Hello and welcome back to the podcast on this Thursday, well what is love?

That's a timeless question and as you know Pastor John from time time, we get questions about the nature of love.

God's love for us, our love for God, our love for each other, and what it means that God is love,

as 1st John 4-8 tells us. On top of this we get questions about how joy relates to love too,

which is part of what we mean by Christian Edenism.

You mentioned a while back that you were working through 2 Corinthians recently and saw something that relates to all of these questions that I just mentioned and ties them all together in a surprising way.

Can you summarize your discovery from 2 Corinthians and explain how it

touches on all those questions about love and joy? I can try and it was surprising not only because for being so simple it has vast

implications for the very nature of God himself and how he loves himself and how we love him and how he loves us.

But also, it was surprising also, because what I saw was not found in some high soaring part of Paul's

writings but rather in a very down-to-earth practical interaction with the Corinthians about his travel

plants. You don't expect to find vast implications about the nature of reality as

somebody's talking about their travel

plants. So let me read verses 1 to 4 of 2 Corinthians chapter 2 and make three

observations as we go through this text and these

these three observations are just mind-blowingly vast in their implications. So here's what he wrote. He said, I made up my mind not to make another painful visit to you.

And then he gives the reason for why he's not going to make a sorrowful, painful

visit to them. He says, because if I cause you sorrow, who is there to make me glad but the one whom I have grieved?

So the first observation I make is the reason Paul decides not to make a painful visit

is because if their joy goes down, Paul's joy goes down.

Which implies that their joy is in some measure Paul's joy.

He finds his joy in their joy.

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