can love be understood?

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:7-8

I've been thinking a bit lately about love, and what that looks like in our media driven, for-profit day and age. Culture tries to splotter love all over the place, and I think people get de-sensitized to what love really is, at its core.

First, remember that love is something we don't understand well as humans -- that's why it goes in the abstract noun category. But certainly, love is demonstrated or exemplified by certain acts. It's hard to identify love without some sort of concrete, physical, can-be-seen act.

Well, this verse tells us that love comes from God, and that God is love. Can we understand God? I don't think God is abstract, but He's too intense, too vast, too full to understand fully by us and our feeble minds, in my opinion. So if we can't understand God, we can't understand love.

Certainly, love was showcased by the concrete, physical in-the-flesh act of Jesus on the cross. It was a manifestation, or the playing out of love, God's love...but that still leaves us a little in the dark on an absolute definition of love.

There's something else unique that I'm figuring out about love. Acts of love are not earned nor deserved. They result from grace. This is true for my human relationships. The most memorable things I remember about acts of love on me or to me are not done to earn anything back from me -- there is a genuine heart to love me because of the person I just happen to be.

Appreciating someone for them just being them and the way they are. Love doesn't try and instruct or tell, it simply celebrates.

Jesus did the necessary thing to fully celebrate each and every one of His. And driving it was grace -- not anything that Jesus expected to earn or deserve back from the people He saved.

In light of this, I think it frees us up to love in our human relationships like He did -- with freedom, no fear of condemnation, not thinking we have or deserve something in return -- we can simply celebrate.