Scriptural Basis:

“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:13

“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.” 1 John 3:16

Application:

There is a before and after in these verses written down by the hand of the same man, the Apostle John.  The first was John’s recording of the words of his beloved Savior just prior to His crucifixion and death; and the second was written looking back at His death, just as we do today. It is this death which sets the significance of all others, and it is this death which essentially defines what love is. Jesus not only tells those who are willing to hear how “love” is defined in the eyes of His Father, He shows us.  

Memorial Day spotlights sacrificial love for others. Some recognize the cost and the value of those deaths, while others live as though their freedom is a personal right to whom no one is owed thanks and honor, especially from them. I am still moved to tears by the sight of pristine cemeteries I have seen in Europe where American soldiers have been laid to rest, still cared for with devotion and gratitude by a dying generation who know the cost of freedom.  In some cemeteries in America boy scouts and others will place an American flag beside each of the thousands of grave stones and crosses marking the graves of many who gave the last full measure of devotion for our freedoms. The grateful crowd who honor them diminishes year by year, while the thankless crowd grows, even as politicians and judges erode the very freedoms for which those soldiers died.

Jesus said His death was an example that should be emulated by those who desire to love greatly, laying down one’s life for others. This verse can certainly be applied to those soldiers who died in the cause of the freedom of others, but it extends to and is focused on a more specific army.  Jesus spoke to “soldiers of the cross” when he said these words. He spoke to those who would identify themselves by their faith as His disciples, foot soldiers in His Army, including men, women and children. They wear the uniform of Ephesians 6.  Their names and their graves are not forgotten. Their God has recorded them in His own Memorial Book, which the prophet Malachi calls the Scroll of Remembrance. (Malachi 3:16). And the promises accorded those whose names are on those pages will be fulfilled. The blood of Jesus guarantees it.

This is why the battlefield is not just Normandy, Guadalcanal, the Auchau Valley, or Tikrit. The battlefield of which Jesus speaks covers the world, and his Medal of Honor is and will be placed on the chests of those disciples who spend their life for others that they might live forever. In the context of John 15 and 1 John, you are the personal object of your Master’s entreaty; you, the warrior who bears His name.  The intended recipients of your love cannot be more obvious: all He has placed in your path. You know who they are. The question “For whom should I lay down my life?” is a meaningless diversion. You can be sure it will not be asked in heaven, because you already know the answer. 

Encouragement:

“A noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid, around the Savior’s throne rejoice, in robes of light arrayed: They climbed the steep ascent of heaven through peril, toil, and pain: O God, to us may grace be given to follow in their train”

(4^th verse of Reginald Heber’s hymn, “The Son of God Goes Forth to War”, 1827)

The Apostle John, who called himself the disciple whom Jesus loved, in his elderly years wrote something astounding about this grand prize of human existence. He simply said, if you don’t know God you don’t know love, no matter how much you think you do, because God, and only God, is love. If there is love, genuine, authentic love, God is always in the mix. Otherwise it is something other than love, in fact, quite different from love; and whatever it is, it is never satisfying. It is not that God creates love, or bestows love. It is never said of Him as it is of light, “And God said let there be love, and there was love.”  God is love. If you would know love, you must be born of God, and you must know Him. He doesn’t give it and walk away leaving you to it. He must be there, and you must know it, or love isn’t.

This is the mysterious dynamic of Christian marriage. If a man and wife avidly pursue God in the course of their marriage, that pursuit, knowledge and love of God produces an unbreakable, intimate, and fully satisfying love for one another. As wise King Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes, “A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:12) The closer a couple draws individually to the “source” of love, the more deeply and fully they will love one another. Out of this one flesh relationship, energized by their love of God, will pour a godly love for their children and for their neighbor. It is so often the case in a marriage when things are rough or the “first love” grows cold that one or the other attempts an earnest pursuit to win back the love of the spouse never thinking or knowing that they themselves are not the source of love in their marriage; God is. Pursue Him!  An old saint, being asked whether it is easy or hard to love God, replied: “It is easy to those who do it!”

Encouragement:
C.S. Lewis wrote to one of his correspondents about their doubt of God’s love, “Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.” In this “season of love” be reminded once more to seriously pursue LOVE Himself, and in so doing love one another more completely.

“Here might I stay and sing, no story so divine; never was love, dear King, never was grief like thine. This is my Friend, in whose sweet praise I all my days could gladly spend.”

(7^th verse of Samuel Crossman’s hymn, “My Song is Love Unknown”, 1683)

Anderson’s Applications:
Recently I heard a television preacher say on the air waves that the Christian hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” was errant in its theology. He said that the hymn writer’s words, “O to grace how great a debtor, daily I’m constrained to be” were simply not true. “God freely forgives us,” he said, “through the atoning death of Jesus Christ for our sins on the cross.” He concluded, “Since Jesus paid it all, we owe nothing in return. Our salvation is a free gift. That is what grace is.” What he says is all very well and true concerning grace and the complete payment for our sin, which could only come from the sacrifice of a perfect sacrificial lamb, the sinless Lamb of God. The great hymn writer Augustus Toplady said it like this in his classic hymn Rock of Ages: “Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling.” We have absolutely nothing with which to pay or erase our debt of sin. Yet this preacher is well off the mark when he denies we are “in debt” to God for His magnificent gift of mercy and love. Toplady expresses the very thought of the nature of this debt in the first phrase of another of his hymns, “A debtor to mercy alone, of covenant mercy I sing.” And the Apostle Paul puts it in a nutshell when he wrote, “Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love….” (Romans 13:8) We do have a debt to pay, a debt which remains even after we ask for our debts to be forgiven, as we have forgiven our debtors: it is to love!

