The meaning of love

Depeche Mode once sang the words:

"Ive read more than a hundred books, Seen love mentioned many thousand times, But despite all the places Ive looked, Its still no clearer its just not enough, Im still no nearer the meaning of love."

If you find the rest of the lyrics on the internet, you can see that singer Dave Gahan was obviously searching for the meaning of love...that is, afterall, the name of the song.

Love is one of the most commonly used words I know. Used to describe feelings towards friends and family, to a piece of music you like, something you eat or drink or even drive. I could go on for along time. Yet, while this word is so commonly used, why do we see so little of this 'love' in the world today.

It seems that love is something we create to make us feel better in the situation we are in. Having said that, I am not discounting love between freidns and family, or to something that genuinly touches your heart. In fact, to some extent, I disagree with what i've just written! However, somewhere in there I believe there is some truth.

The fact that love is used to describe so many things really does begin to detract away from what it really is and really means. Maybe, the love that one feels towards the homeless is compassion, which is possibly an aspect of love, but not love itself. The love for a film could be the way it has made you smile and connected with your emotions during those few hours.

We search for love in many different places, to appease our many different desires. Everything we do in life is essentially us trying to calm our desires to feel wanted by another person, to joke and to laugh, to feel security, both physically and financially etc. Do all the apsects of life that we strive to find and live out come under the concept of love? If we found true love, everything would be okay right? I mean, thats all we really want at the end of the day?

My friend Jack recently leant me a book by Andrew Wilson called Incomparable: Explore the Character of God (by the way, if you have read my last, I doubt it would surprise you if I told you I was a Christian!) Anyway, this books, as I just typed, is about God's character.

I opened it up flicked the chapater entitled "God is Love". I won't spend ages typing on this, otherwise I may just end up typing the chapter, but the jist is that God doesn't just love us, and give love to us, but he is love. 1 John 4:8-10 says:

"Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

If this is true, how can we know true love if we do not know God? We can have glances of it, we can feel wanted, we can fuzzy. But it isn't love. Those things don't last. God does...

This theory is obviously going to have his critics, but you can't judge a persons character unless you truley know him. So you can't pass judgement on God's love unless you make the effort to know him.

So, if God is love, that I presume that means everything will be fine as we see it if we know God? I'm not sure if that is true. Being a Christian certainly hasn't madfe life a breeze for me. But God being love, and knowing God's love you can start to see what it really is. It is the humble, sacfrifical nature of allowing the death of his son for ours sins, it is the underlying assurance and hope he puts in our life, it is the fact that we know that someone does care for us, even if it seems as if knowone else does. God's love certinaly isn't flashy, but it is true, and it is constant and everlasting.

Andrew Wilson says that trying to describe God's love is like trying to rugby tackle a snooker table. You can give it your best shot, but ultimatley it is far to big for you to get oyur arms around it. So I think i'll stop there.

However, if I were to meet Dave Gahan and tried to exaplain to him my understanding of love I would probably say that while he does feel happiness, he does care for others, and others care for him, while he may feel warm when he recieves a hug from a friend, all these things are not love. They are other feelings, that are elements of love. But not true love. That can come from knowing God, who is he is, how he views us, and what he has done for us.