Mature Love
It’s time to grow up.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.1
This is a review and further reflection on love, but I think it hangs together. Let me know what you think.
If this is your first time reading my material, read away, but then you might want to go back. This string starts with On Love.
Pop Love is adolescent dreaming about relationships and what love will one day be like when we are older. This is normal and a healthy part of development…
IF
(A big IF here…)
if it is found in the developing child.
For everyone else who is thinking in the Pop Love way it is either a sign of emptiness or is being used to manipulate people, especially those not yet mature. It is more lust than love.
Real authentic love (what I have termed True Love) is the best part of the human soul, most connected to the holiness and goodness of God and to others, not based on their performance, but on a mysterious attractive force I have been trying to understand and describe to you over the past many entries.
This is the love that connects so well with God that it is considered the fulfillment of the law.
The Great Commandment
But when the Pharisees heard that [Jesus] had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him.
“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
This is the great and first commandment.
And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.2
It was through this sustaining love that Jesus lived his life to redeem mankind — all because, for some strange reason, “God so loved the world…”3 (A big idea for mature minds to ponder).
True Love pursues, but never grasps or clings, because it always wants the absolute best for the one being pursued. So Love restrains itself and behaves in such a way as to cause the one being pursued to stop running, turn and actually wholeheartedly embrace Love back. This is actually a beautiful description of repentance. It is stopping and turning away from your destructive selfishness because your heart is calling you back to the one who loved you the most sincerely way back when.
In this odd unobvious way True Love attracts us as would a hidden treasure or a priceless pearl catch the eye of a discerning speculator.
The Parable of the Hidden Treasure
(Jesus speaking)
The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.4
The Parable of the Pearl of Great Value
Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.5
“Wait!” you might be thinking, “I thought we were talking about Love, and these parables are about a kingdom of heaven.”
That’s correct. The kingdom of heaven where God rules, operates out of the magnificent power of Love. Think of it as heaven’s operating system.
Note that the treasure and the pearl did nothing in the stories but be what they were. They required the individual to discover them and value them so much (which requires a level of maturity born out of life experiences) that the transaction of selling everything to obtain either one of them was a perfectly rational decision, regardless whether unenlightened onlookers approved. (I hope this helps address the questions many ask about why didn’t God save them earlier and keep them from so much difficulty).
Those who have found their own treasures and who have behaved the same way understand better than those who have not. And where is the best place to find such people? Let us know in the comments below.
When this transaction with True Love happens, a bond of protection forms and the Beloved receives an affirmation of Love’s power and commitment. It’s called Life. True Love creates, sustains, and multiplies life. This describes the importance of healthy families for the growth and development of healthy children which aids in assuring healthy societies are sustained against all of its enemies working to destroy it.
And here’s the best part.
Love never ends.6
For the believer in God’s Love, the fairytale ending comes true. They do indeed live happily ever after. This is the point so many writers, like C. S. Lewis, have made that all good fiction rings true because it is found in a deeper reality, another world, that is truer than this one.
And recall all those posts about worship?
Worshipping God is a response to his love. There is no fear in true worship.
That’s why music happens.
That’s where beauty comes from.
Beauty and Love hit the same human centers of the brain and heart that stimulate joy, happiness, peace, as well as feelings of affection both received and transmitted.
They draw us toward a satisfaction with living even in hard times. What I mean is for Love and Beauty (girded often invisibly by Truth) to operate does not require that everything is going perfectly. In fact darkness sets off the brilliance of these gems. They are what sustain the human heart through even the darkest times.
1 Corinthians 13:11 (ESV)
Matthew 22:34-40
John 3:16
Matthew 13:44
Matthew 13:45-46
1 Corinthians 13:8a
Where is the “love” button? Your words are a daily grounding force.