06 Aug I Want to Know What Love Is

For decades, Ann Hood was one half of “The Answer Couple,” Glamour Magazine’s love and relationship advice column. Together with her husband, she spent years answering questions and giving advice to readers about how to make relationships work and last.

The only problem? As she sadly, and belatedly, came to realize, she really didn’t know how to do that herself.

In a column she wrote a few years ago for the New York Times called “What’s Love? Don’t Ask the Answer Couple,” Ann Hood talked about how, despite telling everyone else about love, she really had no idea what it was. She and her husband, after years of trying to help others, filed for divorce.

She wrote this and concluded:

“I wonder, if I could write to an Answer Couple today, if I would ask them what love is. I wonder what they would say, but I know they wouldn’t really know.

No one does.”

This may be you today or your experience with love. You may think no one actually knows, or at the very least, no one has shown you.

Yet, the Gospel writer John, in his little letter to first-century churches, had the audacity to say: “I know what love is. I actually do know what love is and what love looks like.”

He writes this three-word, shot-across-the-bow statement to every broken heart or cynical love sufferer or advice column seeker: “God is love.” (1 John 4:16)

And how did he know?

I John 4:9: “This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him.”

This is entirely different from Ann Hood, who says, “I don’t know what love is.” It’s entirely different from that old 70s song, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” John is saying, “I know what love is, and love is Jesus.”

Mysterious? Yes.

Inaccessible? No.

John says he knows love, and love took a form, love had a shape. It wasn’t just remote; it came near. Love bled, and love sacrificed.

And in the spirit of that, this Sunday as we close out our look at the book of 1 John, I’d like to talk about that: the spirit and the form that love takes in the world and can take in our community.

I’m calling it, “Seven Things I Think Love Looks Like.” I think it will be compelling and practical, and it’s the perfect message to invite a friend to hear with you or to watch online with you.

We can get a lot of stuff right in a Christian church, but if we get this one wrong…we have no answers for the Ann Hoods (and many others) of the world.

I want to get this thing of love right…with you!

Much love,

Morgan