Too many people believe and sometimes teach that love is a feeling or an emotion. Feelings and emotions are involved in love, but the greatest part of love is action-oriented. Love is a verb (what you do), more than a noun (a feeling). 

Many marriages fail because couples value feelings over actions. Many couples feel they have fallen “out of love”—that they don’t feel the love that they once did for their mate. Yet, there is really no falling out of or falling into love. We can fall out of bed or fall in the bathtub, but typically lasting and true love grows for someone over time. Such love for another grows from what we see them do for us and for others. 

Now, imagine if Christ, just before he was crucified, went to the Garden and thought: I hate this feeling; I don’t feel like doing this, therefore I will base my decision upon what I feel. If that had happened, we’d all be hopelessly doomed to Hell. 

The Good News, of course, is that Jesus resisted and fought back His feelings. Even though He prayed three times to have the cup removed, He was more interested in doing the will of the Father than what He might have felt like doing.

Jesus displayed His love by willingly going to the cross and dying for sinners and for those who were still His enemies and desperately wicked. (Romans 5: 8,10). True love is not dependent upon feelings and emotions, because feelings are one of the shallowest and most unreliable of all human emotions. Instead, such love is a choice more than a feeling, because feelings are subjective, while love is objectively displayed in actions.

The bottom line is that love is what a person chooses to do, not what a person chooses to feel. God so loved the world because He felt like it? Yes, He does love us, but that love required action, and that included the supreme sacrifice of His only Son’s life. That was the ultimate love in action.

If we are to tell others about God’s love, we need to emphasize that love is active, tangible, and action-oriented. Love is a choice one has to make; it should not be a feeling we choose to have. Is there any greater love than the one that was displayed on the cross?

The opposite of love is not hatred, because in hatred there are at least some emotions…the opposite of love is indifference. If we Christians are to teach and share about God’s love, we need to focus on what God does, more than what God feels. It isn’t that God doesn’t feel love for us, but God’s feeling love for us was not enough to save us. It was God’s love that cost Jesus His life, and that cost must be acknowledged with the express desire that we will “love one another just as Christ loved us”.  

That type of love, the agape love, comes with a high price…but a price that is every bit worth it!  Don’t you agree? 

- Author Unknown

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But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5: 8,10 NASB

Jesus said, “This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.” John 15:12-13 NASB

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13 NIV

This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4:10 NIV

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in. Him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 NLT

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