I have a confession to make: I truly love Valentine’s Day. It’s very clichè, but I am a girly girl who is into all of the pink and hearts and flowers that start showing up in stores as soon as February 1st arrives. In fact, it’s probably my favorite holiday after Christmas. Perhaps this is due to spending hours devouring romance novels and fairytales as a young girl; I mean, who doesn’t swoon at the idea of having their own Mr. Darcy, Gilbert Blythe, or Prince Charming?
It’s the idea that someone somewhere loves us and is willing to tell us through words, actions, time, or money. That we are desirable and worth wanting. At the core of who we are and who we were created to be is this insatiable need to be loved. It’s why we often search for love in every place but where it can most easily be found.
The quest for love is at the core of every relationship we pursue and in every grasp for fame or power or popularity. That tiny, God-shaped piece placed into the very essence of humanity at the dawn of creation that only the Creator Himself can fill. It was His desire for our love that makes us search for His. After all, “We love, because He first loved us.”
1 John 4:19 AMP: "Because God bestowed on humanity a free will, man is not forced to love Him, but rather consciously and freely chooses the response he makes to God's love."
This is why love is so prevalent in God’s word. Because that is who HE is. We are given so many clues in Scripture as to what love is and isn’t (see 1 Corinthians 13), how we should love and who we should love. We are told to love the Lord with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5, Matthew 22:37). And to love our neighbor as ourselves (Leviticus 19:18, Matthew 5:43-46, Romans 12:17, 19).
Throughout the Gospels, the heart of Jesus’ message was love. Sometimes His words made sense: it’s easy to love God, friends, family, and those who love us back. But sometimes His words didn’t make sense at all. In a society where the law for centuries had been “an eye for an eye”, Jesus’ command to ‘love your enemy and pray for those who curse or despitefully use you’ (Luke 6:27-35, Matthew 5:38-48) must have been a shock for all who heard it. But to Jesus, love looks different.
Have you ever gone shopping for a car and start to notice that very same car everywhere you go? This is known as frequency illusion or the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. It's a cognitive bias that makes recently learned things seem more common than they actually are. When you start shopping for a car, your brain becomes more aware of that type of vehicle. This can make it seem like that model of car is more common than it actually is. Pretty cool!
But this phenomenon goes beyond cars. It can, in fact, be applied to people. The more you perceive someone worthy of your love, the more your mind begins to believe that perception.
The tyrant boss. The annoying co-worker. The estranged family member. The ex-friend. The ex-spouse. The church member across the pew with whom we can’t seem to get along. The person that seems impossible to love. What if we started reframing our perceptions of those we don’t like that much, someone we might even consider our enemy? The person who has mistreated us. The ones who make fun of us. The ones who go out of their way to make our day miserable. The one who betrayed us. The one who slandered our name. The one we can’t seem to completely forgive.
This concept of love was so important that it was Jesus’ final commandment to the disciples before His sacrifice on the cross:
“I am giving you a new commandment, that you love one another.
Just as I have loved you, so you too are to love one another.” John 13:34 AMP
The key to understanding this and other statements about love is to know that this love (agape) is not so much a matter of emotion as it is of doing things for the benefit of another person, that is, having an unselfish concern for another and a willingness to seek the best for another.
Just as I have loved you. Unconditionally. Sacrificially. Without hesitation. Without thought of self. Without our emotions getting in the way. That’s the kind of love Jesus wants for us to possess. And that kind of love is shocking. It’s hard. It doesn’t make sense. It’s different. But if we are to be like Jesus, how can we love unconditionally the person that meets all of our conditions?
After reading this article, I want you to think of the person or persons this applies to in your life. The person that it is hard to pray for. We all have (or will at some point) come across someone who has hurt or disappointed us. And I want you to pray for them. Not that God would strike them down or enact judgement. But that He would bless them. That He would help them. That He would forgive them as He has forgiven you. That He would help you to see them through His eyes. Begin to reframe those long-held perceptions and start looking through the lens of love. God is inviting us to pick up eyes of compassion, to lay down judgements, and love those around us the way He loves them. Before long, loving them won’t be hard. And this kind of love won’t feel different.
After all, it’s not only what Jesus would do; it’s what He already did.
"By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God has sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another." 1 John 4:9-11 NET
