The following is an excerpt from Pastor Tullian Tchividjian’s recent blog post titled What is love? on his church’s blog.

For those who don’t know, Tullian is the grandson of evangelist Billy Graham.

Emphasis below in italics are Tullian’s; bold is mine:

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From one perspective, true love is downright dangerous. In his book The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes,

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even an animal.”

To be sure, Lewis was not saying to avoid love. He was simply making the observation that real love is risky: it opens one up to the possibility of intense emotional ache. In fact, Lewis says, the only place outside of heaven where one can be perfectly safe from all the “dangers” of love is hell, and that’s because love is altogether absent there. Love, as the Bible defines it, is sacrificial. This, however, threatens our natural tendency to protect ourselves. We are afraid to give because we are afraid of being taken. But this self-centered fear is precisely why we so often miss out on true love. We have come to believe that love is first something we receive from others before it is something that we give to others. Someone once rightly said, however, that love is what exists between people who find their joy in each other’s joy. In other words, the real benefit of true love comes from loving others before it comes from being loved by others. To give, therefore, is to receive, not the other way around.

Continue reading Tullian’s post here.