Alright! It’s February! You all know what that means. As the commercials will tell you and the stores will try to sell you, it is the month of love. That’s right. February is the month of love!
Now, as we have entered the “month of love” I figured I would go along with the theme and start us off with the lyrics from a classic song about love. Here it is…“Love Hurts” by Nazareth.
Love hurts, love scars
Love wounds and marks
Any heart
Not tough or strong enough
To take a lot of pain, take a lot of pain
Love is like a cloud
Holds a lot of rain
Love hurts
Ooh, ooh, love hurts
If that isn’t enough to make you want to go out and buy a bunch of chocolate and a bouquet of flowers, I don’t know what will! It makes me feel all warm and gushy inside!
Love hurts.
(Just as an aside, if you have some internet access, go ahead and go to YouTube and watch the music video for this song. Now, that hurts! It caused a lot of personal pain in my life. I couldn’t make it through the whole thing.)
Back to the point, love hurts.
How do I know this? Do I know this because a band from Scotland in the 70s (Nazareth) named themselves after a line in a song called “The Weight" written by a group called The Band that referenced a town in Pennsylvania called Nazareth decided to write a rock ballad and told me that was the case? (Do you follow all of that? The song “Love Hurts” was written by a band in the 70s called Nazareth. They got that name, Nazareth, out of the line in a song entitled “The Weight” that was written by a band called The Band. That song referenced Nazareth, PA. Whew. That’s some unimportant and confusing mess right there!) But back to the point, do I know that love hurts because some 70s band told me so in the form of a rock ballad? Do I even believe this to be true? Is what they sang and what I’ve quoted legitimate?
Let’s see…Nope. Yep. Yep.
Nope. I don’t believe it because I’ve heard the song, because I’ve suffered through a portion of the music video, or because I’ve been directly influenced by this band called Nazareth.
Yep. I still believe it to be true. Love hurts.
Yep. What they sang about is legitimate.
Love really does hurt.
It is true.
I’m betting that if you have had the joy of experiencing love within your life, you know that fact to be true. Love hurts. Let’s look at some of the ways that love can hurt.
- It hurts when you love someone and they disappoint you. When they let you down. When they don’t live up to your expectations or do what they had promised to do. Love hurts when those you love come up short. Love hurts in disappointment.
- Love hurts when the person or thing that you love is no longer present. When a loved one passes and is no longer there in your day-to-day life. When their seat is empty. When their place at the table is no longer filled. When the phone no longer rings and the letters are no longer mailed and the flowers or chocolate that you used to buy now just sits in the store. Love hurts in loss.
Love hurts in disappointment, it hurts in loss. Those are both true, but they are both inward looking. Love hurting in those ways focuses inwardly, on ourselves, how we are hurt personally because of something missing or lacking in our lives. That is true, but love hurting is more than that. Love hurts beyond just inward pain from loss or disappointment. Doesn’t it?
- Love hurts when we see the people whom we love hurting. When we witness our loved ones get injured, or when they are disappointed, or when they are grieving, or when they suffer, or when they go through hardships. Love hurts then, too. If you love another and they go through tragedy, it hurts you right along with them. If their family is a wreck or their body is falling apart or they have been mistreated or overlooked or undervalued or any number of negative things that might happen to people, one finds out in those situations as well…love hurts. Love hurts when others are hurting.
So, why even bother? If love hurts, why even love?
Some have asked this question and have chosen to wall themselves off. They argue, “I tried love before and I was hurt. Badly. Deeply. I will never recover. I will never love again.” With a certain perspective, it’s a reasonable argument. After all, why love if it causes so much pain? If it hurts in disappointment, if it hurts in loss, if it hurts when others are hurting, why bother? Couldn’t we just avoid the pain? Couldn’t we just avoid love?
I suppose that you could, but I hope that we all know somewhere deep inside of us that that option isn’t really a healthy choice. I hope we all have at least some understanding of the fact that we need love and that walling ourselves off from experiencing love is actually more hurtful to us than going through the hurt of love in the first place. Though it is hard, I believe that Alfred Lord Tennyson had it right. “'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” The hurt of love is much better than the hurt of no love whatsoever.
Not only that, but take a look at this quote which comes from an authority that I value much more than Tennyson:
“We love because he first loved us.”
~1 John 4:19
Why do we love? Especially if it hurts? Well, if we get down to the nuts and bolts of it, we love because we have experienced love. We love because God loves us. We love because we have felt the love of Jesus. To wall off love, even though it is painful, means that we wall off Jesus. We would be shutting God right out of our lives as we attempt to shut the hurt from love out. Just take a look at what comes a little prior to this:
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them.
~1 John 4:16
God is love.
There you have it. Plain and simple. If we shut out love, we shut out God.
Whoever lives in love lives in God.
If you live in love, you live in God. Not only that, if you live in love, you live in God, and God lives in you.
Why love, even though it hurts? Because God first loved you. Because if you live in love, you will live in God. Because if you live in love, God will live in you.
Love hurts.
I know. I have experienced love, and I have hurt because of it. I have hurt because of disappointment. I have hurt because of loss. I have hurt because those whom I love hurt. I have hurt because of love.
But even though that is the case, I hope and I pray and I long and I seek to grow in love, to expand in love, that my love might increase even if it means that the possibility of me hurting increases right alongside of it. Why? I have experienced the love of God. I have witnessed and experienced and accepted the love of God through Jesus who bore his own hurt by loving me. I know that Jesus has experienced the hurt of disappointment when I have not behaved in a manner that would honor his name or the gifts that he has given me. I know that Jesus has experienced the hurt of loss as he painfully cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) I know that he has wept when he saw suffering (John 11:35). I know that Jesus mourned and grieved and suffered, and that is just the start of it. The nails, the beatings, the thorns, the abuse, the ridicule, the spitting, the mocking, the pain, on and on and on and on and on. Jesus hurt because he loves so I will love, even if it hurts.
It’s a funny thing how a 70s rock band from Scotland was named after a town in Pennsylvania that was mentioned in a song by a group called The Band stumbled onto part of a truth lived out by a shepherd from a place with the same name, Nazareth, almost 2000 years before. Love hurts. Love scars. Love wounds. Love marks.
For now, that is true. Within this world, at this time, in this present age, that is completely true of love. Love hurts. Just look at Jesus or ask Thomas about seeing where they nails left their marks (John 20:27). But even though Jesus knew it would hurt, he knew he would suffer, he knew the pain that would happen, even though he knew that love hurts, he pressed on. He pressed on into love. “For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” (Hebrews 12:2)
Friend, in this “month of love”, I pray that you experience love, even though it hurts. Experience love because God is love and because God first loved you.
~ Pastor Chris
