“I LOVE chocolate flavored ice cream!”
“I LOVE Justin Bieber!”
“I LOVE my dog, Sparky!”
“I LOVE my wife!”

Ice cream, Justine Bieber, Sparky the dog and your partner for life have been awarded with the same word.
What is more unfortunate, love not has become interchangeable with lust.

I love Ed Cole’s differentiation of the two…
Love is the desire to benefit others, even at the expense of self, because love desires to give. Lust is the desire to benefit self, even at the expense of others, because lust wants only to get. 

The Bible gives us a definition of what real love is.

We know what real love is because Jesus gave up his life for us.
So we also ought to give up our lives for our brothers and sisters. (1 John 3:16, NLT)

Real love is self-sacrificial, unconditional and gives up the right to benefit self.

Below is an example of this kind of love we just described.
Robert McQuilkin was the President of Columbia Bible College. He resigned in 1990 to become the full-time caregiver of his wife Muriel who had Alzheimer’s. He did this because he said Muriel seemed much happier when she was with him.

Watch this…

A young man came up to me recently who I honored and admired.

He told me he was attracted to this lady and wanted to lay down his intentions of pursuing her.  Now just to provide context, both are now working and done with schoool.

He said that it can go either way – that she will say ‘yes’ or he’ll end up ‘on the floor, bloody.’  Pretty funny how he put it but yet I encouraged him to go for it, prayed for him and let me know what happens.

In a day and age when men would rather be sure (the seguristas) to have their girl on the palm of their hands before they lay down their intention to pursue, this guy was going against the flow.

I’ve seen men who have done this and have done it in a way that honored God and the women they were pursuing.  Some successfully pursued and now married like Dan, Dennis and Joe while others ended up on the floor bloody as my friend put it.

But either way, the result was that God was honored in the process and that the lady didn’t end up getting reeled in and hurt.

As Randy Pope says,

“Ladies, if you want a king, you’ve got to be a queen.
Guys, if you want a queen, you’ve got to be a king.”

Kings treat their future queen as a princess.

Paul, in Philippians says it this way,

‘Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush.’ (Philippians 1:9-10 The Message Bible)

Let your love be sincere and intelligent and not mere sentimental gush.

Go to JESUS.

You see, we may not have all the answers, but we do know WHO IS the answer.

Watch a testimony of how God restored a family.