"Love" isn't a feeling you're feeling when you're feeling a feeling like you've never felt before. As one of my earliest mentors (but I can't remember who) said, "That's probably just indigestion."
Instead, love is an action; purposeful, intentional, often self-denying or even sacrificial, directed toward meeting the needs of another human being. Love is giving of oneself without the expectation, and certainly without the demand, of anything in return. If there is a "quid pro quo" whatever is done for the other is not love, no matter what needs it meets.
Love comes with and produces emotions within us. We do "feel" good when we act in loving ways toward others. However, the positive feelings associated with love are not the goal, but rather are serendipity––something positive you experience without looking for it.
"This is how we know what love is--he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. But how does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Dear children, let us love not in word or in tongue, but in deed and truth." (1 John 3:16–18).
To "lay down one's life" for another does not necessarily (and probably for most of us, won't) mean actually dying for another. But "laying down one's life" for another does involve acts of self-denial, where we consciously put the needs of another ahead of our own.
None of us loves perfectly every day, but we can always intentionally work toward being more loving, by being less selfish. That's what the most loving people, whom I have had to privilege to know, do. That's what I appreciate so much about Paul's encouragement to the church of the Thessalonians:
"Now about brotherly love we do not need to write to you, for you yourselves have been taught by God to love each other. 10 And in fact, you do love all the brothers throughout Macedonia. Yet we urge you, brothers, to do so more and more." (1 Thessalonians 4:9–10).
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