Love is a Gift

Kate and I read a book as part of our marriage prep, which was over 24 years ago now, called The Five Love Languages by Gary Chapman.  At first glance I wanted to quickly dismiss it simply because of its terrible cover complete with a giant pink heart on it.  I’ve also seen some with the silhouette of a couple at sunset on a beach embracing each other.  Just terribly cheesy stuff, but thankfully we did not dismiss it because while not rocket science, the book was actually helpful in understanding more about how we express and experience love.  The five love languages, according to Chapman, are gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, and physical touch.  You might be able to come up with another category, but my guess is that it would relate to one of these on some level.  We all express or experience love in some combination of these five categories.   

Now why would it be important to understand your love language and that of your loved one you ask?  Well, while it won’t solve all communication issues with a significant other it can help to adjust expectations.  If you are somebody that loves hanging out watching movies and spending quality time with the people you love, but the person with you likes to express their love through acts of service and wants to say…clean and fold your dirty laundry, you might grow a little frustrated with each other.  Or say you just love to buy gifts for your boyfriend, but he really prefers a great massage or physical touch and doesn’t respond the way you thought he would to the new BTS t-shirt you bought him, which we all know is impossible (BTS is the most popular boy band in the world right now, fyi)…your feelings might get hurt and he might not understand why.  Understanding how we like to give and receive love helps us to recognize it when someone is loving us and vice versa.  They can see that we are trying to love them.  It also helps us to meet each other half way and begin to learn to express love in a way that they really connect with.  And since I know you are all wondering, I tend to be a quality time and gift person, and I don’t know anyone who is not a physical touch person.  Kate is a words of affirmation and touch person primarily I’d say.  If my hands wouldn’t cramp up, I think she’d let me rub her back for hours on end. 

SO, why do I bring all of this up?  It’s to help us understand more of God’s love language in the Bible.  How does he love us?  Obviously, being the author of love and being Love himself according to the apostle John, “God IS love”…God is fluent in all the five love languages (1 John 4:8). Though the touch one seems to be a little difficult at the moment, but that’s why he gives us each other.  It reminds me of a prayer one our good friends prayed once when we were all hanging out together in seminary.  He said, “Lord, please touch us and help us to touch each other.”  He said it with all sincerity, but of course Kate and I burst out laughing immediately.  It was an accurate prayer actually, but the wording could have been better.   

Anyhow, what is one of the major ways God loves us?  How do we experience His love for us?  I would say there are two primary ways in Scripture.  First, God is a gift giver.  He gives.  There is no greater expression of this gift giving than His only Son Jesus Christ.  He gives us everything in his Son; He gives us himself.  He gives us unconditional, one-way love in his Son Jesus.  It is astounding when you think about it.  He gave what was nearest and dearest to His heart for us and to us.  We know this because of God’s second language of love in Scripture…words of affirmation. Scripture itself is God loving us by telling us. Making sure we know his gift to us by moving through his people to write it down so that we would never need to doubt or wonder. He tells us over and over and over again how much he love us. John says it this way: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (I John 4:9-10).  God gave us the greatest gift ever.  It is our reference point for knowing what love is.  In the words of Forrest Gump, “I’m not a smart man, but I know what love is.” 

Love is a gift and by definition then, love is not something that we can earn. But why do we struggle so in the face of such a gift?  We have such a hard time receiving this kind of extravagant and exorbitant love.  We want to feel like we deserve the gift.  We want the gift to be the result of something we have done; we want it to be the result of our effort somehow.  We want it to come because we have proven ourselves worthy of such a gift.  We operate more like another famous Tom Hanks movie, Saving Private Ryan, where at the end of the movie as Tom Hanks’ character is dying he grabs Private Ryan and with his dying breath says, “Earn this.”  It is absolutely horrible!  The worst ending ever to a great movie.  At the same time it illustrates how we as humans think love works or gifts work.  We think we have to prove worthy of it.  We have to earn it.  But that’s where we get it backwards.  We inherently misunderstand how the gift of love works, and not just with God, but with each other too.  We think love and gifts should be results, but true love and true gifts never are.  They are never results of our effort to prove our worth.  In fact, if that were the case we would never accept them.  They would be too much.  We would never think we are worth that much because we can never do enough to deserve such a gift, the gift of God himself. 

But God’s love is not a result.  It is never a result.  His love operates differently from what we think is right.  Instead of his love coming as a result of a display of our value, something that we have done, his love actually dictates our value.  His love, his gift determines our worth.  He speaks who we are. He did it first in creation bringing us into existence, and he does it again in our re-creation proclaiming us as his forgiven adopted children. His gift of love is always about who we are, not what we do.  In fact, as John says it precedes any action that has any true value.  “We love because He first loved us” (4:19).  His gift of love determines our value. 

Instead of responding the way we often do to gifts where we say, “That’s just too much…” because we don’t feel worth such love and affection, when we hear God’s gift of love to us in His Son Jesus Christ we can respond in awe…in worship.  We can be amazed at how much he loves us.  We can be surprised at how valuable we really are to the God of the universe.  His love is a gift.  We don’t earn it.  We simply bask in it.  Frankly, we are changed by it.  Our perspective of ourselves is forever changed because the constant short-changing of ourselves that we are used to runs onto the rocks.  The shame-based thinking we operate under that constantly devalues us and tells us we are only as good as what we can produce gets shattered.  Because He has given us a gift of insurmountable value, which means that we are of immeasurable value to him.  And in case we might miss that he gives us his word and constantly sends people into our lives to tell us again and again. And I am telling you again right now, you are worth everything to him.  That is who you are.  You are forgiven. You are safe. You are God’s beloved.  Amen.

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