“For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears, not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.” 2 Corinthians 2:4 ESV.
Reflection: what is true love?
Love might be the most talked and written about topic of all time. Not sure about you, but I can’t think of anything else that has gotten as much attention. Just think for a moment about history, literature, music, movies, paintings and the like. Even what each of us talk about, the topic of love is everywhere. But have you spent some time thinking about why that is? Why such fascination with love? After thousands of years, we even struggle to properly define what love is; how we can know when it exists, how we can show it to others, and how we can know others are showing love towards us. And think about how easily you can get in an argument with someone, over love. It is a very strange phenomenon, this love, that we spend so much time on and yet have a hard time defining.
As a Christian, we believe (or at least we say) that “God is love”. That He is the very definition of the term, the idea, the phenomenon. And as humans, we have a very difficult time understanding love out of that definition. Because, what God demonstrates in what love is goes against our own nature. Because, in ourselves, we experience love as something we “get” from others; how others are making us feel, such as someone being a good listener for us, or saying something nice to us, doing something nice for us, or even through acts of physical affection towards us. But God breaks this paradigm, showing us that love is something else.
We learn through Jesus what love is, and it kind of scares us. He is demonstrating that love is not what others do for us, but what we do, what we give of ourselves to others; it is selfless, self sacrificing, emptying of self, for others. Paul wrote the following “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” Philippians 2:3-8 ESV.
We see through Jesus that love is not what you can get, but what you can give.
In our focus verse today, we see an interesting example of this. Paul ends the verse by claiming that he had “abundant love that I have for you.”, the Corinthian church. Now, we can then look at how Paul actually demonstrated this “abundant love”. He starts out the verse by saying “For I wrote to you…not to cause you pain” Corinthians 2:4a ESV. In other words, his letter to them previously might have been misunderstood by some as being harsh, painful and not loving. And if we go back and look at 1 Corinthians again, we see both praise and guidance, as well as correction. But notice what Paul then says “For I wrote to you out of much affliction and anguish of heart and with many tears,”, 2 Corinthians 2:4a ESV. meaning it broke his heart what was going on, having to correct them. And we all know that it is easy to give praise, but much harder to give correction, especially to someone you are close to. And it is certainly hard to receive correction, and then change our ways. But it is the only way to improve and grow, right? .
But what really struck me today with Paul’s message was how much it broke his heart for the church, having to say what he said to them. But he did it anyway, in love, “not to cause you pain but to let you know the abundant love that I have for you.” 2 Corinthians 2:4b ESV. It would have been so much easier to just skip those things that needed to be said. But instead, he entered into the pain, into the battle with the church, agonizing over them and their situation, and wrote these beautiful letters in love of them. And we can still read them today, almost 2000 years later.
A broken heart, of love for his brothers and sisters..
So where are we at? How do we define love? Does our hearts break for others? It is of course only God who can change our hearts to fill them with His love, who can transform us into the image of his son. In our flesh, we want others to give us love, to take from them. But when we meet Christ, the more we get to know him, the more we understand the beauty of true love. Of a giving heart, not one focused on taking.