What is Love? The Object of Love - Why is Loving So Hard?

God is love.  So what is the object of Love?  Is loving hard/difficult?  Most people would say it’s hard.  God usually places people in your life who are hard to love.  Family, spouse, house church, friends.  Even co-workers or classmates who may behave in ways that make them hard to love.  We may feel disrespected by family, or feel house church members act selfishly.  Imagine someone who has a poor temperament and is difficult to approach, can you imagine approaching them lovingly?  As a pastor, it’s a hard part of the job.  

Question: Is there someone in your life right now that you’re having a hard time loving?  Could that someone be yourself?

Rile Enrique - “Probably loving another person is the most difficult task.”

Why is it so hard?  Let’s look at Love’s object.  John 3:16 - points to who God loves.  The world = “cosmos” in Greek pointing to everyone that exists.  The world did not recognize God and the world hated Him.  If you loved someone but faced rejection and hatred, you’d probably feel terrible in return.  1 John 2:15-16 - do not love the world - the same “world”.  Desires of flesh like pleasure seeking or their own comfort or being lazy in body, mind, spirit.  Desires of the eyes are greed, materialistic, and image.  Pride of life for power, control, and easy to err.  It’d be so hard to love these people.  Romans 5:8 - the world that God loves is full of sinners addicted with pleasure, obsessed with their own comfort, laziness, hungry for power, recognition, and control.  

This is the kind of world God chose to love.  

Question:  Do you see how you might fall into this same pattern of being “of the cosmos”?

If you’re called to love this kind of person, would it be easy?  It’d be terribly painful.  The object of my love is imperfect, insecure, incomplete.  Love is not hard because of the lover or of conflict but because the object is this type of person.  

Unstable energy in an imperfect system.  We are called to love this imperfect person.  Are we not the same person?  We are not so different.  The energy in our own lives is also unstable.  The person we want to love is unstable.  Us, the person loving is also unstable.  So what happens when two unstable systems combine?  Explosion.  A small trigger can set things off.  No wonder it’s so hard to love…  

So what should we do?  How can we find peace and joy in loving others? 

1. Accept that the one that I love is imperfect.  Admit it to yourself.  How?  We need to lower our expectations and not have unrealistic expectations.  Who is the most self-centered person in the world?  New born babies.  But why do we love them?  The parents don’t expect anything from their baby and they recognize the baby is an incomplete person.  Imagine the dopamine rush when your threshold and expectations are set so low.  So when we lower our expectations, our tolerance for their imperfection also increases.  Ie.  PD has lowered his expectations for the congregation so his happiness is not contingent on our recollection of his sermons, etc.  

2. We need to practice one-sided love regardless of their responses.  One needs to practice unconditional love.  The prostitute, the tax collectors, even His own disciples.  All these people were unstable.  Jesus started loving them even before they started changing.  He loved the world even though He faced hatred.  So whatever we receive from the one we love, we need to be ok with it.  Even though we love, there is joy in loving others and there is pain in receiving a love like this.  

3. How do you stabilize an inevitable explosive system?  You need a stable entity amongst and within the system to anchor them.  It is only Jesus.  Even if there is a mature individual in a relationship, the possibility of explosion still exists.  The only way to stabilize them is Jesus.  Both people must be connected to Christ to find joy and happiness and stability.  We must have Jesus at the center and invite Him into the relationship.  Or else we find entropy in the system.  Invite Jesus in the relationship and constantly stay connected to Him.  Loving will still be difficult, as is the nature of love, but we find joy and happiness within it.  

How is this possible, we’ll see next week.  

Try this with someone.  Their heart may not change, but your heart will.