We love the music about love. We love everything about love, and lend especial honor by setting aside every Feb. 14 as Valentine's Day. Little cupids shoot little love-darts, and little hearts, whether pink or red, adorn everything around us.

We are smitten and besotted with love! The problem is, we are a love-laced, romance-roasted and sex-saturated society, yet our problems loom ever larger.

The divorce rate remains high. Marital-therapy rooms are overbooked. Pornography, the very opposite of love, is infiltrating homes and minds with staggering increase.

Why? The answer lies in the fact that love has become so cheap - dirt cheap, even. Love must cost more than it does if it is to have real value and lasting benefit.

Love now means something other than what God intended. We now "love" that which we merely "like," and have reduced loving relationships into mere sexual encounters.

Love no longer entails long-term commitment or the blessing of marital covenant, nor does it provide the security and comfort of the God-given framework of a nuclear family.

It is anything and everything but love. Love of self reigns today, for which we are paying a heavy price; still, the greatest price is being exacted from our children and grandchildren, who are growing up in a world denuded of the fruit of holy love.

Thank God for Jesus! I mean, literally, thank God for Him! His ministry of two thousand years ago shines forth still as a powerful testament to the value and worth of love - and we mean true love, not such cheap substitutes as "like" and sex.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines love as "that state or feeling with regard to a person which manifests itself in concern for the person's welfare, pleasure in his or her presence, and often also desire for his or her approval; deep affection, strong emotional attachment."

I like how God's Word defines love. First, it does so by way of example: "This is how God showed His love among us: He sent His one and only Son into the world, that we might live through Him" (I John 4:9).

Most things are defined and then illustrated, but not so with love: Scripture first illustrates love, and then backs up the example with a definition:

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins" (I John 4:10). Elsewhere, Jesus says, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13).

The practice of God's love, like the practice of writing and defining, finds fruition in proper application. Again, from the Scripture: "Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another" (I John 4:11).

It will be real and lasting love. It will be love that makes a difference because it costs something, just like it cost Jesus. It will give new life to our tired bones, our wounded hearts and our jaded minds. Valentine's Day will never be the same! *