love is not about feelings

The greatest virtue is love. To will the good of the other. Love is about choices you make that benefit another person to become more of whom God desires him/her to be. We can personally affect the God-given destiny of other people by loving them.

We notice that love is about actions we take. Love is not about feelings. Your emotional condition when you are willing the good of another through the choices you make towards them is not important. What you do is what counts; not how you feel.

If love were a feeling we would not accomplish what God wants for us. Feelings are terrible sources for action. Feelings can be helpful servants of encouragement when we act with sacrifice and feelings can be helpful servants of guilt when we need to turn back to God. But if we base our actions on our feelings we are ruled in a way we are not designed.

Jesus has given instruction about this in scripture. When Jesus says, “Love your enemy,” he is not speaking of something that comes naturally. He is saying that we can become the kind of people who can will the good of those who wish to harm us. The most potent choice is to pray for your enemies. In the act of prayer you lift your enemies up to God and say, “God do exactly what is right in my enemy’s life.” If God is to punish them, so be it. If God is to open their eyes, amen. If God is to make them more forgiving toward us because we have wronged them in some way, then this too will be done. But feelings don’t need to enter into any of this.

We are also given “instruction” about not allowing our feelings to rule us in God’s natural design. For example, even though people are sometimes sexually attracted to their children or their siblings, in all cultures and during all times of human history, with isolated exceptions, incest is a strict taboo. Even though your desire might be to be sexually active with your immediate relative, it is forbidden. This is in atheist cultures as well as God-based cultures.

It would not be a loving thing to do to encourage incest because someone has that desire. Even if some day geneticists could isolate behavior genes (there is nothing close to this in actual research), and people are said to be “born with” that desire; feelings must be denied. Incest taboos are in place for consenting adults, as well, and so this is not an adult/child issue. In the case of incest, someone’s feelings must not be acted on and the loving thing to do as a culture is to strongly disapprove.

So whether through our conscience or the special instruction of the Bible we know love is not about feelings, but rather about choices.