Modern-Day Love

We live in a world of love stories. Everywhere we go, we are bombarded with what "love" means: Flipping through a magazine, watching the newest Hollywood film, turning on the radio, combing the clothing rack in the mall...Love exists! But what is the quality of this love that envelops our everyday? Most of this "love" is clothed in lies, lies that have been instilled in us since entering this life. In actuality, it is often the furthest thing from love. It is lust, dominion, self-protection, self-acquiring of needs, it is tainted with sin...with us. It is not what unbelievers are looking for, because it is nothing new. If we cannot love one another as fellow believers, the way God sees love, how are we to love unbelievers? How are we to love our enemies? How are we to wake up a world to truth? Satan has used forms of "love" to destroy. Relationships, friendships, families...not just between one another...but also between us and God. For if we do not fully understand love, then we are missing who God truly is; for He IS Love.

I was recently reminded of a passage I once read daily: Psalm 139. God prompted me to redeem the message through these verses because it had become words that were full of brokenness and hurt. He reminded me that the truth in those words were still true, because they were always HIS words. God is the author of love, so why do we so often look outside of his truth to gain understanding of this love? We end up confused, disoriented, hurt, and unable to deliver truth to others in it's wholeness.

Hosea had it right on. Or, rather, God through Hosea. What a privilege to be used by God as a vessel for portraying to the world what Love really looked like! That Hosea would continue to purely love someone who would regularly betray him. That Jesus loves us purely, as we continually mess up...he loved us, while we were at our worst. That place in which all of us can look back upon and think, he really loved me then? Yes. He Loved. He loved without lust, without dominion or power, without self-protection and without the purpose of fulfilling his own needs. This is how we are to love. This is the kind of Love that we need to be displaying to the world that we live in. Let us peel back the cultural graffiti of lies that have distorted Truth.