What Is Love?

Those who know me well, know that I'll often have a thought in my head, buried deep within, mulling it around for weeks and even months before it finally gets pieced together. This is one of such thoughts.

What is love? In life, I've been given many different answers. My religion says, God is love. My church says, serving is love. My military peers say, sex is love. The Army says devotion is love. Many say that good feelings is love. Many say sacrifice is love. To a degree, there is an element of truth to all of these.

The Bible says, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."

This got me thinking. The phrase, "lay down his life"....what does that mean? Traditionally, I grew up thinking that that meant death. But what does "lay down his life" really mean? Is Jesus talking about giving up breathing and moving for someone else? Or perhaps He is pointing to something much bigger than death.

Whenever someone asks for an example of love, Christians point to Jesus' death on the cross as the ultimate example of love. But can we really reduce all of Jesus to one final act, as if everything before the cross meant nothing? What about the life Jesus laid down to become human? Before Jesus was born, He was God, the Son! In a way that I don't believe can ever be adequately explained, Jesus was God, but also the Son of God. Equal to, yet at the same time, under the God of the universe! Yet, He laid all of this aside to come to live as a human. It wasn't forced on Him. At any time, He could have said, "forget this, they aren't worth it" and gone back up to be with God. But He didn't.

I'm not trying to diminish the significance of the cross, that is not my point at all. But I think that Jesus' greatest act of love was His entire life, and His death on the cross was the final culmination of His love.

So why do I say all of this? It goes back to the original question, what is love? To paraphrase the Bible (and add some personal opinions), greater love has no one than this, that he give up his way of life, his hopes, his dreams, his possessions, his reputation, all that he has and all that he is......for a friend.

JP OUT!