ALL for Love!
It's Valentine's Day, and today is a day when couples get together to celebrate their love for one another. Today is usually just another day for me, because I am usually single. It is rare that I find someone I want to be with, mostly because I serve God better by myself, and He is all I want. If God one day gave me a wife, so be it, but I don't get involved in relationships too often. The Apostle Paul said it's better to stay single, unless you struggle to stay pure, so that you can give your all to God. And my life's desire is to give my ALL to the Lord. But I understand that this way of thinking doesn't apply to most people, so I will discuss what Valentine's Day is to Christians, how it came about, and what God the Father and God the Son(Jesus Christ) think about Valentine's Day.
The origins of Valentine's Day begin roughly in 269 A.D. In that year, a Roman priest named Valentine would die a martyr to his cause. The priest married young Christian couples according to the tenets of his faith. The government of Rome ordered the priest to cease and desist his actions, but the priest continued to marry other Christian couples secretly. His refusal to repudiate Christianity and his cause to unite lovers with holy vows of matrimony landed him in prison, where he continued to preach his cause. During his incarceration, he struck up a friendship with the daughter of his jailer. He received notes from many of the couples he married and exchanged love letters of his own with the daughter. Legend states that on the day of his execution ( February 14th, 269 A.D.), he left a final letter for his love and signed it "From your Valentine". The legend of Valentine grew in Italy and Europe and in 496 A.D. the priest was honored with sainthood and his day of martyrdom became a day for lovers to celebrate his work.
Valentine's first love was Christ.
Now, as powerful as a story as this is. Remember, that Valentine's FIRST love was Christ. As great as it is to be united with the one you love, we should not let that get in the way of our relationship with God. Remember, Jesus doesn't want us to forget our first love (Revelation 2:4). This doesn't only apply for romantic relationships, but other things of this world can get in the way of our love for God as well. Many times in my own life, I walked away to go the way of the sinful world, because it stole my love for Him. It was more appealing. May this not be the case for us. May we always keep Him first. Remember, Jesus promised we would have all we NEED if we seek FIRST His Kingdom! (Matthew 6:33)
We are all sinners. God created Adam because He loved, and wanted to create us to be beings LOVED by the Creator. But as much as God wanted to love His creation, He didn't want to force us to love Him back. So He gave us a choice. He ultimately knew what would happen, but God's ways are not our ways, so He allowed Adam the free will to reject His ways and sin. And that curse spread to all of creation. Now everyone who is born is automatically born a sinner. And sin has cause the deterioration of all things, as we can see, everything that has breath dies, which was not God's intent. Look at the Garden of Eden. It is actually located between the River Tigris and the River Euphrates. It is not beautiful at all. It is desolate, yet it was beautiful when God created it before sin entered. Our sin causes us to be separated eternally without God. The Bible says that "the wages of sin is death(this means ETERNAL death - Hell), but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus." (Romans 6:23)
Without God's grace, we are absolutely hopeless, but the good news is that God intervened. Jesus(God the Son) humbled Himself and took that death upon Himself. He took our punishment, and satisfied the wrath of God so that by accepting Jesus Christ into our hearts as our Savior, we could be forgiven by God. Truthfully, God never wanted to be apart from us. We chose to be apart from Him. But by His grace, He made a way for us to be united with Him for all eternity.
Jesus died. Jesus rose again to show us that although we all die, there is life after death, and we can spend that eternal life with Him. The cross is rather symbolic. Our sin has separated us from God. But when Jesus was crucified to die on a cross, that CROSS BRIDGED the GAP so that we might reach God through His Son Jesus Christ reaching for us. When Jesus was bleeding and suffering as He was nailed to the cross to hang there in all of the agony, He was saying to you "I LOVE YOU!"
Blessings in Christ the Lord,
Dan
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