Love as God Defines It

Show Notes

It's common for people to define love only in terms of our feelings. But how does God define authentic love? That's what Dennis and Barbara discuss in this episode. (Includes a portion of this song: L-O-V-E, Natalie Cole, Unforgettable: With Love ℗ 1991 Craft Recordings., Distributed by Concord.)

What is The Barbara Rainey Podcast?

Barbara Rainey mentors women in their most important relationships. She loves encouraging women to believe God and experience Him in every area of their lives.

Phil: Have you ever thought about the ingredients that make up real love? Barbara Rainey gives one at the top of the list.

Barbara: We have to know Jesus Christ. We have to depend on Him and learn from Him in order to love; because He’s the only person who has ever lived who did not live focused on self. Every other person who has ever lived on this planet has been absorbed with self, which is why we don’t know how to love well.

It’s important that we know Him, and that we know His Word, and that we read His Word—and allow it to transform us—so that we can actually begin to, in a very small way, learn how to love well.

Phil: We’re going to talk about love today—love as God defines it.

Welcome to the Barbara Rainey Podcast, helping you be transformed by Jesus which will, in turn, transform your home. Thanks for listening!

MUSIC: Natalie Cole, L-O-V-E

Phil: Every February, stores in the U. S. turn red. Candy conversation hearts appear at school or in bowls on people’s desk at the office.

Man (ordering flowers): So what does the total come to?

Phil: As the day approaches, forgetful husbands and procrastinating boyfriends scramble to find a card and some flowers.

Man (ordering flowers): Wait, the vase is extra? HOW MUCH????

Phil: Singles might bemoan the lack of romance in their lives. And some individuals get snarky, sarcastic, or even downright conspiratorial.

Man: Valentine’s Day is nothing but a big marketing ploy by the greeting card companies and people who make really bad chocolate!!

MUSIC: “Love was made for me and you!”

Phil: While Valentine’s Day as a holiday might be overhyped, overdone, and over-commercialized, love itself seems to be somewhat lacking today, doesn’t it? At least love the way God defines it. That’s what we’ll be talking about today on the Barbara Rainey Podcast.

Here’s Barbara.

Barbara: Valentine’s tends to be kind of sappy and sentimentalism, or we think Valentine’s is only for couples and it’s romantic. But love is from God, and we don’t know how to love unless we know Him. He teaches us how to love, and He shows us how to love. So, in my opinion, Valentine’s should be about learning about love—love for one another in any relationship that you’re engaged in.

Phil: Learning about love is something we can all stand to do a little more of. Barbara’s husband, Dennis, says they had to be intentional about it in their parenting.

Dennis: When we were raising our kids, it was like, “They need training.
They really need training.” If there’s an area they need training in, it’s this right here, because the world is sending false messages about what love is, where it comes from. I mean, think of how Hollywood portrays love.

Barbara: Easy—it is feelings / it’s romantic—it doesn’t take any work.

Dennis: Right.

Phil: First Corinthians chapter 13, starting in verse 4, sets the bar high for us:

Teen: Love is patient and kind…

Barbara: Ouch.

Teen: …Love does not envy or boast…

Dennis: Oooh

Teen: …It is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way…

Barbara: We really do not know how to love. We think we do, but we do not know how to love.

Teen: …It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth…

Barbara: We are completely incapable of loving on our own.

Teen: …Love bears all things…

Barbara: The only way we can love, and love well, is to be in a relationship with Jesus Christ…

Teen: …believes all things…

Barbara: …and to know Him so that, then, His love can flow through us to other people;

Teen: …hopes all things…

Barbara: because we’re broken and we don’t know how to do it.

Teen: …endures all things.

Phil: In 1 John, chapter four, the Apostle John discusses true, sacrificial love. Barbara recites verse 19.

Barbara: “We love because He first loved us [1 John 4:19].” We would not be able to love if He didn’t first love us.

