Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day in the US. So, boyfriends and girlfriends, engaged couples, and married folks are thinking about ‘love’ more than at most other times during the year. So in today’s sermon I want us to properly define authentic ‘love’—the kind that lasts a lifetime! The kind of ‘love’ I’m talking about is the kind Jesus mentioned in His conversation with a Jewish religious leader named Nicodemus one night. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “…God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” (John 3:16, NIV). This kind of ‘love’ can be defined—on the basis of this statement of Jesus—as “a sacrificial commitment to the wellbeing of another!” God was so committed to the wellbeing of the human race that He was willing to sacrifice His own Son to rescue us from the eternal consequences of our sin. That’s the kind of ‘love’ we will be talking about in this sermon. It is not a warm, fuzzy feeling that comes and goes with our emotional highs and lows. It is not an intense, passionate physical attraction that dissipates with age. It is an intentional decision to be committed to the wellbeing of another regardless of your emotional highs or lows and is unaffected by your age- related loss of physical passion. It is the kind of stuff that makes relationships last a lifetime. Paul wrote, “Love never gives up…and endures through every circumstance.” (I Corinthians 13:7a…7c, NLT).