“If you can give yourself to someone you should.” -Dawes, “A Little Bit of Everything”
I have been thinking about what love is for a while. I don’t think there’s any other way to put it: To love is to give yourself entirely over to another person. It’s self-abandonment. It’s surrendering your entirety and entrusting it to another. Simultaneously, it is taking on another person. It’s putting that person on and accomplishing in your body their life- what they need and what they desire. It is living their life out for them in your body. It is a reversal of bodies and lives. A cosmic switching of personas. Love means that you commit to orienting your life around someone else.
We know Jesus loves us not just because he died for us, but because he carried us around in his body. Jesus death was not separated from us. It wasn’t objective. Colossians 2:6-15 speaks of this. It says that “you have been filled in him….in him also you were circumcised …having been buried with him in baptism…you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God …God made [you] alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.” We know Jesus loves us because he attached us to himself in a way that is unexplainable yet clearly inferred from Scripture. We became part of Him, and He because part of us. 2 Corinthians 4:10 speaks of the saints as “always carrying in the body the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” There is an intrinsic connection between us and Jesus that goes beyond his merely doing something on our behalf. We are connected, one body. Sex makes a lot of sense when we talk about spiritual things like this, but I’ll not go there right now.
For now it is enough to know that for us to imitate Jesus’s love for us we also have to be about the other person in our relationships. Love is saying, “I give up my self and my agenda in order to take on your self and your agenda. I am about you now. I desire your agenda more than my own. Your agenda now is my own.”
Tim Keller expounds upon the idea of self-forgetting love in his book The Reason for God. He talks about how the Trinity perpetuates itself through mutual other-centered desire. Each member of the Trinity is wholely concerned with the other two GodHeads. They dance around each other in holy other-centeredness. This is our model for our relationships as well.
April Goes to Clemson 