Phil: Human, romantic love tends to follow some patterns. It goes through different stages, or seasons. First is infatuation.

Song: “Uh-oh, here I go, falling head over heels, you know…”

Dennis: It’s like gravity. You fall under the spell, and it just—you just go downstream with it.

Song: “...and you scoop me in your arms”

Phil: Dennis and Barbara refer to that season as “young love.” If we stay with the stream metaphor for a moment, love usually then hits some rapids — rough water where you have to work hard together to stay afloat.

Barbara: But you have to go through the rapids to get to the mature love—the kind of love that’s satisfying, the kind of love that we got married for. You can’t get to that unless you go through the hard times and make the choice that you’re going to continue to learn to love; you’re going to continue to learn to forgive; and you’re going to continue to depend on God to give you what you, in the rapids, realize you don’t have the ability to do.

Phil: If you think about it, most of the qualities of love listed in 1 Corinthians chapter 13 come as a result of making it through those rapids. Like, God says “Love is patient and kind.” Well, how do you learn patience? Patience is usually forged in the context of suffering of some sort. Kindness is learned best when someone is being unkind to you. And so on.

A few years ago Barbara wrote a devotional for families called How Do I Love Thee. Instead of a standard book, she printed the content of the devotional on heart shaped cards. These were designed to be read out loud and then hung on a garland, one each day. Each of the 14 folded heart-shaped cards contained a story and a prayer based on the 14 descriptors of love found in I Corinthians 13.

This beautiful product, packaged in a cute box with a chain garland was one of Ever Thine Home’s top ten best-sellers.

So this year we took the same content and created a new ebook for you to use with your loved ones. These are intended to be read out loud and discussed.

Barbara: Well, the idea is to help us focus on what love is all about during Valentine’s because, when kids are in school, they’re talking about it. There’s advertising everywhere. Yet, it’s a prime opportunity for moms, and dads, and kids to focus on love.

The idea is that, starting on February 1st, you take the first heart and you read about “Love is patient.” There’s a story in there about someone who demonstrated patience.

Dennis: But on the inside of the heart are some summary statements about what it means for love to be patient. If you thought the other was convicting, this is, as well: “Love chooses self-control rather than speaking or acting out of impatience. Love doesn’t retaliate. Love is willing to wait calmly. Love is long-suffering—another word for patience—which means waiting may be long and unpleasant, but love trusts that God is in control.” And then, finally, one more: “Love is not flighty or quick. It takes time to love well.”

Now, I think kids can catch on to some of these and grab hold of them and realize, “In our family, this is the kind of love we need to be practicing with one another.” Then on the opposite side you tell a story.

Barbara: Yes; and the good thing is that it’s quick and it’s easy. You can have a short two- or three-minute time, as a family, before the day starts—before everybody goes off to school or whatever you are doing. It just kind of centers everybody, for a few moments, back on what the truth is. Each one of these has a story; because stories are engaging, for children and for adults, to listen to.

Phil: So, on the heart-shaped card for “Love is Patient,” it starts out by saying:

Patience is not natural to us. We feel impatient when we can’t control the circumstances or people in our lives.

When our parents are late to pick us up at school or the traffic jam makes us late for work, the right response is to be patient, trusting that God is at work and He knows what He is doing.

Then she goes on to talk about the first man to translate the Bible into English, William Tyndale. She explains how just the act of translating the Bible could have cost him his life. And she says,

William spent the rest of his life translating the entire Bible into English, while fleeing from the authorities who searched for him in every country in Europe. His long-suffering helps us see that love trusts God’s control, even when the wait is unpleasant.

The One who perfectly demonstrated how to love this way was Jesus. He told us how to do this when He said, “I do nothing on My own. I always do the things that are pleasing to the Father.”

Then Barbara offers this suggestion:

Pause and ask God what to do or say, like Jesus did. Think about staying calm, about choosing self-control instead of blurting out whatever you feel like saying, and enduring unpleasantness while you wait.

