True love isn't candy or flowers or valentines

Valentine's Day is a made-up holiday so greeting card, candy, and flower companies can get money.

EPrata photo

One famous quote from Billie Holiday says

“Love is like a faucet, it turns off and on.” 

The world does not know love. It expresses kindness and sensitivity and something approximating love, but without Christ, we don't know what love is. To Billie Holiday and others, love is something that can come on of its own volition, and it can go away again.

God's love is eternal. This is because God IS love. His love is perfect, pure, holy, eternal, and thorough. He loves His people with a devotion saturated with timelessness and emanates from living waters that flow forever. No faucet in sight, just an everlastingly flowing fountain of perfect love.

In our economy, love is a fleeting feeling based on a deceitful human heart. In God's economy, love is a permanent state of being.


Wouldn't you like to know this kind of love? God loves us so much that,

EPrata photo

In return, we love God with all we've got in us. And when that isn't strong enough or faithful enough, in His sanctifying work the Holy Spirit enlivens our soul and pricks our conscience and burns off what hinders us from loving Him as we should and we love Him all the more. Loving Jesus is not romantic. As Bob Dewaay says in his review of romanticist Ann Voskamp's book 1000 Gifts,

The Bible speaks of the church as the Bride of Christ but does not describe the universal call of the gospel in sensual terms of a lover pursuing His love interest (who may have no interest in return). God is commanding sinners to repent. The gospel calls for repentance and faith, not romantic feelings looking for satisfaction. ... When Peter urged Christians to grow in their faith and in Christian virtues, he did not point to a higher order experience based on romantic feelings—he called them to remember:

Therefore, I shall always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you. And I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder, (2 Peter 1:12, 13)

Instead it is a knowledgeable, singular, focused, pursuing kind of love. There is no room for anything else if we love Him with all our soul, heart, mind, and strength.

EPrata photo

Love God with your everything. Then the love you give to other people will be purer, stronger, and more faithful. And that is way better than a paper heart or a sloppy sentiment or a box of consumable candy. Your faucet will never turn off; because the love of God never stops.