From one perspective, true love is downright dangerous. It is far from safe. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.” To be sure, Lewis was not saying to avoid love. He was simply making the observation that real love is risky: it opens one up to the possibility of intense emotional ache. In fact, Lewis says, the only place outside of heaven where one can be perfectly safe from all the “dangers” of love is hell, and that’s because love is altogether absent there.
Love, as the Bible defines it, is truthfully self-sacrificial and this threatens our natural tendency to protect ourselves. We are afraid to give because we are afraid of being taken. But this self-centered fear is precisely why we so often miss out on true love. We have come to believe that love is first something we receive from others before it is something that we give to others. Someone once rightly said, however, that love is what exists between people who find their joy in each other’s joy. In other words, the real benefit of true love comes from loving others before it comes from being loved by others. To give, therefore, is to receive, not the other way around.
I was sharing this with a friend awhile back who was struggling because he felt that his workplace was cold and unloving. He told me that he expected to receive more love from his coworkers than he had and he was sorely disappointed. After hearing him out and doing what I could to sympathize with his pain, I sensitively challenged him. I told him that he was going to work with the wrong perspective. Instead of going to work asking, “Who here is going to love me?”, I told him to go asking, “Who is here for me to love?” I did not come up with this counsel on my own. This is exactly what the Bible teaches about love, specifically in 1 John 3:16 when the Apostle John writes: “By this we know love: that he (Christ) laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers.”
This is the glorious freedom that Jesus offers. If we are loved by Christ; that is, if we embrace for ourselves, by faith, his self-sacrifice on the cross for sinners, we are then free to love others without risk because our deep need to be loved will be satisfied. So, for example, while I may enjoy love from my wife, I do not need it. In Jesus I receive all the love I need. This enables me to love her without fear or reservation. I get to revel in her enjoyment of my love without needing anything from her in return. I “get” love from Christ so that I can “give” love to her. This is the only way you and I will ever experience the soul-satisfying love that all of us were created and designed to experience.