And then she closes with a prayer:

Patience is not easy for me, Lord—not with my family, not with certain people, not with my circumstances. Help me remember it’s not about me, but it’s about what You want to teach me. Amen.

Dennis: I’m picturing us reading that, and our kids would be bouncing off the walls, even though it only took, you know, three or four minutes, total.

Barbara: Well, we would have done it while they were eating so they were, at least, a little bit preoccupied. [Laughter]

Dennis: Yes; but they’ll be hearing more than you think they’ll be hearing.

Barbara: They always hear more than you think they’re hearing. They pretend like they’re not listening, but they’re hearing.

Dennis: It’s the way to get stuff in their hearts.

Barbara: Yes.

Dennis: And it’s a way to do it so that they can have takeaways that they can, ultimately, apply in their relationships with the parents and, also, their brothers and sisters.

Barbara: You could hang it across a door, you can tack it on a wall, just about anyplace. But the idea is it’s then up for the first 14 days of February, culminating on Valentine’s Day. As a family, you’re seeing this, day after day after day. It’s just a visual reminder of what love is all about. And hopefully, it’ll provide opportunities for conversation, as each family member runs into an opportunity where they realize they’re not loving so well after all. Maybe they’ll talk about it, and maybe there will actually be some heart change through the process of that. Which is what these are shaped like, hearts.

It can be left up all year. We tend to think seasonally, that we can only talk about love and hearts and things like that at Valentine’s. Well, it’s year round. Same with Thanksgiving and gratitude. It’s something that should be a part of our conversation and our lives year round. So it could be left up a lot longer than February 14.

Phil: The Valentine’s devotional from Barbara Rainey is called How Do I Love Thee? You can download your own ebook, or pdf, of it to print out on card stock yourself. I’ll tell you where to go for that in just a minute.

Here was a fun moment on FamilyLife Today some years back, as Dennis and Barbara interacted with FamilyLife Today co-host, Bob Lepine, about Valentine’s Day.

Bob: Barbara Rainey joins us on FamilyLife Today. I’m wondering: “What is the most memorable Valentine’s Day?”

Dennis: No, no, no, no, no. [Laughter] If you’re going to ask her, then, I’m going to call Mary Ann! [Laughter]

Bob: I’ll tell you what Mary Ann would say. I just want to know—

Dennis: It was a pizza!—or was it the cookie?

Bob: —the heart-shaped pizza.

Dennis: Or was it the heart-shaped broccoli? [Laughter]

Bob: Yes!—heart shaped. [Laughter] The sad thing is that the most memorable Valentine’s Days, in our relationship, all came before we were married; okay? You guys didn’t have any Valentine’s Days—

Barbara: —before we were married!

Dennis: We didn’t. That’s exactly right!

Barbara: —which explains why I don’t remember any. [Laughter] We just didn’t do much for Valentine’s Day.

Dennis: Let me just head this off at the pass; because this is going to deteriorate very fast, because you’ve got a good eyewitness here. [Laughter] I was going to—now, I’m not saying this was really smart—but I was going to give her a rose for our first Valentine’s and, then, follow it up each successive year—

Bob: —with another rose?

Dennis: —with another.

Bob: Yes? Is this one of those it’s-the-thought-that-counts kind of things or what?

Dennis: It was. Well, it was until Barbara said, “You know, I would much prefer that you express your love to me the other 364 days of the year in various ways than going and buying a box of chocolates or a cheesy—or a cheesy—[Laughter]

Bob: So are you saying acts of service is more your love language than gifts on Valentine’s Day?

Barbara: More than roses; yes.

Dennis: That’s not her deal.

I think we need to find out “What does communicate love?” to our spouses and then get on that page with them and exploit it.

Bob: There were a couple of things that I did when Mary Ann and I were dating. One year, I bought a box of 32 kids’ Valentine’s cards. I wrote a different message on each one. I stamped it, and I mailed all 32.

