Falling In Love -What Does That Mean

Below is the transcript from the video above.

So some of you know, I’ve been alone for about 10 years since my divorce. And, um, as I’ve contemplated getting into a relationship with a man, a few of the things that have been brewing in my mind regarding love have been concerning this idea of what is love?

What am I looking for in a relationship? What is going to be different now? And I’ll be honest with you, the reason I can say what’s gonna be different now is because for about the last 10 years, after my divorce, I had to really just be alone. I needed to be alone. I never would’ve thought that I could have been alone for this long.

But you know what? It’s because I needed to know who God was. I needed to fall in love with God so that I could figure out who I was so I could, you know, you can’t really know yourself until you know God because he’s your creator. Otherwise, you’re left to search for your identity, based on your peers, based on your success, based on the image that you create on social media or whatever it is.

But that’s not the true you. The true you is who God says you are because he made you. You know, there are eight, what, 8 billion people on the planet. And the most amazing, um, and staggering thing to me is that they’re, we’re all different. We all have different dna.

And so how better to know who you are than to have God show you who that is. So, when I think about now contemplating loving another human, um, falling in love as they say it really is overwhelming because first of all, I wanna know what is, what does that look like based on God’s way. I’ve been asking people this question, what, what is love to you? And, the answers are truly amazing from the standpoint that they’re so different. Think about how you would define love when it comes to being in a relationship with another person? And I’m not talking about the way you love your children or your parents. I’m talking about a love relationship with a man or a woman.

The answers have been everything from someone who makes me feel special to someone who will love me no matter what. Someone who understands me. I mean, the definitions are all over the place. Someone who will have sex with me. There’s all these definitions. And what terrifies me is that I think it should be terrifying, is that you are never gonna find anyone who defines love the exact same way you do. And that’s why people are always disappointed in love, because we have, we have this expectation. Another person has this expectation, and they’re always failing because their expectations are not the same. And so that’s really made me think, oh, okay. So if I know going in with the thought  that I am not going to be able to find somebody who has the same expectation for what love will be, then where do I start? 

Well, God’s kinda like going, “you can look at my word because I don’t change and, you know, I kind of figured out this from the beginning.” So, that’s what I’ve done. And I wanna share what I’ve studied with you. And maybe for some of you this is the time you stop listening because if you don’t believe in God’s word, I, you know, I get it. But if you do believe in God’s word and you believe that God’s word was given to give us guidance about reality, then, I hope this blesses you.

I hope this will be something that helps you maybe in your own search for love. So let’s just, I want to start with some very simple things. The Bible says, “for God so loved the world that he gave…,” and we know the rest of the verse, but he gave, what is, what did he do?

He gave, and he gave, and he gave, and he gave to death. And he gave, not for people who loved him, but the Bible says he gave, he died for people who hated him. In fact, the Bible also talks about how God senses reign on the just and the unjust things that we have in this earth.

He doesn’t just give them to people who are believers. He gives the Son the reign to breathe life to everyone. Now, you think about that in the context of love. You know, we don’t have any problem most of the time given to people that we, you know, our children, our family, our own tribe,  but to give to people who hate us probably never crosses our mind.

So we’ll start there then. I’d like to skip over to 1John 7:8, And it says, Beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God. And whoever has been born of God and knows God, he is someone who loves. And it says, anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Wow. What does that mean? What does “God is love” even mean? 

If we’re struggling with the definition of love to begin with, and we don’t know God, or we think we know God, but you know, God’s image has been damaged by the world’s definition of who he is.

Think about, I mean, I’ll admit that my idea of God was a judge who was ready to squish me or send me to Africa to be a nun, um, which I didn’t wanna do. In other words, he wants to make my life miserable. 

And so, in order to figure out who God is, we have to read his word. It’s his book about himself. And, which is really great of him to do that because we can see who he is. The Bible says we can see God in creation, but to know who he is, know what he’s, his characteristics are, and his nature is, we need to read His word. 

Well, this is a different subject, but I I want you to understand that, to to know God, we first need to accept his gift of salvation that he died to give us. We need to surrender to him. We need to give our life to him the way he gave his life to us. He did it first. He set the example. He’s not asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us. And he did it in a way that we could never even comprehend. 

Secondly, we need to know him. We need to fall in love with him. See, he’s fallen in love with us a long time ago. He made us. We’re his children. He made us. And, when we look at what the Bible says, what God says about love, Jesus said, “if you love me, you will keep commandments.” Ooh, that doesn’t really sound like love.

