Love

Walk into a store today, just about any store, and you will be overwhelmed by flowers, hearts, candies with messages, boxes of chocolates…  Listen to any talk radio and you will be offered, Sherri’s berries, pajamagrams, Vermont Teddy Bears, or pro-flower deals… Why?  Valentine’s day.  It is a huge industry celebrating “love.”

That word, has been really abused.  Through television shows, movies, romance novels, it has been reduced to an emotion that is heralded, as John Lennon put it, as “all you need.”  But John abandoned his wife and son and was sexually promiscuous while married to both Cynthia and Yoko.  We have a divorce rate in the culture and the church that blasts the notion that, “love is all you need” out of the proverbial water.  Or we have a epically deficient definition of love.

What an opportunity.

This next few days talk to your kids about love.  You know that in the Bible three of the four Greek words for love are found.  The key one is agape.  That is God’s love for us.  Why not spend some time meditating on John 3:16, 21:15 – 17, pay attention to the interplay of the word use – you know this but Christ uses agape and Peter responds with phileo, except in verse 17 where Jesus uses phileo.  What are the implications of the way the Holy Spirit directs John’s use of agape in these two passages.  How should that shape your kids view of love?  If you need more data here is a list of all of the places agapao (verb form) shows up in the New Testament.  Have some fun with this.