Barbara: Nice; nice. You know, that would cost you more now.

Dennis: That was back when—

Bob: It would cost me more; yes.

Dennis: —postage stamps were—what?—a nickel a piece?

Bob: Seven cents, I think.

Barbara: Yes.

Bob: But, then, every year on Valentine’s Day, with our kids, we used to have a Valentine’s treasure hunt. I would stay up at night. I would hide clues, and I would hide presents around the house—different things—candy and different toys. We had a little scavenger hunt for the kids. They would look forward to their Valentine’s scavenger hunt that we did every year.

Barbara: Nice idea.

Bob: It was just something fun that we did.

Phil: Barbara explains how she came up with the idea for her Valentine’s devotional How Do I Love Thee?

Barbara: I know families talk about Valentine’s. I know that kids are thinking about it, because they’re going to exchange Valentines in their classes with their friends. It comes up every year.

It’s one of those things, like, “What can I do to make this important? What can I do to make it meaningful?” There isn’t a whole lot [already]. My real motivation was to equip moms and dads to be able to talk about it at home in a meaningful way—and to teach their kids the essence of love—where it comes from, why we fail at loving, why we’re not good lovers, and how we can learn to love in a relationship with Christ. It just makes sense to help moms and dads do that as the country is naturally thinking about Valentine’s Day anyway.

Phil: I mentioned before: the devotional comes in heart-shaped cards. Each one is folded, like a book. On the front, each heart has one of the characteristics of love found in 1 Corinthians Chapter 13. On the inside you’ll find a story to read and a devotional thought from Barbara. The idea is that you’ll print them out and hang up a new one each day, somewhere in your home, after you’ve read them.

Barbara: And it’s a reminder for everyone in the family—for February 1st through February 14th and then, hopefully, beyond—that: “This is what love is all about.” As you add the hearts, one day at a time, through the first two weeks of February, you’re adding to the descriptors of what love is all about—what it looks like and how we can be more loving.

Phil: Dennis says that as Barbara worked on studying 1 Corinthians chapter 13, it had a positive impact on their marriage.

Dennis: I have noticed a change—in just our relating, back and forth, with each other— in Barbara. I think she absorbed this from the Scriptures, and I think God’s Spirit is using it in her life. She’s ministered to me as a result of that.

Barbara: Yes; I think what stood out to me was how guilty I was of not being able to do any of these things. I mean, I’ve always known that patience was an issue. I had a hard time with being patient with my kids. I have a hard time being patient with my husband. I just think, naturally, we want what we want—and we want it when we want it—so that one was not too much of a surprise.

But some of the other ones were more of a surprise as I got into what it really means to be—one of them says, “Love is not arrogant.” I’ve never really thought of myself as an arrogant person—but it means when you’re thinking about yourself first. Well, it’s like: “Okay; well, I do do that. Everybody does that. We all think of my own interests, my own desires, and my own wants first before we think of somebody else's.” It’s just very convicting to realize how unable, in our own power—how unable I am, in my own power, to love well.

Dennis: I wish we had had something like this to start off our first Valentine’s Day, as a couple, where we could begin to center around: “What is this love that we’ve expressed to each other? What does it really look like?”—

Barbara: Yes; that would have been good.

Dennis: —and, “How can we become lifelong students of what the Scriptures teach about love, and reprogram our brains from the get-go, and begin to express that to one another?”

I mean, I wish, at this point, we’d had it like a wheel of fortune, where you can spin it. I could get one for you, Barbara, and me—and just take a look at it—and say: “You know—here’s one for you to focus on for the next 24 hours. Just work on this one.”

Phil: For example, Dennis randomly picked one of the hearts and read it.

Dennis: “Love is not irritable or resentful.”

(opens heart-shaped card)

Dennis: “Irritable means easily-angered, which is unlovely. It means that, without Jesus’ love in your heart, it is impossible to love difficult people.