That’s not the kinda love we’re looking for. Is it? We’re not looking for that kind of love. We’re looking for love that will do stuff for us without any expectations, right? But the fact is, love has rules. We talk about defining love. We are talking about what your rules for love are.

For example, if your  requirement for love as somebody who makes you feel like a princess, then or a king, if you’re a dude, then what does that involve on your lover’s part? Well, they’re gonna have to serve you, right? They’re gonna have to not love anybody else. They’re gonna have to do certain things. That will be your rules. 

Well, what makes us think that we’re in the best position to define the rules of love? Ooh, that kinda hurts, doesn’t it? 

I know it’s painful to think that we are not, we’re not in that position. We’re not in a good position to say, well, love to me means, you know, sex. Or love to me means, you buy me a big wedding ring. If those are the things that we’re saying define love, then we need to be open to the fact that we might be way off base.

God’s definitions of love takes us back to John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave…” And you know what’s crazy is we tend to think that God thinks the way we think, but that’s not true. 

If God had the kind of expectations in love for us that we put on each other, he would be sorely disappointed. And, you know, that might just be the reason that all of us are disappointed in love, the love that we’ve tried to find in the world. But he doesn’t do that. He has an expectancy. He wants to be with us.

I just have to read part of this beautiful passage out of the Song of Solomon. It’s hard for us to wrap our mind around the fact that God just wants to be with us. He came. He left heaven and he came to earth, and he knew when he left that he would suffer terribly in order to establish the right for us to have a relationship with him, to accept his gift of salvation. But he did it anyway.

And you know, he didn’t just stop at that. He didn’t just give us the ability to have a relationship with him. He searches for us. He wants us. His spirit draws us. And if you read The Song of Solomon, chapter two, which is a great metaphor for us, it’s a love relationship between Solomon and the Sheena White woman. When she describes Solomon’s love for her, it’s a very good picture of the way God longs for us.

She writes he is looking through the window, gazing through the lattice. 

“My beloved spoke and said to me: 

Rise up my love, my fair one, 

and come away. 

For lo, the winter is passed,

The rain is over and gone. 

The flowers appear on the earth;

The time of singing has come,

And the voice of the turtledove 

Is heard in our land.

The fig tree puts forth her green figs 

And the vines with the tender grapes 

Give a good smell, 

Rise up my love, my fair one, 

And come away!

O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, 

In the secret places of the cliff.

Let me see your face, 

Let me hear your voice for your sweet,

For your voice is sweet 

And your face is lovely.”

Song Of Solomon

This is this woman describing what Solomon has said to her. And this is a metaphor for the way God views us. He’s like, let me see your face. Let me hear your voice. For your voice is sweet and your face is lovely. You know, you experience that kind of love, that kind of treasure love with somebody who, somebody who treasures you that much. It, it’s an indescribable feeling of joy. It really, really is.

And this is the way God longs to be with us. You know, the Bible has over and over again described Christ as our bride groom. And we are the bride, those of us who have, have accepted Christ as our Savior. And that love is just mind blowing. It really is.

And so we have to adjust in order to find the kind of love that God wants us to have. God is love. We have to learn about who God is. We have to fall in love with him.

Like I said, he has rules. Jesus said, “If you love me, keep my commandments.”That’s not to beat us over the head. He doesn’t force us to do this. He doesn’t force us to love him because he understands  love is a voluntary thing.

And when we conform to God’s rules of love, which are in his word, I mean, he puts it out there for us. So it’s not some big mystery. And when we conform to his rules, then we suddenly discover what love is. It’s like, oh, I’m encircled by the one who’s watching me. He’s got his eyes on me, he adores me, and I’m in the circle of his arms. I’ve joined the great dance with the Father, son and the Holy Spirit. And I am loved. I’m fully loved. I’m no longer a wallflower.

When we’re in that circle of God’s love, then we understand better what 1Corinthians chapter 13 says, because it’s the love chapter, right? The Bible talks about what it’s not. It’s not doing beautiful things, speaking in tongues. It’s not giving prophetic words. It’s not being as wise as Solomon. It’s not having such faith to remove mountains or giving to the poor. Because the bible says that if we do these things without love it profiteth me nothing.

And I think so many of us ram through good works to check the box instead of doing those things because we are loved, because we are so loved. We know we are so loved by God that we want to give of the abundance that he gives us.

