For King and Country’s “The Proof of Your Love” is a quintessential contemporary Christian song detailing Christ’s love and how we’re supposed to follow up on that in a world that desperately needs to experience it because we’ve all been thinking of love all wrong.
Take your favorite RomCom or other romance and picture the relationship between the two lovers. What brought them together? What binds them together? Would their relationship last outside the confines of the screen or book?
Now, my experience with romances is fairly limited, but from what I’ve read and watched, I’d say the chances are pretty slim. We have this misconstrued vision of love. This vision has come about through a combination of faulty views on what love is and how relationships work. We’ve been influenced by fiction stories and movies, and also, I think, by our society’s lack of openness about love in our relationships.
Let’s take a look at your classic movie relationship: the lovers often come together via a hardship experienced by one of the two. The other attempts to help them through it, to fix them, and they eventually catch feelings for each other and get together.
When people talk to others about how they “fell in love” with their significant other, the phrase “we just had a connection” is used fairly frequently. And maybe they did, but that’s not how love works. But that somewhat harmless phrase has been perpetuated and misunderstood as it has been conveyed through our societies, and now we have a bunch of people searching for a connection that, frankly, they’re never going to find.
We’ve got this definition of love as a feeling, an emotion, a connection, a noun. It’s the butterflies in your stomach when you see someone attractive or connect with someone on a deeper level, but that’s just not it. Those feelings are nice, valuable, wonderful, but they’re just that: feelings. Love? Well, love is a verb.
So, if love is a verb, an action, and not a noun, a feeling, then how does it work? Well, let’s go to the best example of love there ever was: Christ. He died. He sacrificed his life for us. It wasn’t selfish. It wasn’t for him to boast about his actions. It wasn’t prideful. It was done with a heart that desired the best for us.
It’s oft used, but John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.” God the Son sacrificed Himself for us. That’s what love is. It’s sacrifice.
You see, the thing we call love now can’t be love because it’s selfish. It’s “loving” someone because you get nice feelings from them. That’s about what you want. But love is about what others need, desire, want. Love is laying down your life, and I don’t mean dying, for someone else. I mean choosing to serve and take care of the person you love before you take care of yourself. It’s setting aside yourself for the sake of another. John 15:13 says “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”
Love doesn’t rely on feelings, either. It’s a choice. Why? Because if we are to love like Christ loved us (John 15:12), our love must be unconditional because Christ’s love is unconditional. He does not love us more or less when we make mistakes. So, too, when those we love make mistakes, we should not love them more or less.
I’ll leave y’all with this pure definition of love from 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 “Love is patient, love is kind. Love does not envy, is not boastful, is not conceited, does not act improperly, is not selfish, is not provoked, and does not keep a record of wrongs. Love finds no joy in unrighteousness but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
Don’t feel love. Do love.