You Cannot Earn Love
With the coming of Valentine’s Day Sweethearts give red, pink, white, (and in Texas) yellow roses. Chocolate companies all over the world mass produce myriads of boxes of chocolate in anticipation of the day. The candy aisle in the grocery stores brim with various assortments of confections. And with much thoughtfulness, geniuses at the Hallmark Corporation contemplate just the right words to use to record the exact sentiments desired by the thoughtful. These and many other gifts are given to that special someone in order to express one of our deepest needs–the need to love and be loved. How many will think that they are earning that love?
What is a gift? Dictionary.com defines the word as follows: “something given voluntarily without payment in return, as to show favor toward someone . . . .” Consider these key words involved and implied in the definition: voluntary, payment, return, favor, relationship. The word “voluntary” is related to the English word “volition.” Volition involves the will, a mental faculty used to choose and make decisions. A volunteer is someone who does something without payment. The word “payment” means to exchange one thing for another with currency of some kind. The word “return” means to turn something around, or send something back. “Favor” is a wonderful word; it is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, it is something done or given out of goodwill or graciousness. As a verb, it involves the idea of preference or inclination toward someone or something. Considering all of these things, a gift is a gesture (of an item or service) from one person to another, originating within one’s free-will, which demonstrates an inclination of good will, and it carries no expectations of anything to be given back. A gift is the perfect avenue to demonstrate true love because true love involves all of the same elements in a gift, and much more.
Consider that love is an act which expects nothing in return. Teaching us to love our enemies, Jesus said:
For if ye love them which love you, what thank have ye? for sinners also love those that love them. And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. And if ye lend to them of whom ye hope to receive, what thank have ye? for sinners also lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love ye your enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing again; and your reward shall be great, and ye shall be the children of the Highest: for he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil (Luke 6:32-35).
Jesus is teaching us that true love is free from expectations; it doesn’t expect anything to be given in return. In fact, that is the blessing in love, because “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).
Love also originates within the free-will of an individual’s spirit. The apostle Paul wrote in Galatians 5:13-14, “For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another. For all the law is fulfilled in one word, even in this; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Love is a choice that originates within the freedom of our own spirits; it is a fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22). Our free-will is involved in love. We are to use our freedom to choose love, and thereby serve each other.
Love is the currency of relationships. We are all involved in relationships of one kind or another. I’m not speaking about romantic relationships, though those are included. A relationship is the circulation of one person with another, and love is the greatest currency to effect the best possible relationship. Our most important relationship is with God, and the first commandment is to love God. The second is similar: we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:37-39). Love is that aspect of a relationship, among other things, that predisposes one person favorably toward another.
Love demonstrates good will toward others. Consider what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8: “Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. Charity never faileth.” All of these behaviors promotes good-will between persons; they each are not love, but originate in love. It is why love is the greatest of all the virtues.
Now consider this; love is itself a gift. Love itself is the greatest gesture, and there is no higher. God’s love is the greatest, because God IS love (1 John 4:16). God has demonstrated His love for us by giving us Jesus. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). There were no strings attached to that gift. God gave Jesus expecting absolutely nothing in return. How could he expect something in return when He was giving to His enemies (Romans 5:10)? Romans 5:8 says, “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” God’s love personified in Jesus was the greatest gift ever given to man.
God’s love is a gift, but all true love is a gift. It cannot be any other way because love is grounded in the existence of God–God is love! The love of husbands for wives, and wives for husbands is a gift. The love of parents for children, and children for parents is a gift. The love a person has for his friend is a gift. The love we have for our neighbors is a gift. Even the love we give our enemies–especially that love–is a gift. One cannot earn a gift precisely because it is given as a favor, a show of good-will, without expectation of return. We know we cannot earn the love of God, but we cannot even earn the love of our fellows!
This means that love itself is a free gift. If it could be earned, then it wouldn’t be given freely on our part. That is the heart and soul of what it truly means to be free. We are free to accept God, and we are free to reject God, but to be free to accept God, we must be truly free! We are free to give the gift of love to God just as He is free to give the gift of love to us. The only difference is that we must first accept His love, and from Him learn to love before we can give Him our love. John wrote:
Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit (1 John 4:10-13).
Some may be thinking, “Free to love? Weren’t we bought with a price?” Absolutely. 1 Corinthians 6:20 says: “For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.” We have been bought, but we’ve been bought to be free. That is the heart and soul of the word redemption, and we have been redeemed (1 Peter 1:18). We’ve been bought out of slavery, and God has graciously given us entrance into His family. Consider Galatians 4:3-7:
Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world: But when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth his Son, made of a woman, made under the law, To redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons. And because ye are sons, God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Wherefore thou art no more a servant, but a son; and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ.
Christians freely choose to love God precisely because they have been bought out of slavery. Nevertheless, we still give love to God freely as our gift to Him. It is precisely this motivation that lies behind the free-will offering of 2 Corinthians 8-9. Paul wrote that he was seeking to prove the sincerity of their love (2 Corinthians 8:8), and their offering was to be freely given (2 Corinthians 9:7).
Can we say, however, that God deserves our love? Yes. God deserves to be loved by virtue of the fact that He is love, and because God is intrinsically valuable, and therefore God is worthy of our love. This worth doesn’t originate from us, but from God. It means that God Himself has within Himself qualities that deserve a person who has free-will to love Him. It doesn’t mean that God owns someone else’s love, and has thereby forced them to love Him. Each person is an independent free-will agent with the capacity to choose to love independent of God’s intrinsic qualities.
As great as a gift may be, it must still be accepted. There is something I must do to accept a gift. I must receive it. For a physical gift, I would hold out my hands, take hold of it, and bring it into my care. But how do we receive God’s gift of love? We accept the truth that God loves us, we trust what God says about us, and we put into practice the wisdom and truth He provides through His plan for our righteousness. To do anything less is to reject God’s love, but none of these things earn God’s love because it is a gift—given freely, and freely accepted.