Tag: love

The Deep Desire Beneath Lana Del Rey’s Shallow Lust for Life

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On her latest album, Lust for Life, Lana Del Rey stays true to her musical style. She maintains her haunting vocals, which are deep and rich and can take off with soaring clarity. The light, slow beats that accompany her voice are in the background, while her vocals take up the focus. Her sound is pretty and gritty all at the same time. At The Atlantic, Spencer Kornhaber describes Del Rey’s new release as a return to her first one: “Lust for Life is really Born to Die’s sequel: a rather fabulous return to catchiness, camp, and faint hip-hop influences.”

The album screams nostalgia, from the opening song, “Love”—which resembles a 1950’s rock anthem—to “Beautiful People Beautiful Problems,” a duet with Stevie Nicks, to the retro-looking album cover. Her lyrics, meanwhile, carry timeless pop themes: summer love affairs, love lost, bad relationships, sex, and romance.

Though pop lyrics about relationships are “oh so cliche,” they also serve as a signpost for our cultural obsession with love.

Read the rest at Think Christian >>

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If Love is God, Love Will Fail

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I was never any good at romantic love. I feared falling in love — being vulnerable with my emotions. I knew whoever I married would need to be a worthy man according to Scripture, but also someone I could fall in love with, and that second part scared me. As I dated my husband, two big questions hovered over our relationship:

Was he godly? Yes.
Do I love him? Yes, I do.

But it did not end there, like I had thought it would. Because I had overcome my fear of falling in love and “took the plunge,” I thought I had arrived. I thought we had arrived. Instead, I realized that, though I had fallen in love, I did not know a thing about true love. In fact, God walked me and all my fears about love through the door of romantic love on my wedding day in order to teach me about his true and lasting love in new and deeper ways.

Two Loves

There is a clear distinction between biblical love and romantic love. Biblical love is unnatural to us, so it is always worked in us by the Holy Spirit. No one loves like God without God’s help. Romantic love comes more naturally to us, and therefore happens easily.

Romantic love is a good gift of God’s common grace meant for our enjoyment, and it is good for this type of love to develop into marriage. Biblical love is a different category altogether. At its core, biblical love is selfless, committed to truth, and driven by a divine work inside of us. It never happens unless we draw near to God in Christ. Biblical love can also be expressed and experienced in any relationship, while romantic love is exclusive — designed to be expressed and experienced (at least ultimately) with one person in marriage.

Romantic feelings only scratch the surface of God’s design for us. They give us a glimmer of the ecstatic feelings God has for us, the kind of feelings that lead him to sing over us (Zephaniah 3:17). Biblical love takes us even deeper into that wondrous love. Our love for one another models his covenant love for us — a love so zealous to uphold his covenant with us that he will die for us, even when he had every reason to leave us.

Death is at the center of God’s love for us, and death is at the heart of all biblical love. The covenant vows we make on our wedding day are a death sentence of love. We vow to die to self, in every season of marriage, for the other — to keep the covenant at all costs, doing whatever it takes to serve our spouse’s joy in Jesus.

Read the rest at Desiring God >>

The Love Connection in The Lego Batman Movie

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It’s not only the dark side of Gotham City’s villains that we see in The Lego Batman Movie. We also see the dark side of the dark knight.

While the constant comedy of this family movie keeps the content lighthearted, the character development of Batman himself gives the film a sense of depth. The conflict Batman/Bruce Wayne faces is lurking inside the crevices of his heart; his change involves unmasking himself so he can learn to give and receive love.

Batman lost his parents to the crime-ridden streets of Gotham, which creates in him a passion for fighting crime. The Lego Batman Movie suggests he uses this mission as a way to avoid dealing directly with his traumatic past. In one scene, his butler Alfred catches Batman lost in thought as he gazes at a wall of family photos. Alfred suggests that Batman settle down and give up the mask. But Batman puts on his mask of denial and avoids facing his greatest fear, which, Alfred claims, is having a family again. Batman has kept himself safe from experiencing pain by being a loner, acting independently, being egotistical, and by staying focused on the physical aspects of his life. All of these are mechanisms that help numb himself to feeling any strong emotions.

Read the rest at Think Christian >>

Love & Personality

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I like personality tests. My analytical mind loves examining and discerning people’s personalities; even my own. I recently took an online personality test and my result was the assertive and stubborn leader found in ESTJ.  One paragraph in my personality type description said this:

“However, ESTJs don’t work alone, and they expect their reliability and work ethic to be reciprocated – people with this personality type meet their promises, and if partners or subordinates jeopardize them through incompetence or laziness, or worse still, dishonesty, they do not hesitate to show their wrath.”

Unfortunately, my husband gets the brunt of my ESTJ personality combined with my sin. So, when he doesn’t do things right, according to my standard, I can be harsh and unloving (or as the paragraph above states, “show my wrath.”)

To Love and to Abide

The above paragraph resonated with me, but didn’t turn to conviction of sin until I was reading 1 John 4:7-21.

Liberally peppered throughout 1 John 3 and 4 are the words abide and abiding. These words are referring to the definition: to remain, continue, stay, dwell, reside, and to continue in a particular condition, attitude or relationship.

Another word that pops up in these two chapters is love. There are also phrases like ‘abiding in God’, ‘God abiding in us’, ‘abiding in love’, ‘loving God’, ‘God loving us’, ‘loving our brothers’, and ‘keeping God’s commandments.’ These individual themes tie together in these two chapters.

When we choose to believe Jesus is the Son of God then God abides in us. We in turn abide in God, and thereby prove God abides in us, by loving God. How do we love God? According to these two chapters, we love God by keeping his commandments and loving others. In fact, the essence of keeping his commandments is through loving God and others.

Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” – Matthew 22:36-40

We Love Because He First Loved us

So, what does this have to do with a personality test and conviction of sin? The fact that I am not good at abiding in love. Abiding in love is harder than I think. It’s not a fuzzy emotional feeling; it’s obedience. It’s nailing my wants, needs, and desires to a tree, so I can be resurrected to a new life of selfless love. I’m the one who dies, so others can live. This is what it looks like to identify with Christ’s death and resurrection (Romans 6:5.) When we abide in him we take on his identity.

For most of us it is easy to love strangers, because we never see them again. But it’s harder to love those closest to us; the ones we experience life with everyday. We are going to have some friction at times with either a spouse, child, roommate or parent, because we see and experience more of each other. When they do something we don’t like we try to conform them into what we want-change them.

Yet, the most loving thing I can do for my husband is ask God to change me. It’s easier asking God to change others rather than asking him to change me. I need to ask him to help me be loving and kind to my husband, and this is possible through God’s Spirit abiding in me. It’s possible, because God first loved me.

“We love because he first loved us.” 1 John 4:19