I have been thinking lately about how easily we say the word love.

We love coffee. We love summer. We love a favorite song. We love a place we’ve visited once. We love people. We even say we love God.

The same word carries everything from a passing preference to the deepest commitment a human heart can make. Perhaps that’s why love has become one of the most misunderstood words in our vocabulary. We use it so often that we’ve almost forgotten to ask what it actually means.

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, His answer wasn’t complicated.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” Then He added another that could never be separated from the first: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Everything else, He said, hangs on these two commands.

That has always fascinated me.

Jesus didn’t point first to religious performance. He didn’t begin with knowledge, accomplishments, or appearances. He began with love.

Not the kind of love our culture celebrates. The kind that God defines.

The sermon I recently listened to described biblical love in four simple ways.

Love is sacrificial.

Love is a choice.

Love is truthful.

Love is obedient.

Simple words. Difficult to live.

Sacrificial love asks us to give before we receive. It lays down pride, comfort, and sometimes even the desire to be right. It is the kind of love Jesus demonstrated long before He ever asked us to practice it.

Choice reminds us that love is far more dependable than emotion. Feelings rise and fall. They are beautiful gifts, but they were never designed to carry the weight of a lifelong commitment. Anyone can love when everything feels easy. The deeper question is whether we choose love when it becomes costly.

Truthful love may be the hardest of all.

Our world often tells us that love means never making anyone uncomfortable. Yet Scripture paints a different picture. Love without truth becomes approval. Truth without love becomes cruelty. God never asks us to choose between the two. In Him, they have always belonged together.

And then there is obedience.

That word has become uncomfortable in our culture because we often associate it with restriction. But throughout Scripture, obedience isn’t presented as the opposite of love. It is one of love’s clearest expressions.

In Deuteronomy, God’s people were told to love Him with all their heart, soul, and strength. They were to keep His words close—not only in worship, but around the dinner table, while walking along the road, when lying down, and when getting up. Love was never meant to visit us only on Sundays. It was meant to shape the ordinary moments that quietly become our lives.

Perhaps that’s what challenges me the most.

It is easier to admire love than it is to practice it.

It is easier to speak about loving difficult people than to answer them with gentleness.

It is easier to celebrate sacrifice than to surrender our own preferences.

It is easier to agree with God’s truth than to allow it to correct us.

The older I get, the more I realize that love isn’t measured by the size of our declarations. It is revealed in the ordinary decisions no one else sees.

The patient response.

The honest conversation.

The forgiveness that isn’t deserved.

The quiet act of service.

The decision to remain faithful when walking away would feel easier.

Maybe that is why Jesus tied our love for God so closely to the way we love other people. The two cannot be separated. The love we profess with our lips eventually reveals itself in the life we choose to live.

I don’t think God is asking us to feel more.

I think He is inviting us to become more.

To become people whose love resembles His—steady instead of convenient, truthful instead of superficial, obedient instead of selective, and sacrificial instead of self-serving.

Because in the end, love isn’t simply something we say.

It is something we live.

Until next time,