Eric Heath – February 14, 2025

It’s Valentine’s Day. The season of love. Pink and red decorations abound. Cinnamon hearts get their one week of being sold in stores. The elementary school that I drive by on the way to the church office proclaims “love” as its “value of the month”. Even a local car dealership suggests that I can “show the Valentine’s Day love” with up to $20,000 cash back with 0% financing. Love is in the air – or as the old song says: “it’s written on the wind, it’s everywhere I go”.

Growing up as a good secular child of the ‘80s and ‘90s, I had a particular understanding of the concept of “love” – one that fits neatly within the Valentine’s Day motif. Absorbing various messages from television and film, I understood love to primarily be related to romantic feelings. Sure, I understood the concept of familial love – and I grew up in a home with loving parents – but my cultural education taught me that love – true love – was certainly all about finding your soulmate. Most, if not all other types of “love” were good, but decidedly secondary.

While this concept of “love” persists in society, a counterbalancing conception of romantic love has grown increasingly prevalent – one that says that “love” is actually a straitjacket; a restraint on our freedom that carries too many risks to give ourselves over to. Better to (as another old song says) “hide your love away”.

So which is it? Is love the dangerous subjugation of our will to the desires of another, or is it the answer to all of our problems (after all, the same guys who wrote “you’ve got to hide your love away” wrote “love is all you need” two years later)?

Well, it’s both of these things. But it matters how you define “love”. For much of my life, I only defined it one way – the Valentine’s Day way. God’s word – and His love – is not so limited.

The gospel of John gives us some of the most profound statements about how to understand love. First, of course, the great statement of the depth of God’s love for His people in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Later, Jesus marries love with obedience in John 14:15 when He says that “if you love me, you will keep my commandments.” And, drawing on what He will do at the cross, in John 15:13 He says “greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

From Jesus’ words, we see that love is an attribute of God – one that demonstrates both His obedience to His Father and His sacrifice for His people. And so the contours of our love follow accordingly – obedience to Christ’s commands and a radical prioritization of the needs of others over ourselves. So, in reality, God’s love is the answer to our biggest problem, and our call to love is something that involves the dangerous subjugation of our wills. Both cultural understandings of love that I mentioned above are only partial answers.

Of course, Biblical love can be demonstrated in romantic relationships! Paul uses marriage as a picture of the love for Christ and the church precisely for this reason. But that’s an illustration, not a limitation. Central Abbotsford includes unmarried and married people alike, and all of us have the opportunity to reflect God’s love, both in how we interact with one another and the wider world. 

Whether it’s Valentine’s Day or not, my prayer for our church is that we continue to seize all of our opportunities to show our love – our true, Biblical, love. God’s love saved the world, and we can continue to shape it according to His will.

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

 – John 17:20-26

We love because he first loved us.

 – 1 John 4:19