TD Jakes - What Is True Love?
I heard somebody say, and I understood the context in which they meant it. They said that love doesn’t hurt. Then they were talking about domestic violence, and I totally agreed with them on that. However, I don’t like the statement out of context because love does hurt. Love hurts; it hurts to care. Love hurts so badly that it’s the funny thing about our relationship with it. We all want it, and we all need it, yet we try to dodge it. Maybe it’s because it’s so expensive. Love is expensive, not just with checks, dinner, and gifts. I’m not talking about cards and flowers; love is expensive because it requires an unsettling openness and difficult transparency.
While we love to be loved, when it comes time for us to fall in love, we don’t know where it will lead. It starts out with your heart on fire, but it doesn’t always end up that way. I’m not just talking about romantic love; it applies to love for anything or anyone. You can love a pet, and then something happens to it. If you have a new crush, it can crush you so badly that you might not want another pet for a while because you don’t want to invest that much again and risk losing it. If you can cry over a pet, you will definitely cry over a baby. Before it’s over, little boo-boos and falls will break your heart, and that’s part of the process. It determines how tough your love is and how you respond to the challenges of love, the rejections, the isolation, and the expenses. All of this is difficult.
We want to protect ourselves from the pain and trauma that come from impact, so often we lock out the pain, not realizing that the same mechanism that locks out the pain also locks out the pleasure. While you’ve insulated yourself to the point where you can’t feel the pain, you’ll eventually notice that you can’t feel the pleasure either. A wall is a wall; without discrimination, once you put it up, it locks everything out, and you go numb. It’s incredibly challenging to muster the courage to dismantle the wall because the wall protects you from pain but imprisons you without the pleasure. Love is complicated; it’s very difficult. Paul wrote an entire chapter about love alone. It endures all things, hopes all things; he talks about the endurance of love. It seeks not its own. He said there abide faith, hope, and charity, but the greatest of these three is love.
The greatest of anything lies in the third dimension: faith, hope, and love. The greatest is always in the third dimension: the outer court, the inner court, the holy of holies, body, soul, spirit. The greatest is always in the third dimension: father, son, Holy Spirit. The greatness is always in the third dimension. While you can find faith and hope easily, we sometimes struggle with love. You can be strong in faith and full of hope but locked up about love. That’s why some of the most anointed and gifted people dancing all over the church can also be rude in the parking lot. I knew you could appreciate that illustration; if they’re honking their horn at you and giving you sign language, and you’re not deaf, you wonder if that’s the same person who had a word of knowledge in church and sang that song in the choir, hitting that note that gave me goosebumps.
Now they’re screaming at me in the parking lot. Johnny Cash’s son wrote a book, and I pulled a quote from it that I thought was profound. He said true love is many things and can survive the strongest and most painful times. I’m not talking about fake love; true love, when it emerges from the fire, may be scarred forever, but this bruised love is somehow only greater for having survived the pain. The people who are clapping have survived pain. We have this polarized relationship with love: we want it, yet we’re afraid of it. We draw close to it, entertain it, but don’t let it get lodged in our hearts. We can have coffee and do brunch, but don’t get too close because love will bring a strong man to his knees.
Love will make a tough guy cry into his pillow; love will take a rough, resilient woman and bring her to her knees. Love will make you do things you said you would never do. Love will make you take things you never thought you would. Because love has a way of surviving pain. It seems like an oxymoron to mention love and pain in the same sentence because love is so romantic. After all, how could there be anything more sincere than a mother holding her baby in her arms, nursing at her breast, giving nourishment from her body? That’s as intimate as it gets. You would never think that child could grow up and cuss you out, punch you, slap you, or steal your car, leaving you in pain. But if you live long enough—if you let them live long enough—there will be moments where love goes on trial.
There will be tough times you have to deal with love. The problem with heartbreak, with bruised love, is that if I have a bruised arm, you can treat it; if I have a bruised shin, there’s something you can do about it. But if my love is bruised, there is no surgery for a broken heart—not the kind of heart I’m talking about. There is no surgery for a broken heart. There is no pain medicine for a broken heart. If you don’t believe me, if somebody breaks your heart, take Tylenol and see if it helps. The vulnerability of the heart is hinted at in the human body itself. The human body hints at the vulnerability of the heart because the heart is surrounded by a rib cage. The physical heart is protected by the rib cage because it’s powerful, keeping you alive, pumping blood to the furthest parts of your body.
Miles and miles of arteries, veins, and circulatory systems rely on the power of the heart to pump blood. In any place it doesn’t reach, you’re going to have a problem—even if it’s your toe. How can a heart be so powerful and yet so sensitive? Just a few weeks ago, a football player collapsed on the field and had two heart attacks before doctors could get him to the hospital. The heart is powerful yet vulnerable, surrounded by the rib cage. The ribs connect to the sternum with a strong but somewhat flexible material called cartilage. It is designed to protect the organs in the chest, such as the heart and lungs, from damage. God knew to protect the physical heart. Even though the heart is strong, it is vulnerable.
