Love truth, love love (2/2)

According to my calculations, loving truth is relatively uncommon, but everyone loves love. I mean how could we possibly find it within ourselves to reject that “lovely” warm fuzzy feeling we call love?

While there are different types of love. I love a good pork roast and snowboarding and being creative, but those types of love are not the same type of love that I have for my wife. Even that type of love changes in nature as my feelings toward her go up and down.

Working out what love really is, can be a challenge. Until we experience it, the concept of love is foreign. I experienced love first in a dream as a teenager. I was walking down a corridor and a woman was walking toward me, and that lovely deep warm fuzzy feeling came over me (in the dream) - wow, that was so cool.

The common understanding of love is that love is a feeling that comes out of the ether. Uh-uh. No way. Cupid doesn’t exist in my books, and I can prove it. . . Untold millions of people since Adam was a cowboy have supposedly got struck by this Cupid character and fallen in love, just to fall out of love again, the moment the going gets tough, or another arrow struck for the girl next door, or the girl at the office.

OK, sure there’s different horses for different courses, and attraction to another person can be strong, but it’s way too convenient in my books to place the responsibility for our own feelings of love onto an external source. That’s not taking personal responsibility for our feelings.

I’ve seen some people make some pretty big mistakes over this love of love. It’s all very well loving, but the love of love can be a trap, when our desperation to be in love drives us into behaviour and decisions we later regret.

The interesting thing we can derive from God’s take on this love thing is that love is a command, not a feeling. Yup that’s right - more in tune with a military order than a lovey-dovey feeling from Mars Cupid!

Here’s Jesus response to a religious boffin - a real clever dude who was into all the detail legal stuff and checking out Jesus’ take on something important:

[Jesus] answered: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”
“You have answered correctly,” Jesus replied. “Do this and you will live.”
Luke 10:26-28

So here we have two commands - nothing to do with feelings. He simply says love A, and love B - and just to rub it in, Jesus says again “Do this . . .” - a command to action.

Now that we’re reading this love thing a little clearer, maybe it is becoming a little harder to love, love? The thing is that a command like that tends to upset the apple-cart a little when it comes to our perceptions about responsibility. When we see love as a choice, a decision of the mind, and will, not a feeling we gain a little wisdom.

And it makes sense too when you think about it. Feelings come and go. They go up. They go down. But if this amazing human need for love rests upon a feeling, or some abstract thing with wings and a harp or bow-and-arrow in the clouds, then we’d all be in chaos. A man would make a commitment to a woman (and visa versa) because he felt in love, and then the moment that he had the same feelings for a different woman he’d up and leave at a moment’s notice. It would be hell on earth as people followed their own selfish desires and called it love.

Hang on a minute. That IS what is happening all around me! Hmmmm. But if God is love, how can this possibly be?

The bible makes it clear that love and truth are intertwined. Love without truth brings about a feelings driven world and self-centeredness. Truth without love however brings about rules, manipulation, power-games, politics and religion. There’s only one place that I’ve ever managed to find total love and total truth in equal measure, (and we really need them both in equal measure to live godly lives) and that’s on the cross - where Jesus did what He did for us.

The VICTUS IN AMBITUS way is to love truth and to love love - in equal measure.