A cousin of mine once worked in a bank. She told me after she handled cash for a time, she knew simply by touch if she had come across a counterfeit bill. Her familiarity with the *real* enabled a sense of the *false.* It is the same with love. However, we've become all too familiar with false love. So much so that *true* love is strange to us at first. False love is the type of love culture and society tells us to pursue and is, in reality, not love at all. It's candy-coated selfishness that seeks satisfaction through physical means (e.g., sex, possessions, accomplishment, and prestige).
Jesus, because he *knew* the Father's kind of love, never gave into what the world offered to him.
Japanese Christian theologian Kosuke Koyama writes:
"Love is an inner energy of man which makes him perceptive to the presence of good and bad in human relationships. And love is committed to encourage the good and discourage the bad to grow anywhere. It is the mind of God at work. So often the New Testament writers write: ‘And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they thus questioned within themselves, ...’ (Mark 2.8). Jesus was not a magician. He is perceptive to what is going on in the hearts of men because he loves them."
May our pursuit be to always be the object of God's fatherly love and to know and experience that love in ever greater ways, so that we, like Jesus, will not be satisfied with the anemic, false love which our society and culture panders to us. If we do this, we will love and protect in the same way our Father does and the world will take note and begin to ask why we love differently...and far better and truer than what they've ever known.
May we have high (i.e., godly) standards for the love we pursue and practice in all our relationships.
