More Than a Feeling!

In 1985 Huey Lewis and the News told us in a hit rock song, “The power of love is a curious thing. Make a one man weep, make another man sing. Change a heart to a little white dove. More than a feeling, that’s the power of love.” Lewis got it right in that song – love is more than a feeling. We will return to that thought in a moment. But first note that in our culture love songs very, very often get it wrong. More often than not they reflect the wrong-headed notion that lust is the same thing as love, that love is a only a feeling, an ocean of emotion and nothing else. So people fall in and out of love, believing the lie that love is something that happens entirely in the heart and the hormones, a completely subjective experience that has nothing to do with the head and the brain; a process in which we have little choice and no control. If a person makes me feel good I am “in love.” But if I lose that “loving feeling,” I must be out of love.Tracy Adkins well- captured the popular cultural notion of “love” in the 1997 country song "(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing.” Lyrics include these: “I been thinkin’ bout our love situation / All this attraction in the present tense / I’ve reached the only logical conclusion / Love ain’t supposed to make sense / This ain’t no thinkin’ thing, right brain, left brain / It goes a little deeper than that / It’s a chemical, physical, emotional devotion / Passion that we can’t hold back / There’s nothin’ that we need to analyze / There ain’t no rhyme or reason why / Cause this ain’t, this ain’t no thinkin’ thing.” Further in, the song says, “Gray matter don’t matter much darlin’ / When it’s gettin’ down to you and me.”

 So it goes in a world that has largely reduced love down to nothing but a feeling, often a lustful one. Religious writer Ravi Zacharias counters this diminished idea of love. He wrote: “Love is a command, not just a feeling. Somehow, in the romantic world of music and theater we have made love to be what it is not. We have so mixed it with beauty and charm and sensuality and contact that we have robbed it of its higher call of cherishing and nurturing. Watch two young people in a passionate embrace – it may be love, but it may also be nothing more than passion. Watach two elderly people walking hand in hand with evident concern for each other, and you are closer to seeing love in that relationship than in the youthful embrace” (www.rzim.org). Someone echoed this truth in these words – “Love at first sight is easy to understand. It’s when two people have been looking at each other for years that it becomes a miracle.”

 Love is more than a feeling. The Bible says, “Let brotherly love continue” (Hebrews 13:1). It also says, “Love suffers long” (1 Corinthians 13:4). Jesus taught us to love even our enemies and to do good and pray for them (Matthew 5:44). No disrespect to Tracy Adkins, but these verses force us to the logical conclusion that Christ-like love IS a thinkin’ thing, going far beyond feelings to faith. The Bible declares, “By this we know love, because He [Jesus] laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren” (1 John 3:16). ‘Nuf said. The cross is irrefutable proof – love is much, much more than a feeling. Love is a choice we make in our heads, not just a feeling we have in our hearts. Love is the actions we take, not just the emotions we feel. Now, is your love for God and others more than a feeling?

--Dan Gulley