Love

"We love, because He first loved us."  1 John 4:19 (NASB)

Our culture is enamored with the concept of love for each other.  We have a whole segment of the movie industry dedicated to perpetuating a faulty concept of what love is.  We have young people growing up who think about love in the context solely of personal pleasure.  We have this because we have generations of adults who have demonstrated that love is simply about personal pleasure.  As a culture we can fall into love and fall out of it just as easily.  And we have a divorce industry that demonstrates our commitment to self love.  For our culture, love begins, and ends, with me. 

I believe that this is the foundation for a number of critical problems within our culture.  The acceptance of homosexuality and other forms of sexual deviancy is because of the base of love being centered in me.  I have heard good Christian people tell me that they do not know how they can stop their child/friend/co-worker/family-member from choosing to live in sin because it "makes them happy".  This is the reason politics is so divisive.  Everything begins and ends with me. 

This one simply verse from John contradicts all of it.  Love, and the ensuing understanding of life, does not begin with me.  Instead, love begins with God.  When we consider this it means that there is someone we must look to outside of ourselves to define for us what love is, and God certainly has defined it for us.  Love is self-sacrificial.  Love is patient.  Love is kind.  Love keeps no record of wrong . . . and it goes on and on.  When we think of love in this way it changes our perception, not only of the concept of love, but our concept of the world and even ourselves. 

So love the way God intended love to be.  Because our love is dependent and secondary upon the love that God has for us.