“Love doesn’t keep a record of wrongs that can lead to resentment.” That’s a good one; because we have to forgive, and forgiveness means you have to give it up. You have to give up the right to punish.

“All of us are susceptible to anger when tired or hungry or when we’re stressed. Even then, we must choose love. Love forgives wrongs.”

That’s really a good reminder, because every relationship must forgive when they have been wronged.

And do you remember what the story was on this one, Barbara?

Barbara: I don’t know; but if you remind me, I bet I will remember.

Dennis: “In A Wrinkle in Time, Meg Murry and her little brother travel through time on a quest to find their scientist father who vanished during an experiment.”

Do you want to go ahead and finish the story?

Barbara: Well, it’s a great little story; because it’s a make-believe story about other worlds, and other planets, and time travel, which is fascinating to kids and adults alike. What happens is that Meg is trying to rescue her brother and her father. She is confronted by this creature that’s called an It.

It’s very vague who the It is; but it’s clear, when you read the book, that the It wants her to be angry. She gets angry, and she gets irritable, and she’s frustrated.

Then, she realizes, all of a sudden, that that is exactly what he wanted her to do—the It wanted her to be angry / it wanted her to be irritable. Then, she realized that, if she chose love, it made the It frustrated. That was not what he could handle. She learned that choosing love was a better choice than choosing anger. When she chose love, her father was released; and she, and her brother, and father traveled back in time and landed back in their own backyard.

Dennis: Cool!

Barbara: It’s a really sweet story, and it is make-believe; but it still is the truth that we’re always better off when we choose love rather than being irritable, or angry, or impatient with other people. Love is always the best choice.

Phil: I’ve heard it said that most people think the opposite of love is hate. But when you examine true, Biblical love, love as God defines it, you’ll find that the opposite of love is actually self.

Barbara: Which is why we have to know Jesus Christ—it’s why we have to depend on Him and learn from Him in order to love; because He’s the only person who has ever lived who did not live, focused on self. Every other person, who has ever lived on this planet, has been absorbed with self, which is why we don’t know how to love well.

It’s important that we know Him, and that we know His Word, and that we read His Word—and allow it to transform us—so that we can actually begin to, in a very small way, learn how to love well.

Phil: Maybe you’ve heard the advice: Substitute your own name instead of the word “love” in 1 Corinthians, and ask yourself if it’s true. So, for example, “Phil is patient, Phil is kind, Phil is not arrogant, Phil is not irritable or resentful,” and so on. Well, am I?

Then, after realizing how far you fall short, substitute “Jesus” in place of the word “love.” Jesus is patient, kind, not arrogant, etc.

But, beyond just being a model for us to follow, Jesus actually is our life. He provides the power to love in this way. We can only love properly, says the Apostle John, because God first loved us. And as we experience the reality of Jesus’ resurrection in our lives, His Spirit gives us that resurrection power to love THROUGH us, even in the most difficult situations.

Barbara: It reminds me of when we were raising our children. We had a family that lived next door to us, at the time.

They had a son who was a very angry child. He was always being mean to our kids. It was, initially, just frustrating to me. Then, I would find myself being angry at him. When I would see him, I would feel this anger at this child. He was really doing mean things.

Dennis: He threw a rock over one of our kid’s head one time—

Barbara: Exactly.

Dennis: —and we’re not talking about a little bitty—

Barbara: —it wasn’t a pebble.

Dennis: —it wasn’t a stone. It was a rock the size of a loaf of bread.

Barbara: He was an angry child. He didn’t have a good background. He was troubled, and he was difficult. But I remember thinking: “Jesus wants me to love him. I don’t want to love him! I don’t like him! He’s not nice to my kids; I don’t like it when he comes over to our house!”

But I remember—it was one of the first times I had ever done this—I remember, saying to myself: “This is somebody that God wants you to love.

