Love hurts. Does it? When we say love hurts, what we mean is “because I love deeply, I am open to being deeply hurt”.

 

But what if that’s not true? What if loving deeply has nothing to do with being hurt when someone does something against us? If love hurts, then that would mean God hurts because God is love. God doesn’t hurt us, he can only love. When we are hurt by God, we have only misunderstood him.

 

Brandon and I dated 3 years before we got married. We loved each other soooo much! Or at least we thought we did. But soon after tying the knot, in fact on our honeymoon, we had our first big fight! I was hurt because I thought he was going to hold my hand and stroke my hair the whole time. The attention I thought he was supposed to give me my whole life started to fade on our honeymoon!

 

As a newlywed, and the majority of our marriage, I didn’t know that being married was not about me feeling loved. When I said, “I love you, what I really meant was, “I need you. If you don’t love me, I cannot love you back.”

 

Marriage is about me laying down my life to love my spouse, regardless of whether they love me back. I took a vow to love him, for better or worse, sickness or in health, till death do us part.

And it wasn’t until I really understood grace that I was set up to love unconditionally. Grace taught me what Jesus did for me. He loved me in my worst moments. He never left me. In fact, while I was a sinner, Christ died for me.

 

Understanding this gave me the power to love my husband regardless of how he treated me. And you know what? I learned how to receive the love of God, which is so much greater, and the only love that can really fill me anyway. And now it’s really hard to hurt me!

 

And you know the miracle? When I decided to lay my life down, guess what? My husband opened to receive the same love from God and learned to lay his life down too! Our marriage is better than I could ever dream!

 

God is love. So if you need love, you can find more than enough to show up in your relationships full of love, not getting offended every time someone does something against you. Offenses will come, quite assuredly some large ones, but is it possible to respond to offenses full of God’s love?

 

As a pastor, I want nothing more than for the body of Christ to learn to love each other. My desire is for the body to be so connected to the Lord’s love that they aren’t so easily offended with each other, fighting about who’s opinion is right and getting hurt when someone fails us.

 

Do we really want to give another human the ability to hurt us?

 

Love gives. Being hurt has nothing to do with us loving an individual.

 

If we are hurt, it means our “I love you” really means “I need you”.

 

If you don’t love me back, I am hurt.

 

What if we didn’t need love back? What if we were so full of God’s love that other’s behaviors didn’t really affect us? What if we are already deeply loved, complete in Christ?

If our self-worth is defined by another human’s ability to love us, we will be hurt. Yes, we care what others think, but we don’t place what others think above what God thinks about us. You are loved.