I am my beloveds and he is mine...His banner over me is love...I love chocolate...love you!...I love my car...I love playing golf...I love chicken nuggets... I love your hair...I love money...I love Jesus...I love my husband...I love my dog, my kids, my parents, my lattes, my boots, and so on. Love gets used so many ways for so many things, it kind of loses its meaning. I want my husband to know he rates higher than my favorite boots and I want to know I am more important than some TV show he might love to watch. (Just so you know, that is a random list there. Those are not all things I "love". For instance, I do not golf.)
I don't mean for this to be a dry topic since it is a holiday, but I want to bring the different levels or types of love to our attention (in between giving attention to my husband, kids, granddaughters, house, dogs and my malfunctioning computer, that is).Three of these involve our emotions.
The first comes from a Greek word storage. This would be the type of love and affection that naturally occurs between parents and children, between siblings and then in healthy marriages between an husband and wife.
Then we have the word Greek word phileo. This would be the love that means "to have a special interest in someone or something, frequently with focus on close association; have affection for, like, consider someone a friend". So it is a strong liking or strong friendship. Since this implies strong emotional connection between friends, we would not phileo our enemies but is possible to agape them, which brings us to the next Greek word translated love.
Agape is the word that refers to the love of God, the very nature of God ("for God is love" 1 John 4:7-12 and "for God so loved the world He gave His only begotten Son" John 3:16). It's one of the types we are to have for people. Even though we tend to think of love as primarily an emotion this type is actually love because of what it does regardless of feeling. I also think this means regardless of what I get out of it. It has the good of another in mind.
Eros is the word for passionate or sexual love. It referred to the Greek god of love when used as a noun and has pervaded our culture as seen in advertising, porn, attempts to legalize perversion and maintain legalization of abortion making uncommitted sex without responsibility possible and more "legitimate", the trafficking of young girls, clothing styles and more currently sexting. My lengthy assessment on this does not mean God is against sex. Of course not! He created it but also knows how we function best and are healthiest so set boundaries up (in marriage people!!!) for the enjoyment of sex. And as we see the above distorted uses of sex we can see His boundaries are for the protection of society and it's people.
.Again Happy Valentines Day! Enjoy the day and make sure those you love know you do!
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