“Love is doing what will enthrall the beloved with the greatest and longest joy. What will enthrall the beloved this way is the glory of God. Love means doing all we can, at whatever cost to ourselves, to help people be enthralled with the glory of God. When they are, they are satisfied and God is glorified. Therefore loving people and glorifying God are one” (John Piper).

Love is not a feeling. Sure, love involves feelings, but above all, love is an act of the will. In any relationship, truly loving means that you can do love and act loving even when you don’t feel love. Besides, no one can maintain a feeling of love indefinitely. You will inevitably fall in and out of love many, many times throughout your life, but 1 Corinthians 13 love is a stedfast choice that never wavers.

When you love someone the way God loves, it’s not about enabling sinful behavior. True love always tells the truth. True love seeks the best for the beloved at all times, even when that involves tough love. True love is where you can disagree with people’s lifestyle choices and behaviors and still love them by seeking God’s best for them.

In a culture that equates love and lust, be the one who strives for a biblical kind of unconditional love. Be the one who loves without expecting anything in return. Remember that you can only love at all because God first loved you and demonstrated that love by sending Jesus to the cross for you and me.

“My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God” (1 John 4:7-10, The Message).