True Love Transcends Time!

Do you believe in love at first sight? I do! In fact, I believe that true love is eternal and therefore “love at first sight” is merely our recognition of something that already exist. I can’t remember a time when I did not love my Granddaughter (or any of my Grandchildren) and why is that? I can remember a time when I didn’t have grandchildren, or children for that matter. But I can’t remember a time when I did not love them. The reason for this is found in the very nature of love.

You see, we are told in 1st John that “God is Love” therefore, love is eternal and infinite! Moreover, love is not an emotion, but is emotional. It carries deep feelings but is not a feeling. Love never ends, for it is infinite. We struggle to define it because our finite minds struggle, and in fact can’t grasp the infinite. True love is incomprehensible to us and leaves us speechless and overwhelmed with thoughts of it bouncing around in our heads undefined touching our emotions and our intellect with equal power.

Now certainly, as a Christian I have a view of Love. This view, some will disagree with, but it is based on the truth of Scripture and confirmed by my experience. 

Before I was a Christian, I thought I knew love, I had been in “love” and in fact was married and had two children. And just like everyone else in the world I would say I loved my family. But, now on this side of things, I realize that I did not know real love. I had all my flesh, emotions and psyche could muster, but it was not the love of God. It was determination, loyalty, compassion and connection, but it was not infinite and eternal. If God is love, to know real love is to know God, to not know God is to not know Love. In 1st John we read, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1st John 4:7-8). The lost person would possibly still argue that they “love” others, but is that love unconditional? Or is it relative? I love you if we get along with each other or I love you until I don’t feel it anymore! We call an emotional state of compassion, loyalty and desire, "love", and in so doing find that we fall in and out of love, but that is not the eternal love of God, it is an emotional state and will and does change over time. 

True love never changes. If we read 1st Corinthians chapter 13, we can see that “love never fails” (v. 8) The reason love never fails is because of its eternal quality. The eternal is ever existent. Love therefore is ever existent and cannot cease to exist. So, if we truly love, it will be eternal and without fail. So, you can’t fall out of love with someone if that “love” is true love. One could also submit you cannot “fall” in love as well. If a love is true, it can only have its Genesis from one source, the source of all love, God! Therefore, a person who does not know God could never truly love. God grants us, gifts us, imparts into us, love, not just for him, but for each other. This Holy Love is unfailing, never changing and eternally existent. 

Since love is eternally existent it has an interesting relationship with time. Eternity, and those things eternal exist forever in the future and forever in the past. True love is therefore forever in existence in the future and the past simultaneously. There has never been a time when love was not.

This is the amazing thing about God’s love for us and in us. Once we taste and see true love, we are given a glimpse of eternity. This is the reason I cannot remember a time when I did not love my granddaughter, for in her the love of God has manifested itself and therefore connected me to eternity. And in eternity, in God’s love for her, there has never been a time when that love did not exist. So, I cannot remember because there has never been a time when I did not love her! 

True Love transcends time!