C. S. Lewis remarked in his book The Great Divorce, “You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.” With this combination of Valentine’s Day 2008 and our consideration of the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer, it well we recognize these abiding truths: in loving God we comprehend how our previous love for our fellow beings was truly deficient; and, we who know His salvation are indebted to Him, a debt calling for one thing from us, and one thing alone, our love. An old saint, being asked whether it is easy or hard to love God, replied, “It is easy to those who do it!”

A young pastor of a church in the highlands of Scotland in the 19th Century, Robert Murray McCheyne, penned the words of this hymn to express his debt to his God and Savior. The first and fifth stanza read:

“When this passing world is done, when has sunk yon glaring sun, when we stand with Christ in glory, looking o’er life’s finished story, then, Lord shall I fully know, not till then, how much I owe.”

“Chosen not for good in me, wakened up from wrath to flee, hidden in the Savior’s side, by the Spirit sanctified, teach me, Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I owe.”

Consider this Valentine’s Day how great is your salvation, and, then, how great is your love?

Encouragement:
“Teach me Lord, on earth to show, by my love, how much I owe.”

C.S. Lewis when still a bachelor, which he was most of his life, was asked in some of his correspondence if he had ever been in love, with the intimation that until he had, maybe he should refrain from talking about it. He wrote, “You ask me whether I have ever been in love. Fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. But if one is only to talk from first-hand experience on any subject, conversation would be a very poor business. But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte of, of anyone else I have read. We see through their eyes. And as the greater includes the less, the passion of a great mind includes all the qualities of the passion of a small one. Accordingly, we have every right to talk about it.” I might add to Lewis’ words, we have every reason to celebrate it.

Everyone has in some way been touched by “love and romance.” In almost all cases we are the product of it…at least in our parents. And if anyone has loved or been loved by another, this is the product of God’s love. “We love, because He first loved us.” (I John 4:19). We “sour” on something like Valentine’s Day for any number of reasons: its commercialization, the lack of love or romance in our life, or because we believe we have no one to love now, and there is no one to love us back; or just because we think we don’t need some made-up holiday to inspire thoughts about love and romance. We believe that we can do that without help and in our own way.

Now before you think this is solely a defense of Valentine’s Day, it is not just that. It is a defense of the celebration of love and romance, and its necessity in our individual lives and in the life of our family. It is an encouragement to the appropriate expression of it by parents in the sight of their children. It is a statement about life as God designed it to be lived. Our God is a God of love and romance who has designed it into our very fabric. If there is a day in the year intended to remind us of love and romance, and help us celebrate it, then, glory be, let’s do it! But don’t relegate it to just one day of the year, or even fifty or a hundred.

As with Christmas or Easter, the meaning of Valentine’s Day can and should be celebrated every day of our lives. Unfortunately, there are days we do not feel like celebrating anything. On such days it is difficult to relate to the Apostle Paul’s words, “Rejoice in the Lord always,” or “In all things give thanks!” Love and romance ooze with rejoicing and thankfulness. Still our experience is that they do not kindle each day as on our wedding day, or those days we were filled with love for our spouse, compelling us to romance them. Romance is a highly individualized expression of affection toward the one we love. It is the language of love expressed in all manner of communication, including and beyond the spoken word.

In any marriage love and romance fuel the relationship in the right direction; otherwise the tank eventually runs dry. They are servants not only to husband and wife bringing joy to their pilgrimage; their love and romance are servants to their children tutoring them about the essentials of life: what it means to be a man or a woman, a husband or a wife, a father or a mother. Just as the womb of the mother was a place of security, protection, and nourishment for the developing baby, so is the home for the growing child. Love and romance between father and mother are necessary ingredients to the child’s emotional health and maturing. Children know when and whether it is genuine, just as they hunger to see it and rest secure in it. They flourish under its umbrella, and they find satisfaction for their emotional needs.

But how is love and romance in a marriage sustained? Lewis wrote in his little classic, Mere Christianity: “Love, as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced (in Christian marriages) by the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else. “Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”

Children are a gift from God to a marriage, an expression of His grace. When a couple realizes the powerful impression upon their children that love and romance between them makes, they will be encouraged all the more to pursue it with year-round habit and not wait for the annual Valentine’s Day reminder.

God would not have woven it into our very being if he had not intended it to some magnificent purpose. There is the glimpse and more of love and romance in Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Ruth and Boaz, the Song of Songs; it is in the wooing of God toward His people throughout the Bible, the myriad expressions of Jesus the Bridegroom pursuing His Bride; it is in His brothers and sisters who pattern their marriages after the glorious relationship of Jesus with His church.

Psalm 84 acknowledges that in this world we are in a desert described by the Psalmist as the Valley of Baca. He has blessed many of us with a companion for the journey, and the Psalmist says, “As they pass through the Valley of Baca, they make it a place of springs…They go from strength to strength till each appears before God in Zion.” Such is the nature and beauty of love and romance. They are springs in the desert for those couples who find strength and passion for their love in Him. Set your heart on such a pilgrimage!