumes an inverse, and that the inverse is not truth. If we only had truth in this world, we would not need a word like truth. It would be understood that everything we or anyone else said was true. As in not false, not a lie, not deception, not misleading, not even sarcasm... not untrue.

Love that is not true is subject to amendments. "I love you as long as," "I love you enough to be generous on our prenuptial agreement," or "I used to love you but I don't anymore." No. Such love is not love at all, but emotional entanglement. Entrapment of the heart which, as scripture tells us, is deceitful above all else (Jeremiah 17:9-10). Love that is true acknowledges upsets, difficulties, and struggles but holds firm through it all. Love like that expects trouble, it doesn't get surprised by it. The jealousy that comes from real, true love is not a controlling or demanding temperament but a zealous protection of the object of that love. Love is decision and emotion, pleasure and pain. In fact, true love starts the relationship despite the knowledge that pain is coming. In much the same way, God started a relationship with an unfaithful people and sent His Son to die for those same people. His resurrection sealed the deal, covered our sinful flesh with His own perfection, and assigned those of us who follow Him a place with Him in eternity.

If I were writing the ways of love, as Francis Chan says in his book Erasing Hell, I sure wouldn't write it like that. Love like that is just crazy.