Happy Valentine’s Day!

This coming Sunday is Valentine’s Day.   Valentine card sales are up.  If you’ll be buying one, don’t wait too long – the selection gets a bit thin by the weekend.  Flower sales will be through the roof by the end of the week, but don’t buy those too soon or they will be past their prime by the end of the week.  Apparently, this day is an economic stimulus.  I found a graphic that indicated how much Americans spent on Valentine’s Day in 2012.  Given that the economy was not great in 2012, I can’t imagine that that graphic would look much different today.

And what is at the heart of this day?  Love, of course.  I am a bit of romantic, so I am going to assume that the expressions of love on Valentine’s Day are all genuine.  We talk about love in so many strange ways: we talk about finding it and losing it, about falling into it and falling out of it, about looking for it in all the wrong places, and about making it.  We love pizza, we love our friends, we love our motorcycle, and we love our spouses.  In English, one word covers a lot of territory, doesn’t it?   No wonder we get so confused by love.  But I know a thing or two about the nature of love, and some of it I learned from the ancient Greeks.  They liked precision in language.   That’s why they had different words for different kinds of love.  There was one word for the love that is given because it is an obligation – like with family.  It’s like the old saying goes, “You can pick your friends but you can’t pick your family.”  Those old Greeks used a completely different word for the love that we have for people who enhance our life by bringing something we enjoy to it.  That’s what friends do.  There was yet another word for the physical attraction kind of love. 

But as much as those ancient Greeks knew about love, the apostle Paul found it necessary to explain another kind, and used still another Greek word to do it.  We find one of the best-known definitions of that love in 1 Corinthians 13:  4 ”Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.  8 Love never fails.”  That’s the very same word and definition Paul used when he tells husbands to love their wives, when Jesus tells all of us to love our enemies, and when the Scriptures tell Christians to love each other.  It is an other-focused, intentional, and active love that seeks the benefit of the other without regard for whether or not it is deserved.  Where did Paul get that idea?

He got from Jesus himself.  He understood that those words in 1 Corinthians will mean nothing to our model if we don’t hear them first as a beautifully accurate description of God’s love for us in Christ.  Every thing he said in those verses I quoted above describe the way God loves us because of Jesus, in Jesus, and through Jesus.  Paul clearly understood that, because he also wrote this:  “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  (Romans 5:8).  Jesus did not die for us because he was obligated to do that because we were God’s children by birth.  We weren’t and we never could have been without Jesus redeeming us first.  Jesus did not die for us because there was something about us that he just couldn’t live without.  We were sinners – every one of us.  Physical attraction had nothing to do with it, either.  Jesus died for us because he wanted to and because his Father wanted him to.  He died for us because he loved with us with a hold-nothing-back and whatever-it-takes kind of love of the highest order.  He died for us because God knew the only way we would ever be qualified to be in his family and in his heaven would be if all that disqualifies us was washed way with Jesus’ blood and all that qualifies us was supplied by Jesus’ perfect obedience to God as our substitute.  And so he loved us by giving his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will have eternal life.

That love came to earth at Bethlehem and came to its highest expression at Calvary.  From that perspective, we might consider the season of lent culminating on Good Friday as the ultimate valentine.  Want to give someone you love the best Valentine’s Day gift ever?  Get to know Jesus better.  If you do, you will not only learn how to love better, you will also find the strength only God gives to love more like him.

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