Thursday January 19, 2017

 

Love, (in the Christian sense) does not mean an emotion. It is not a state of feelings but of the will. Act as if you love. Do not sit there trying to manufacture emotions. CS Lewis

 

Where there is love, there will always be strong feelings and emotions; love and feelings are inseparable. Many well-intended people will tell you that when you fall in love with someone or something, trust your heart and go with your feelings. However, most of us have lived long and have learned, that our heart is not the best advisor when dealing with just about anything, especially matters of the heart. The inverse is, that our emotions and feelings are also the reason we fail to love people the way we ought to. The problem with a “feeling” driven system for loving, is that it leads us to treat people they same way they treat us, to love only those who love us, or to love those people that we stand to benefit from. Yet, when we open our Bibles, we discover that Jesus wants us to love others in spite of our feelings and emotions. Jesus, said things like: everyone loves their friends but I want you to love your enemies, I want you to love others the way I love you.

 

A problem arises when we allow our emotions and our feelings to influence the way we love others. When we do this, we focus on our rights, respect, and justice. This way of loving drives us to attempt to convince, control, and convict. This system will never work, because no person ever feels sincerely loved by someone who is trying to impose their own agenda, because love (in the Christian sense) is a decision and not an emotion.

 

Philippians 2:3-8 NIV

 

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

 

While the world’s system of loving is focused on feelings and justified through rights, respect and justice, and executed by attempting to convince, control and convict; God’s system of love, manifested through Jesus Christ, cancels out Jesus’ rights and is then fulfilled through service and sacrifice.

 

In the Christian sense, to act as if we love, is not dictated by emotions but rather the decision to serve and sacrifice in spite of our emotions.