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Happy Valentine's Day!

It’s Valentines Day!

Ok, so what does that mean?

From one perspective, it’s a commercial celebration of romance and love that includes giving greeting cards and gifts.

From a slightly more crass perspective, it is a commercial exploitation of romance and love that includes giving greeting cards and gifts.

Perhaps a more gracious perspective is that it’s a day set aside for people to express their affection to one another by giving gifts.

Regardless of how you view it, you might tend to agree that love is often misunderstood.  And how could it not be!  After all, we talk about falling in love.  We talk about love at first sight.  We talk about making love.  We talk about how much we love ice cream!

So how would you view and understand the word “love” in conjunction with the follow words and phrases?

 

  • Be very careful;

 

  • Be very diligent;

 

  • Take utmost care;

 

  • Take good heed;

 

  • Take diligent heed;

 

  • Be sure to always;

 

  • So diligently watch yourselves.

 

All those words are how different translators chose to present Joshua 23:11 to us.  The ESV puts that verse this way:  “Be very careful, therefore, to love the Lord your God.”

The love we have for God is supposed to be active and intentional and thoughtful and requires careful attention.  It’s much more than our misunderstood concepts of love that include just falling into something or a first sight type of thing or a definition that is skewed toward sex or having a strong preference for peanut butter and chocolate ice cream…

So Happy Valentine’s Day and be very careful to love the Lord your God!

Oh, and be very careful to love that special someone in your life, if you have one to love!

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