I want to emphasize that even though the heart is strong, it is vulnerable. If I am to represent the heart of God, I must be as strong as I am vulnerable. If I lose either one of those aspects, I cease to reflect the heart of God. If I lean too far into strength and let go of vulnerability, I misrepresent the heart of God, mistaking it for a false identity of being a strong woman or a strong man. Yes, you might be strong, but if you are hard, you are not like God. God gives us a hint in the physical heart: you must be strong enough to keep pumping and vulnerable enough to need protection. Are you hearing what I’m saying to you in the spiritual realm?
Now I’ve gone from the physical to the emotional, and now I’m heading to the spiritual. In the spirit realm, God warns us to guard our hearts, for out of our hearts flow the issues of life. What He means is to guard your spirit. He says, «I don’t have a rib cage around your spirit, so you must stand guard over your heart—who you let in and out, what you let flow from your heart.» Because out of your heart flows the issues of life. That’s where your creativity comes from; that’s where your endurance lies; that’s where the power to fulfill your vision comes from.
When you stop feeling, you stop being creative. When you stop feeling, you stop dreaming. When you stop feeling, you stop believing. When you stop feeling, you stop functioning. You become a machine, a robot, a mannequin. You become an iPad, a laptop; you become functional but not relational. You lose your ability to invest emotionally. God says, «Guard your heart.» Stand watch night and day over your heart because out of your heart—not your head, not your intellect, not your degrees, not your vocabulary—flows the issues of life.
If you have more in your head than in your heart, you’ll go bankrupt. You’ll be a walking encyclopedia; but if you’ve lost your empathy, you’ll lose all connection with humanity. Because we don’t care how much you know until we know how much you care. It has been said that grief is the price we pay for love. What that means is that people who don’t love much don’t grieve much. You have to be a lover to have great grief, and most people won’t invest enough because they don’t want to go through the tragedy of loss. Great lovers are great grievers. I’m talking about capacity. Some people sitting beside you don’t have the capacity to care enough, work enough, grieve enough, or feel enough to meet your needs.
If they have a pint-sized capacity and you have a gallon-sized capacity, and you keep saying, «I need more,» while they respond, «I’m giving you all I’ve got,» neither one of you is lying. You’re just unequally yoked because you’ve connected with someone who doesn’t have the capacity to give you what you truly need. And I can’t change how much you need it if they don’t have that capacity to meet your needs. When you’re dating, instead of asking, «What kind of car do you drive?» or «Where do you work?» you need to check their capacity.
Who in your life has been there a long time, and you still love them? What have you endured and come out loving on the other side? Who did you give up, and why? Why did you cut them off, and how do you feel about it? Some people can cut you off and think absolutely nothing of it; they don’t have the capacity. They were never invested in you in the first place. When John, the writer, speaks about God, he notes that God so loved. It would be enough to say that God loved because God is love. But he says, «God so loved.» He had to put an adjective in front of it to modify the noun and help you understand the magnitude of the infinite capacity of God to love.
The infinite capacity, as Paul said, is something Peter described in praying that you might know the love of God that passes all understanding, the breadth, height, and depth of the love of God are incomparable. You can only attempt to come up with human terms to describe God’s infinite capacity to love. God said, «I have loved you with an everlasting love. I loved you when you were drunk. I loved you when you were high. I loved you when you were reckless. I loved you when you were wicked. I loved you when you were evil. I loved you when you were fornicating. I loved you when you were stealing. I loved you when you were down and out. I loved you when you were in a homeless shelter. I loved you when you were in a jail cell. I loved you when you didn’t have food to eat. I loved you when you were rich.
I loved you when you were turning tricks. I loved you even when you were strung out on cocaine. God so loved you.» God’s love is profound and transformative. If you really embrace that love, it will heal you. If you accept that, you won’t need people as much as you think; you won’t feel as lonely or desperate as you do now because you’ll realize you don’t need someone else to love you. God so loved you. And contrary to what some in church might say, it doesn’t say that God so loved the church, the Christians, or the believers; it simply says, «God so loved.» Many of us who preach about Him and teach about Him struggle to express that because we can be self-righteous and judgmental, trying to decide whom God loves. But you cannot build a wall high enough that God’s love cannot scale it.
Climb over the top of it; I will put a ladder up and reach it. I don’t care what you say. You might not like them; you might lock them out. There are people that God loves— your enemies. God loves the people that did you wrong. God loves the people you want to get even with. I know you don’t want to hear that because you want God to destroy them, but that person is God’s child too, and God loves them—the crazy ones, the foolish ones, the spiteful ones, the vicious ones. God is so loud in the world.