B-log

 ”I may not be a smart man, Jenny, but I know what love is.”

  -Forrest Gump

We all might know what love is, but none of us knows on our own how to really make love.

You might be saying, “Speak for yourself, McAnally.” I’m not talking about that kind of “making love.” After all, this is pastor’s blog, not a screenplay based on a Nicolas Sparks novel.

I’m talking about the kind of “making love” that is reflected in the old Kentucky Headhunters song Always Making Love to You, which recounts how the singer’s love for his lady is “made” in the time while they are apart from one another, or when they simply think of one another, rather than in times of cuddlin’ and smoochin’.

Using this as the shore from which to wade into the shallow end of potentially deep theological waters, this type of “making love” is not the romance, eros, the physical manifestation of love that is commonly expressed between two people. Rather, the “making of love” or the creation of love is only possible because God makes or creates his agape love and expresses it to his creation (at least according to 1 John 4:9).

Ultimately, God expresses the love he makes not in creating us, but in redeeming us, through the death and atonement of Jesus.  The love that God creates is selfless. It’s sacrificial. It’s timeless. It’s epic.

This is the standard. This is the model. This is the ideal. We can’t “manufacture love” the way God does. However, because he loves us, we have been commanded to access the love that he has manufactured, and with it love others sacrificially and selflessly. 

We don’t have too look far to realize that far too often, we fail miserably when we attempt to create love and nurture loving relationships in our own lives.  These failures befall us in so many places:

• More than half of all marriages fail.
• Millions of pre-born children around the world are aborted.
• The euphemism named euthanasia (meaning, literally, easy death) is growing in social acceptance and frequency each passing year.
• Children are growing up in an epidemic of fatherlessness.
• War rages on around the world, replete with genocide, rape, torture, and forced starvation. 

This is the indictment against humanity. It falls upon your shoulders and it rests heavily upon mine. Our total inability to make, manufacture, manifest, build or create love from our own motivations or mechanisms illustrates the vast disparity between God and humanity.

In the posts to follow, we’ll dive into 1 Corinthians 13, perhaps the most famous passage on love. I hope it will help you love God, love others, and love yourself more fully and appropriately. I hope it will help you “make love” better.