The Love Cycle

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."

                                                                                                   --Matthew 22:37

So, I haven’t written in awhile, and I am going to blame this on actually having friends that I hang out with all the time. It’s a big change from sitting in my room by myself, listening to All Sons and Daughters on repeat and journaling about my loneliness.

But having friends is just what I want to talk about anyway.

Over this past year, I have been praying to understand love a lot more than I do. Shocker (get ready for this): God is answering my prayers. He has been gently and patiently instructing me in love, and the more I learn, the more I feel like I don’t know.

The thing about love is, it can be confusing when you are a human, because real God-love is pretty much an alien thing beyond our imagination, yet we are programmed to search for it.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.—Ecclesiastes 3:11

I don’t feel frustrated by this, though, because I know that He makes everything beautiful in its time—including me. I can’t make myself beautiful. Only He can do it. And if I ask Him to teach me about love, He will teach me much more about it than my pea brain can comprehend, because He doesn’t teach my brain—He teaches my spirit.

And that’s a good thing, because the only way we can understand His word is by His spirit.

Speaking of the Word, this is the passage that kind of rocked my world a week or two ago.

     Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

     By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.

                                                --1 John 4:-7-20

I know that’s a lot, but it’s just too good to cut.

I’ve always thought this passage was redundant and a little too circular, as if John was just struggling to convey a message that wouldn’t come out right. But I see now that it is meant to be circular. It’s a description of the love cycle.

God loved us first, while we were still running around in sin, hostile to everything holy. He loved us by doing something, by acting: sending His only Son to be a living sacrifice who would pay for what we were doing. But, according to this text, that’s not when His love was perfected. It wasn’t even perfected when He raised Jesus from the dead.

Let’s reiterate: So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world.

His love is perfected when we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us, and when we stand confidently before Him without guilt or shame. It’s NOT perfected when we say, “Well, I guess God loves me, but I don’t think He is going to heal me.” Or, “I mean, I know God loves me, but I am not sure He is really going to provide for me, so I am not going to ask Him for what I need and try to get it myself.” His love is perfected when we come to Him as children, as His own Son would: because as he is so also are we in this world. His love is perfected when we are no longer afraid of punishment, of condemnation: because perfect love casts out fear.

There’s one rhetorical question I need to ask: are you harboring any shame or guilt in your relationship with God? If so, please allow His love to be perfected in you. This perfection is an ongoing process, a daily thing, and we all must make the choice to allow it to happen.

So this is the love cycle: God loves → us, we receive that love, and then we love → God.

And there’s another essential part of the equation. When we love → God, we can also love → others. ….No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us. Honestly, the only way we really can love other people is by the power of His Spirit, as new creations. In the flesh, we just don’t cut it.

It’s just a big circle of love. But it does have a beginning. And the beginning is God loving us, and us receiving His love.

Unfortunately, most of us try to do it backwards. We head counter-clockwise against the flow, always running in circles and continuously frustrated that our efforts are getting us nowhere. We go after all kinds of stupid and crazy things to make us feel like we’re worth something, like we’re important and valued. But what if the thing you use to fill yourself up isn’t a thing? What if it’s a person?

It’s one thing to know you shouldn’t be sacrificing your heart to money or drugs. It’s another when the thing you are trying to satisfy your heart with is a human relationship, or an assortment of human relationships. This is the most dangerous form of idol-worship, because relationships are good. God made us to be relational. He created Adam to be in communion with Him, to walk with Him in the garden; He created Eve not to fill a void in Adam, but to enrich his relationship with God, to share in it and spur him on in it. This was the purest triad of relationship.

Trouble happened the minute Adam trusted in someone else’s word rather than God’s—even if the person he trusted was walking with him in the purest human-to-human relationship the world has ever seen. At its core, original sin was relational. It was a distrust in God. Humanity started to think, “Maybe God is a liar. Maybe we will not surely die….maybe this other person is right….”

Think about it for a moment. There is probably someone in your life—a friend, a mentor, a spouse, a family member, or even your child—whose opinions you value, whose company you cherish above all others’; a person for whom you would bend over backwards (which I literally did one time when one of my dear friends asked me to take a yoga class with her). This person could be someone who is not literally in front of you now, but in whom you are hoping—like a mystery future spouse. Are you using this person to fill the relational hunger in you for God? If you are, you are setting your relationship up for failure.

I’m not trying to condemn here. I’m only telling you what I know from experience. Replacing God with someone else is always painful. There are no exceptions.

It’s good to submit to one another and value others above ourselves. That’s biblical. But there is a fine line between submitting in love and submitting in affection. I have seen a lot of “good people” fall into the trap of the reverse love cycle: we love → other people, and we think that this helps us to love → God, who then in turn will love → us.

The problem is, you can’t start with yourself, because, on your own, you can’t love anybody. You have to know the original source of love, and He has to abide in you. You can’t manufacture love on your own. You only have affection, which is simply the result of natural preferences. Affection is conditional, and it lends itself to favoritism and blind loyalty, which leads to jealousy and strife. Unfortunately, this is how most of the world understands the word “love.”

God, on the other hand, shows no partiality (Romans 2:11). Even when we are faithless, He still sets the love cycle in motion by being faithful to us anyway (2 Timothy 2:13). As humans, we have a hard time comprehending this. It’s just not how we operate.

Good thing we get to be recreated by the Holy Spirit. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.

The Spirit is the keystone of the equation.

We are meant to have close friends, to have wives and husbands, to have children. That’s biblical. And, naturally, there are certain people with whom we click better than others. Jesus had 12 close buddies, and even among those, there were 3 who spent more time with Him.

But the sin occurs when we attempt to replace Jesus with these other relationships, when our hope rests in them. When we expect others to be Jesus, we will always be disappointed, because we are seeking something from them that they cannot give. This is not love at all. It is feelings and behavior that are motivated by our desire for affection, attention, and affirmation, and have little to do with the other person (and his or her best interests) at all.

We all seek to fill ourselves with others at some point—and, if we don’t watch out, these relationships can destroy us. Be on the alert for our adversary, who loves to take the beauty of relationships, which God created, and make a shipwreck of them. It’s kind of his favorite hobby. All sin is relational sin, because ultimately, we are sinning against God and destroying our relationship with Him.

The worst (or best) is when you realize you are replacing God with another person, and that you have to give this up. It’s a hard decision to make. But once you give that person (or more than one person) to God, He will bless you back with an abundance of love—real, pure love.

Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from who the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.—Ephesians 4:15-16

Isn’t that the most beautiful image? What a sweet letdown to realize it doesn’t matter whom you love, as long as you are loving the Lord; and that you are free to love everyone in His Spirit. Jump on into the love cycle. It’s a beautiful process--and He will make you beautiful in your time.