If you’re of a certain age,
you might remember
the rock group Foreigner singing,
“I wanna know what love is.”
You might wonder
whether they ever found out
but have you?
Do you know what love is?
Do you wanna know what love is?
[PAUSE]
A lot of people believe
that they can't really say
what they mean by love.
Why?
For many people,
love is something so personal
that they cannot express it fully.
They cannot say what love is,
because of all the feelings
it arouses in them.
Great poets and playwrights
try to capture
how love works
by helping us know
what they think
true love feels like.
Perhaps this is part of the problem,
love arouses in us
such powerful emotions
that often we seem
to identify love with those emotions.
Love becomes feelings.
For many people today,
love is an emotion,
intense feelings,
a roller-coaster of experiences
that tug at the heart strings,
and make us lose
any sense of rhyme and reason.
But it isn't.
And you know that.
[PAUSE]
For us Christians,
we know that God is love.
And God is not feelings.
This might be
a bit difficult for us
to get a handle on,
because God is clearly beyond
any thought that we could possibly have.
But we do know
things about God,
however imperfectly.
We see through a glass darkly,
but we still see.
God is love.
God is good.
God is perfect.
We know these things
for our Lord Jesus Christ
tells us these very things.
So what does it mean to love
if God is love?
To love someone must mean
to desire to bring God
into the life of the person we love.
Indeed,
this is where we can
say something
of what love is.
Love is the will
for the perfection
of our beloved in God.
To love someone means
that, with the most burning intensity
you want nothing but their good,
for God is good.
To love someone means
you want them to be perfect,
for God is perfect.
What we have to realise
is that it is not our perfection
that we want to someone else to have.
It is not our good that
we want someone to have.
It is God Himself that
we want someone to have.
This is why love
cannot be an emotion,
nor something so personal to us
that it cannot be communicated to another.
If we cannot communicate love
then how can it be love?
A love that cannot be expressed,
is an infatuation,
an obsession for our beloved
that only involves our imaginings,
and thereby lies
the great tragedies
of mankind.
Love is an action.
It is nothing less
than participating in God himself
and bringing him
into the lives of our family and friends
and all those whom we desire and love
and hope for their best.
But love is not a force.
[PAUSE]
St Paul tells us very clearly
that love is patient and kind
and does not seek its own.
Love endures and puts up
with all manner of things.
It never forces itself upon anyone.
The person whom we love truly
will always be free from our control.
If we truly love them
we must let them
be free to love us back
or to reject us completely and utterly
of their own free will.
But love is not an action
that can be separated from God.
We can speak so many languages.
We can think so many deep thoughts.
We can even sacrifice all we have.
But these aren't love.
Unless we want nothing less
than our beloved finding
perfection and joy in God,
all our actions are useless,
all our actions are meaningless.
Actions that do not will the good
of our beloved are not love.
[PAUSE]
We live in an age
where we have to fight against
the idea that love is
just a feeling albeit powerful.
It is precisely this idea
that love is just a feeling
that is destroying relationships
between human beings.
When our society
removes God from
the substance of love
all that is left
is what we see around us -
love is some indescribable feeling
that nobody really knows
but everyone demands to possess.
We cannot truly love our neighbour
if we water down the good
that we are supposed
to want for our beloved.
We are imperfect little beings,
we are sinners
and we cannot expect to live out
the fullness of love in our lifetime
especially without God.
So we cannot expect to get love right.
That is the point,
for we are striving for
our own perfection in God.
Our perfection isn’t in
this world –
it is in God.
That is what God wants for us.
Clearly, God loves us.
Every day,
we need to struggle
for our perfection in God
for love of Him
and for the perfection of others in God.
Love means a struggle –
a struggle to become perfect
even as our Heavenly Father is perfect.
[PAUSE]
This Lent
we need to sit down and,
in our prayers,
look at how
we are loving our neighbour
as ourselves.
We need to look at how
we are loving the Lord our God,
how we are trying to be perfect in Him.
The more we can bring
the true love into the world,
the more we can re establish
good relationships
between human beings
and with God.
[PAUSE]
Love really is
our burning desire
for the good and perfection
of the Beloved
found only in God.
Did you really wanna know what love is?
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