This week I am posting on this theme: “Fill in the blank: Love is________.”
Love is validation.
Love validates the dignity of the one who is loved.
God possesses the greatest dignity as God the Father Almighty and therefore is worthy of being our greatest love. Psalms 89:5-8 (NIV) proclaims His great dignity saying,
The heavens praise your wonders, LORD, your faithfulness too, in the assembly of the holy ones. For who in the skies above can compare with the LORD? Who is like the LORD among the heavenly beings? In the council of the holy ones God is greatly feared; he is more awesome than all who surround him. Who is like you, LORD God Almighty? You, LORD, are mighty, and your faithfulness surrounds you.
It is because of His supreme dignity, His perfect holiness and awesome greatness, that He is worthy to be loved with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30). When we love God, we validate Him for who He is. Don’t misunderstand me here. In validating God, we are not giving Him dignity, or adding to His dignity. We are responding to what we see. We are responding to who He is.
Every person also has great dignity as a son or daughter of God, who was created in His image. There is no person who does not beat His mark, His thumbprint. Psalms 115:3 (NIV) says, Our God is in heaven; he does whatever pleases him. Every person you meet, exists because God was pleased to knit their soul out of nothing and give them the breath of life. For creation to be the perfect expression of his life and love and glory, He determined that you, me, and everyone we meet needed to be in it. When we love people we validate the dignity they have as image bearers of God.
Secondly, right along with that, love validates one’s worth. When we love God we are validating his infinite worth. When we are loving others, we are validating the worth God has given them as His image bearers. Jonathan Edwards in his sermon The Great Concern of a Watchman for Souls said it better than I could, saying,
You may judge how much Christ will insist upon it that you should exercise great diligence and strictness in the care you take of them, by the value he himself has manifested of the souls of men, by what he has done and suffered for them: he has shown how precious he has judged immortal souls to be, in that he, though a person of infinite glory, did not think his own blood, his life, his soul, too precious to be offered up as a price for them to redeem them, that they might obtain that salvation (The Works of Jonathan Edwards, vol. 25, p. 71).
Thirdly, love validates another’s needs. This is true for our love for one another. When we see a person in need or in pain love will not trivialize the pain and suffering of the other. Instead it will validate their pain, their feelings, and their need, and minister to them where they are, not berate them for not being where we think they ought to be. Love always remembers they dignity they possess as image bearers of God and the intrinsic worth they have in God’s eyes as such.
Love is validation.
Learning To Be Full Of Grace And Truth. 