“The only way that you’re going to be able to love this person is to ask God to love him through me.” I did not have the capacity to love this child.

I asked God to love him through me. I was amazed, that within days, I remember that anger was going away. I actually started kind of liking this kid. It was such a transformation in my heart—I went: “Wow! It’s really true. God really can give us the ability to love when we don’t have the ability to love.”

Dennis: And I’m thinking of working for Bill Bright for more than three decades and listening to a message he gave over, and over, and over again. He had a number of messages. You sometimes wondered, “Bill, haven’t you learned anything different recently?” but he kept going back over certain messages over, and over, and over again. One was about the Holy Spirit—another was about the power of forgiveness.

One of the most memorable messages I heard—I must have heard it 15 times from Dr. Bill Bright—was how to love by faith.

It was just what Barbara was talking about—how you love the unlovable by asking God, in faith, to love that other person through you. Bill Bright used to say: “You know, I’m an introvert by personality. I’m not naturally, and don’t come across as, a loving person; but I’ve asked God, over my lifetime, to help me be a great lover of people. I want to be known as a person of love.” That one thought, for me, lodged in my heart.

It really goes back to 1 Corinthians 13, where it says: “If I speak with the tongues of angels, and I have the faith to move a mountain, and I can do all of these miracles, but have not love, I’m a zero. I’ve missed life.”

Because if you miss God’s love, you’ve missed life.

In Galatians 5, when Paul was talking, he described the deeds of the flesh—that’s what we’re talking about here—it’s anger, strife, conflict, lust, and all of these things.

But then he goes to the fruit of the Spirit—which any person, who knows Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior, has the Holy Spirit. Paul says: “But the fruit of the Spirit…”—“…be filled with the Spirit”—“the fruit of the Spirit is…” What is the first one he mentions?

Barbara: Love.

Dennis: “The fruit of the Spirit is love.”

So you can know you are a Christian, you can know you are a follower of Christ when you’ve begun to notice God is changing your attitude toward some people who are difficult to love. Some of them may be family members. I mean, if you have a big enough family, you’re going to have a child that is an irregular child—he is not going to be easy to love, because he’s probably going to be a lot like you.

Barbara: Well, it might be a brother or a sister—it might be an in-law. I mean, there are going to be multiple opportunities.

Dennis: There are so many applications of this. We need to be tutored about how to love. That’s really what I love about Barbara—and what I love about what she has done here—she wants us to get in touch with what the Holy Spirit wants to do in our hearts.

Phil: One of the characteristics of love in 1 Corinthians 13 says this:

Teen: Love believes all things.

Phil: Barabara explains.

Barbara: Well, simply, it means we always believe God; we always believe the truth; and we always believe what He says. It doesn’t mean we believe everything we hear, everything we see. It means we believe what is true—the Scripture is what is true, and God is what’s true. So, it very simply means, we always believe in God. The “believes all” doesn’t mean “believe everything”—it means “always believe.”

(Music)

Barbara: Love is an action; and we tend to think of love—especially in the West / especially in our culture—we think of it as a feeling and nothing more than a feeling when love is not a feeling at all—it’s a choice; it’s an action; it’s doing things for other people; it’s serving. That’s what love is all about.

Phil: Barbara Rainey’s heart-shaped cards devotional is called How Do I Love Thee? You can print them out and hang them on a ribbon or a length of twine as a decoration, and as a reminder of what you’re learning about love as God defines it.

All the links you need are at EverThineHome.com/LoveThee. You can see pictures of what this looks like there, and get ideas for how to display this beautiful devotional decoration in your home.

There’s also a link to our Etsy store there, where we have a limited number of cards available, as well.

Thanks for listening today. I trust you’ll look to the God of love, as you learn to love others with love as He defines it.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Barbara’s blog at EverThineHome.com. I’m Phil Krause, and I hope you’ll join us next time, for another episode of the Barbara Rainey Podcast.