loving

I am beginning to notice that whenever I’m upset with my husband, the Lord talks to me about love. Just such a thing happened this morning, as I spent the last part of yesterday upset with Dave. “Do you want to get to know him?” came the first thought in this morning’s quiet time. I remember that earlier in the summer the Lord had challenged me to get to know Dave better . . . really know him. Hmmm. There’s that thought again. It’s easier to want to know him when I like him. Yes, as it turns out, liking my husband is a prerequisite to loving him. Here is the lesson from my quiet time;

When we love someone, we want to get to know them better. This helps us in learning how to love them and express that love in ways meaningful to them. An example might be when a wife learns how her husband likes his eggs cooked so that she can please him or the husband begins taking the garbage out so as to be helpful to his wife. As husbands and wives get to know each other they learn how to make each other happy, or unhappy.

Learning about the one we love is a life-long experience, driven by the desire to love. There are other desires in our hearts also, some of which may dampen our desire to love. Desire for our own way can change the object our love from the other person to ourselves. Offense at the other person can cause us to withdraw our love, forgetting what we know to be good and lovely, replacing it with anger or contempt.

In John’s first epistle he posed a good question; “ . . . for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” (1 Jn 4:19b). Well, we might like the way the other person makes us feel, but that doesn’t make us want to get to know them in a deeper way than any other person in our lives. Liking is not loving. Building a relationship based on liking how another person makes us feel without loving in return is selfish and serves our fleshly nature. Without love, the good feelings we get with this person will not help us endure future offenses or disappointments that may come into the relationship.
When love first knocks on the doors of our hearts we need to make a decision to nurture it and let it grow deep in us. We do this by getting to know the person we love. You might say, we get to know what makes them “tick”. Perhaps at first we thought we made them tick and so our focus shifted to ourselves. But this will make for a very lop-sided and unfulfilling relationship.

Our earthly relationships are a reflection of our relationship with God. We “see” the one we love; we don’t “see” God. We can think it easier to love God because we imagine He would never do the disappointing or unacceptable things our earthly mate does. However, when we walk with God for a while we find out that things do not always turn out the way we expected or wanted. If we become self-focused or offended, our desire for knowing about God’s ways will eventually die, being replaced with a desire for a relationship in which God pampers and serves us . . . or one in which we are just left to our own ways.

Our rituals of loving God, just like loving a person, can become empty. We look on the things we do and question why we do them. These acts do not preserve our love nor protect our hearts against hurt. The acts of pleasing our mate, therefore, may be preserved because we feel obligated to do them. Or we may gradually stop doing them, forgetting what they once meant to the other person. In our relationship with God, we may slowly eliminate time spent with Him alone, filling our time with other things.

But there is a better way. It is to let love take us deeper into knowing the one we love, and into knowing God. With this desire comes a choosing to leave past hurts and disappointments behind. For in the heart of the other person are deep secrets waiting to be found out. And in the heart of God is a vast crystalline sea of knowledge and wisdom about His ways, waiting for us to dip into. With this kind of love in our hearts it is easier to set ourselves aside and seek to make the one we love happy.

So we find that we cannot truly love if our heart desires only to be loved, and not to give love. Therefore if we cannot love our husband, wife, or others we cannot love God. When we choose loving another, we will also learn how to love God.