Love
A couple of months ago I had a young man in his twenties ask me. “How do you know if you love someone and when did you know that your wife was the one you wanted to spend the rest of your life with”?
(I wanted to share my response which is something that I have personally learned over the years in my own marriage.)
This is an interesting topic because a person’s understanding of what love is greatly impacts how they deal with love. The world sells you on the idea that you can fall in/out of love with someone when it does/doesn’t suit you, but that’s a big lie. That is not love.
Love is a decision; you choose who you love so that the love comes from you to them. This means that the perfect picture of this type of love is that the person being loved can’t impact the love of the one who gives it. They can’t earn it, gain it, or lose it because it is a free gift from the one who loves. This is how God loves. He loves us apart from us. So, we can’t earn it, gain it, or lose it when it is given from Him. That is why we are told in scripture to love our wives as Christ loves.
It is just like forgiveness; you must choose to forgive someone and continue to forgive them even if they didn’t earn it or deserve it. You choose to give forgiveness just like you choose to give love. This is how you can love/forgive someone who hates you, who has wronged you, who is against you.
1 John 4:9–11
In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
Mark 12:29-31
“Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.””