Love Is.
Making love stick. This is the theme of our current series at Community. The core concept is that it is easy to fall in love, but how do you make love stick. With the divorce rate as high as it is, many are saying that love is not a forever thing. Tim Sutherland opened the series saying that we need to make love a verb. Yes, we do, but we need to go much deeper than that. Jon Ferguson said that romance is a state of temporary insanity. I would take that further. Way further. You see, the major worldview today is shifting so far towards naturalism, a belief that cannot explain love outside of an evolutionary instinct that aids in our survival. It is about self gain, and when we don't gain, we move on. This is survival. But we weren't designed this way.
Love, when truly unleashed, is the most insane thing. You see, we can love as a verb. People love all the time, and then move on. What love truly is is not a verb. It just is. It is a core essence of existence. Not just romance, but love is insanity, yet it is the most sane thing that we could ever experience. We fill ourselves with so much junk, but when we allow love to come in, allow it to take over us, it pushes everything else aside.
Why is love so visceral? The one that made us, our Lord Jesus, made us in creativity and love. He didn't end there, he made us to love creatively! And yet, we became so absorbed in ourselves to the point that we forgot this core essence of what it means to be human. Victor Hugo wrote, "To love another person is to see the face of God." When we let love come in, we open ourselves to one of the core elements of God's existence. The amazing power of love is such an elixir that I am not surprised by the insanity it brings. Yet, this potency of love is likely the most sane thing in the whole world.
If we are to make Jesus our "love coach," as this series calls for, we need to go deeper. We shouldn't stop at making love a verb, rather than a feeling. We need to release all that is in us, and let love fill us. Let love become who we are, not what we do. Once we do this, we will truly be insane. The generosity of love, the selfishness of love, the heroism of love is what we were made for. Jesus came to a world that hated him, cursed him, and yet showed unrelenting, unquenchable, insane love. He brought that love to the cross, without asking for anything. This is love — not some evolutionary adaption, not some feeling powered by hormones, not some action to be taken — a state of being, closer to God than anything else.