LOVE SEEKS # 3PM – THE LOVE STORY 
You were made to love and be loved. You are a love creature. Just as a fish needs water to live in you need love to survive and flourish.
Perhaps the most famous love story ever told is Romeo and Juliet. A complicated tale of two feuding families which ends when Romeo thinks Juliet is dead and drinks poison. Later Juliet awakes and seeing Romeo dead stabs herself and dies. Only a love story could include so much pain. Shakespeare wrote a tragedy and the reason it is so powerful is that love is a very powerful motivating force.
Hollywood has made billions from movies about love. Some of the most famous movies about love are: Love Story, The Notebook, Titanic, When Harry Met Sally, Love actually, Pretty Woman, P.S. I love You, Sleepless in Seattle.
As a human being you are made by God to have the ability to love and be loved. It’s part of your make up, you can’t change it. You are a love creature. When babies are born if they are deprived of love they will die even though they have food and warmth.
Touch deprivation: http://goo.gl/uibLp3 and: http://goo.gl/YSuXoj
God reveals Himself as father – a term that speaks of relationship. God is Love. (1 John 4:8) We are made in His image, after His likeness. (Gen 1:26) Therefore we are like Him – a love creature.
To love is to value, to do good to another. It’s more than just feelings and emotions though these are very important, it is about the worth of the person being loved in the eyes of the one loving.
The bible uses the word love to translate five different Greek words.
- Mania – Manic love is almost not a love at all. The word “lust” is probably not strong enough – “obsession” is closer to the word.
- Eros – Eros is obviously the root word for “erotic,” but it does not describe sexual love only, it actually describes all emotional love; the feeling of love.
- Philos – Philos love, or brotherly/friendship love. Philos describes the love between two people who have common interests and experiences, or a fondness for.
- Storgy – Storgy is the love one has for a dependent. It is commonly called “motherly love.”
- Agapeo – Agape love is entirely about the lover, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the one loved. Agape love, in its purest form, requires no response. The most common word for God’s love for us is Agape (I John, John 3:16) and the love we are commanded to have for one another (Matt. 5:44, I Cor. 13 (http://goo.gl/2SJlEJ )
Ever wondered why your heart is referred to as the part that is broken when you experience loss of love or emotional upheavals? Like – it’s only a pump right?
World renowned Neuro-Scientist and author Caroline Leaf says:
“YOU ARE ‘WIRED FOR LOVE!’ – http://goo.gl/bb7tcz
And from her book “Who Switched Off My Brain”
by Caroline Leaf. http://goo.gl/RJxfP3
Toxic stress is particularly powerful because your heart is not just a pump. It is actually like another brain (and you thought you only had one brain!). Science demonstrates that your heart has its own independent nervous system, which is a complex system referred to as the “brain in the heart.” There are at least 40,000 neurons (nerve cells) in the heart – as many as are found in various parts of the brain. In effect, the brain in your heart acts like a checking station for all the emotions generated by the flow of chemicals created by thoughts. It is proving to be a real intelligent force behind the intuitive thoughts and feelings you experience. The heart also produces an important biochemical substance called an atrial peptide (specifically ANF). It is the balance hormone that regulates many of your brain’s functions and stimulates behaviour.
New scientific evidence on the heart’s neurological sensitivity indicates there are lines of communication between the brain and the heart that check the accuracy and integrity of your thought life. The reality is, your heart is in constant communication with your brain and the rest of your body. The signals your heart sends to your brain influence not just perception and emotional processing, but higher cognitive functions as well.
When God reveals Himself as Father, this means His love is plural, because a Father can love more than one child and it is a pure and acceptable love. You are made to love and be loved. Love is the greatest of all human experiences and many movies have been made about finding love or losing love and finding it again.
The problem with love is that sin entered the world and messed things up. Messed with God’s plans of love. Love was hijacked and became self-centred.
2 Tim 3:2 For people will be lovers of self and [utterly] self-centered, lovers of money and aroused by an inordinate [greedy] desire for wealth, proud and arrogant and contemptuous boasters. They will be abusive (blasphemous, scoffing), disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy and profane. (AMP)
Love became a weapon of pain instead of a life giving force. Love was corrupted by sin. Love became love of things, lust, immoral sexual desire, love given and love taken away, broken hearts though love removed.
Love is not the problem, sin is the problem. Love is the answer. When Jesus went to the cross that was love in action! Romans 5: 8 But God shows and clearly proves His [own] love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, the Anointed One) died for us.(AMP)
When sin wrecked humanity, God’s answer was love. God so loved the world – that He gave. The God who is love reached out to the creatures that he created with love as the answer to brokenness and to broken hearts.
Love conquers all, love overcomes all. Human love is magnificent but God’s love is all powerful. God Loves you, and He loved you enough to send His son to die for you because you are valuable to God.
But you must receive to be healed. – Let love in.
1. Have you ever suffered from a broken heart?
2. If God pours His love into your heart – how can you receive it?
3. First love is the love we have for God at the first – what’s it like/
4. Can you meditate on the love of God to you through the cross, how would you do it?
5. When you are full of God’s love how will you act?
craigmanderson 