Love: Defined.

Love.  It is a word dense with connotation and value.  It has a purview of expanse and an arena that encompasses every human.  In some way, every human being experiences love.  But by that same sentiment nearly every person has experienced counterfeit love.  That is, we've often seen or been exposed to something claiming to be love which, in the end, turns out to be something less, something toxic, or even something relationally dangerous.

Yet the world is inundated with the language of love.  We speak of the things we love and the history of love.  Love songs still fill the radio waves.  Love is, it would seem, an inescapable and significant component of the human experience.  But with all this talk of love, have we not in, in some ways, dissolved the definitions of love to mean whatever we want it to mean?

But Scripture defines love not in some abstract definition but in a person, in Jesus.  He is love. His life, His death on the cross, and His resurrection: this is the definition of love.  Therefore, every other perceivable attempt at defining love must, by nature, look to Christ as its source and its rubric.  It all comes down to Jesus.  We would be so much wiser if we always kept that before us.