Making love, Part 2: love takes time
It’s easy to define distance in terms of time. You can ask, “How far to the airport?” and the answer could very well be “20 minutes.” You can’t turn that around though…If you ask, “What time can I pick you up for our date?” and the answer will never be, “About 10 miles.” It just doesn’t work that way.
Similarly, people try to define love in terms that just don’t work. A person can ask their spouse, “Do you love me?” and the typical answer might be…
- I bought you flowers a couple of years ago, didn’t I?
- I kiss you every morning no matter how your breath smells
- I pay the bills, don’t I?
- I went to that romantic comedy (or action movie, as the case may be) with you, remember?
People continually try to define love in terms of activities. However, Scripture consistently teaches that i love…true biblical love in all its forms…is always defined as an expression of time.
In these three verses, God beautifully illustrates the components of love. In three verses, God demonstrates the breadth of love like light through a prism. These verses reveal fifteen hues of God’s love. These are fifteen petals of a flower that is love. Alone, they possess limited nobility; together in its whole, it is beauty that possesses its possessor.
In describing each of these fifteen characteristics, Paul always chose verbs instead of nouns. Verbs are expressions of actions. Actions fill time and space, and accordingly, love is always an expression of time. The description is not so much of what love is, but what love does (and does not). Breaking these three verses down into their component parts is akin to taking your day and breaking it down into the hours, minutes, and seconds from which it’s made:
Patience. The Greek word for patience, makrothumeo is a verb that is always used exclusively with people, rather than circumstances. When you love, you must be patient. Patience has to overcome so many differences:
- opinions
- experience
- education
- gender
- background
- expectations
- prejudices
- personal preferences
- and on and on….
You can never successfully be patient in a hurry. You can’t rush it. You can’t force it. You can only develop it from a foundation of love.
Kindness. Kindness is similar to patience because there is a superficial sort of kindness like there can be a superficial sort of patience. A loveless kindness is just like a superficial patience that is nothing more than just putting up with other people. That’s not patience. Being superficially kind isn’t really being kind, either. In fact, the Greek word for kindness is chrestuomai which means a useful, serving, gracious type of kindness. It’s kindness that takes time.
It’s the type of kindness that took Jesus 33 years to express, where he exchanged his holy, eternal, invincible body for a weak, frail, terminal human body. Where he exchanged the everlasting accolades of heaven’s angels for the hate-filled scorn of humanity. Where he exchanged his crown of gold for a crown of thorns, his royal robes for bloody rags, and the throne of heaven for the cross of death.
He took the full measure of time that was required to extend this kindness to you. He doesn’t want you to miss it. And once you claim it for yourself, he empowers you to reproduce it.
That, dear friend, is kindness.
