Love

​We have just welcomed our 5th great grandchild! What a joy! A perfect, pretty baby girl! She is surrounded by the love of her parents, grandparents, aunts, great aunts, aunts and uncles and many adoring friends. She already knows what love is!
Not everyone is born into such a family but sooner or later everyone experiences love. I first fell in love when I was three. Sitting under the bushes that separated our house from theirs, I promised to marry the little boy next door. When I was a bit older and had more sense, I was so embarrassed that I avoided him for some years and was thrilled when his family moved to start a chain of liquor outlets.
What is love? It’s hard to define. During the interview with Princess Diana, when asked Prince Charles famously replied, “What is love.”  Of course, he knew. He had already found his life- long love, Camilla. Here are a few quotes about love that I found. It is strange that none of the many quotes could actually define love. The Beatles, “All you need is love.” Hermann Hesse, “If I know what love is, it is because I know you.” Robert Frost, “We love the things we love for what they are.”
The Bible has a lot to say about love and its consequences. ”The love of money is the root of all evil.” (1 Tim 6:10). King David loved Bathsheba, committed adultery, had her husband killed in war and he wrote the great Psalm of penitence, “Against you, you only have I sinned, and done this evil in your sight.” 1 Kings Ps 51:4.  King Solomon, despite his wives and huge harem of concubines, loved heathen women and in the end, though the wisest man, he followed their idolatrous, heathen customs and “ did what was evil in the sight of the Lord; he did not follow the Lord completely.” I Kings 11:4,5.
 
The Apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthian church says, “Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 1 Cor 13:4 . Later he says, “faith, hope and love, but the greatest of the three is love.” 1 Cor: 13:13. The apostle John expounds the extent of love in John 3:16 (NIV) “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16.
 
Merle
All Scripture references are from NIV