Love

What is the true definition of love? Is it what we see on television, or on the billboards, and in the magazines? Like so many other things given unto us by God, love has been perverted to such an extent it is almost unrecognizable from is origin. The origin of love is God, "for God is love." (1 John 4:8) In Focus on The Coptic Family Fr. Mikhail E. Mikhail teaches us that there are three persons in marriage, the man, the woman, and God. Therefore if God is absent, then it is not love but something else, a perversion. True love has no necessity or desire for the flesh but a union between the persons and God.

How do you love someone in the way God intended? Love is an emotional and spiritual connection, not a physical desire for the flesh of another individual. If we are looking at another in a physical way and we believe that is love, we are lying to ourselves. It is through the love of God that two people love one another and when two get married, they receive communion meaning they are receiving God as two people united in one through the body of Christ. This is love, everything else is superficial and vain. Everything else is perversion dressed up and called love when it is not.

What exactly is the scriptural definition of love so that we may know it and work towards it.
 "Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails." (1 Cor. 13:4-8) This is how we love. St. Paul teaches us how to love the way God intended and gives us the true definition of what love really is.

"For this is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you." (John 15:12) Christ tells us to love in the way that God has set forth, true love. Not in the way the world tells us to love, which is false love, a love that will leave you empty and struggling. We must ask ourselves, in what way am I loving? Am I loving as the world has taught me, or as Christ has taught me? This test I offer unto all will show if you are a disciple of this world or a disciple of Christ.