If You Make Love, Will You Have Love?
May 23, 2025
Everyone wants it, few seem to find it. Why is Love so difficult to find? Why is it so hard to hold onto? With my perspective on these questions and with the Lord’s help, I’m hoping to provide some answers that will make sense and help people long term.
I believe the trouble of Love being is how we experience it. Because Love is something we experience ourselves, we understand at first as something not given but taken. As children it’s largely what our parents do for us. As adults we have romantic relationships, but “Love” is still something that is taken. Through reception or professions of love, through public displays of affection. Through what’s commonly referred to as “Making Love”. I’ll come back to that in a moment. Even in long-lasting marriages sex and who is getting what is a keystone in determining whether the marriage is successful or not. The world tells us what we receive gives us our value, and our purpose because of the relation between our perceived value in the eyes of others and our own judgement. All of this being inward focused. But sadly, this is as Satan desires, it’s filled with confusion. He as the ruler of this world has inverted love. Love is something you provide others with. It’s not taken, it’s not gathered, it’s not received in the typical sense. It is something you make to give and then witness the ripples of something to be observed. But this idea is a bit abstract perhaps. I can be more specific.
Giving is by nature removing something from yourself in part to the possession of another. To be more specific still, it’s a sacrifice. To elaborate on this by comparison, Lust is taking, or another way to put it, Lust is devouring. Lust isn’t only related to sex, but rather whenever we strongly desire something, we seek to devour it. Sex is the strongest compulsion in this regard and it’s why you are meant to flee from sexual immorality. The pull is too strong, and we, far too weak.
“You can’t have your cake and eat it too.”
Translation: You can’t possess a beautifully baked cake and consume it simultaneously. When we devour, we destroy things at some fundamental level. This is something you’ve likely heard or seen or experienced firsthand many, many times before. For instance, through language or phrasing like;
“That puppy is so cute, I could just eat him up!”.
I would assume and profusely hope not. The phrasing alludes to devouring, to consuming or rather what those words themselves allude to, possessing. You can’t possess something more than when it’s inside of your body. Speaking of body what about physical examples of this? Well, not to seem vulgar, but more sex acts than anyone would care to count involve putting your mouth on another person’s body or theirs on yours. Even public displays of affection often do the same. Non-sexual but romantic relationships like between two kids in high school can imitate these ideas through “making out” or giving “hickeys”. Hickeys for those that may not know involve a person putting their mouth on their romantic interests’ neck and sucking on it until the blood below comes to the surface. Leaving a red mark that stands as a temporary testament to the pair’s physical intimacy. This is also an attempt at devouring. This version of “love” is along the lines of eating that which you favor. It’s centered on you. Gluttony is eating too much food you desire. Lust is enjoying too much sexual gratification with those you desire. The world wants us to receive to devour, to effectively destroy, debase and dismantle what it was originally. Pleasure is the motivator; devouring is the act.
This is why when you do this, you will find a hollow emptiness, as you try harder and harder to satisfy, you will feel less and less satisfied. Jesus said for us to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood. I believe he was speaking in a way to signify love and how it works that our flesh and minds can understand. We favor or “love” what we devour. If you’re going to devour anything, make it the Lord and Savior of all mankind, make it the living water, make it the one who breathes life, not death, not sin, not the world. There is no greater love for a man to give up his life for his friends. Sacrifice is highlighted here, non-sexual love, aka non-sexual giving. Circling back to my first mention of “Making Love”. You can only give what you have, and all that you have is what we can sacrifice with, our time, our words, our attention, our money, our favor, our tolerance. But to make love we often assume this to mean a sex act or intercourse itself. But this is also a part of the confusion. The term highlights the act of conception. That which is made and will be loved (sacrificed for) unconditionally and non-sexually. I see sex as in some sense low brow or base level to love. Sex is often messy and can be dangerous, but out of the most manure filled soil, the most beautiful flowers bloom. The tallest and strongest trees jut forth from the foulest decomposing mess of dirt. That dirt is where seeds take root, surrounded by molds, fungi, worms, insects and so on. It sounds like a putrid place, but this is where life begins its’ ascension. Down below what we know as topsoil, is another world. A world of more dirt but not the lush, life rich top-soil, no. A world of true filth, dirt that is not fit for purpose, that is lukewarm, that doesn’t house molds and fungi and worm, that no seed can take root in. A world of inert and degenerative waste. Perhaps it goes down all the way to Sheol, but we live and rely on a thin margin that has been blessed by God’s breath, his light and his Grace. Sex to me is the beginning of that topsoil layer. It is the moment before and directly after conception where the seed takes root and begins to enter the world more abundantly and upwardly. Two flesh coming together to form one. What starts as a filthy perhaps dirty physical act, with lustful overtones or at the very least undertones that result in rich dark soil full of nutrients and new life. A new life that will be loved, cherished and cared for without the lust that preceded it.
This “Love Making”, points us to what is made and not what is had. Intercourse is had; life is made. Think back on all the most important relationships you’ve ever had. I would wager that most if not all your best ones, your most dear ones were completely devoid and unexpecting of sex. Your mom, your dad, your brother or sister, aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, cousins, nieces, family friends, mentors, tutors, role models, teachers, classmates, bosses, coworkers, peers. Love is there to a degree from high intensity to low, but what is resoundingly not present? Sexual relations. Romantic relations are unique and only in one specific way. They are allowed by God for us to touch in some small measure the very power of creation itself. Everything else we do is just repurpose things for additional or auxiliary uses. But to forge the body of a new human is close as this world gets to creation anew, from God’s perspective no less. And you love that new life; you sacrifice for it because it’s you. No relationship outside can boast of this, no relationship is so reliant on that unconditional love of what is made. Children can’t understand the depth of love as well as the parent can. Just like your love of your brother or a mentor can’t be as deep as a parent for a child. We are allowed a peak into what God feels for us. Sex is not a requirement; it is a tool to get you to where God is. To physically see what creation is like and to give yourself completely to it.
Sacrifice is love, Jesus gave his life for us, The Father gave his son Jesus up for us. These are the two most profound examples of what love really is. So, to gauge our relationships on what we receive is folly. What are you willing to give to another? What will you sacrifice for them? And if you are given pause on what you would or would not do for them, perhaps this may indicate that your love was meant for another. If you don’t have anything to give up (time, attention, favor) to Jesus, the one who gave you his Grace, then you may not find the joy, the peace and the purpose that True Love provides.
In the end, if you “make love” you will undoubtedly have love. Only if what you love is something you will unconditionally sacrifice yourself for. Without guaranteed return and without hatred or spite. Giving for the sake of another. Just as God gives us life and Grace for our sake when we can do nothing in equal measure in return. So love as he loves, love what he loves which is you, which is your enemies as well.