And then we talk about, well, what is love then? Well, it says in the Bible love suffers long and is kind. Love does not envy. It doesn’t parade itself. It’s not puffed up, does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not think evil, and does not rejoice. Iniquity bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. And love never fails.

Wow. 

That is, even that is so far above the love that I have ever shown to another person that it makes me ashamed. It really, really does. But I’m incapable. I am incapable of loving that way unless I know God, who is love, he is the author of love.

And when I fall in love with him and I conform to his rules for love, then guess what?

I can be long-suffering. I can be kind irrespective of what the other person’s doing, I cannot envy, I don’t have to envy because I have everything I need. See, I don’t have to be prideful because I have received so much mercy from God that it strips me of pride so that I can say, “Oh Lord, to you be glory for everything that I am. Everything that I have is yours.”

Then I don’t think about people in an evil sense. I look at people the way God does, and I can love them the way God does because I understand the prison of evil. God shows us that. 

You see, when we fall in love with him, we have a completely different perspective, a transforming perspective that takes us from operating in our flesh that’s still with us, still plagues us, to operating in his spirit. And then we can bear all things, we can believe all things, we can hope and  we can endure. And we have the love that doesn’t fail. 

See, when the cup is full of God’s love, then we have something to give. But when it’s still empty, cuz we’re trying to cram things into our gods shaped hole in our heart, we’re trying to cram things in there that are gonna quote, satisfy us in love and they don’t, then we can never get enough.

But when we take God’s word and apply it to our lives, and not because we have to, but because we want to, because we want to be close, and we want to be in love with the one who loves us, oh my gosh, it’s so transforming.

And then we become love, the love we first read about in the book of 1John, this idea that we can love one another is easy because it’s from God and it’s not some great effort on our part, but rather we are a funnel. 

Our job is to obey and love God with all of our heart. And that means to love him. 

We all have a heart, right? He is Lord. So when we look at another person, we’re not mercenary. We don’t have this expectation, oh, that person is gonna gimme what I need because I need, I need things bought from me. I want to be treated like a princess. I want to make sure I’m satisfied. My physical needs are satisfied. 

No, when we look at the other person, we’re looking in through the eyes of love. God’s love. And it’s, what can I do? What can I do to love on this person? What can I do to meet their needs? And if the other person in the relationship is thinking the same way, wow, isn’t that the kind of love you want? 

Don’t you wanna be in love with someone who’s in love with God and experience that kind of giving, giving, giving? Because then when both people are giving that way, in other words their cups are full of God’s love. So they’re both giving to each other that way. Their cup is overflowing. And as a unit, they’re able to love others. Man, isn’t that the kind of love you want? 

That’s what I want. I wanna love, be in love with someone who is in love with God. Because then it will never run out. And it doesn’t matter whether you age, you are crippled, whether your blind, poor or what circumstances will come. You will never lose the love for the other person because you never will, you’ll never lose your love for God. 

You know, the Apostle Paul prayed that believers would know the height and depth and breadth and width of the love of God. If the Apostle Paul prayed for that, then that means it can happen.

And that’s what I wanna know. I  just wanna encourage you that if you are lonely, if you feel unloved, you have a choice. You have a choice. You can know the greatest love of your lifetime. And that is Jesus Christ.

He loved you before you loved him, and he wants to know you. The Old Testament talks about the eyes of God, a search over the earth looking for someone, looking for people to love. And God’s looking for you. He is. And he wants to give you everything you have ever been missing.

And that is his love. And his love lasts forever. And if you’re a Christian, if you already accepted the gift of salvation and you feel unloved, I would encourage you to do what I’m challenging myself to do. And that is to fall in love with God. It’s an everyday process. Every day I have to wake up and commit my heart to Christ and say, 

“Lord, be Lord of my life. Teach me your ways. Help me to walk in your commandments. Help me to love your law because your law is love. And then, pour through me. Pour through me and help people to see when they look in my eyes, they can see you. They can just see you.”

That’s the way that love works. God has an expectancy to be with you. He doesn’t have an expectation because it would crush you. And when we figure that out, when we learn to live in that wonderful expectation of our expectancy of God, then we don’t crush other people with our own expectations. Rather we show them what it looks like to be completely loved by God who loves us so much that He gave. That He gave. 

So I hope this has been encouraging to you. I want you to, to get this, I want to get this every day. So thanks for listening. I hope that  this helps you find the love of your life.

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