Growing up, Nat King Cole—along with Johnny Mathis—was almost synonymous with Christmastime. I could hardly wait to pull the 33⅓ album from its sleeve and place it on the family console, letting the warm crackle announce the season.
Maybe that’s why Nat King Cole recently crossed my mind. It is Christmastime, after all.
Cole recorded countless iconic songs—Christmas classics and otherwise. Like most music across the ages, much of what he sang about was love. Arguably, one of his most famous songs was the 1964 hit “L-O-V-E,” loved for its playful spelling of the word (“L is for the way you look at me…”). Surprisingly, despite its enduring popularity, according to Google, the song only reached No. 81 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year. Yet, over time, “L-O-V-E” has become a cultural staple—featured in films, soundtracking weddings and accompanying those moments of romance and nostalgia.
Isn’t it funny how love isn’t always obvious at first.
I’m reminded of a theologian who once distilled our deepest human longings into a simple sentence: “We want to be loved, and we want to have a good time.”
No truer words have been spoken.
The Apostle John, writing to an early community of followers of The Way, contextualized and expressed love this way:
Dear friends, let’s love each other, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is born from God and knows God. The person who doesn’t love does not know God, because God is love. This is how the love of God is revealed to us: God has sent his only Son into the world so that we can live through him.
(1 John 4:7–9)
Love—real love—is central to what it means to be human, created in the very image of God. Yet what we’ve been told love is—or what we’ve come to believe it to be—hasn’t always proven true. As a result, we either grow cynical, convinced love doesn’t really exist, or—like a bee—we flit from flower to flower, chasing that elusive pollen of fulfillment.
“We want to be loved, and we want to have a good time.”
Thankfully, we don’t have to guess what love is—or isn’t. The Apostle offers an answer that is both eternal and deeply satisfying:
This is love: it is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the sacrifice that deals with our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us this way, we also ought to love each other.
(1 John 4:10–11)
Love—not waiting, but acting. Not abstract, but sacrificial. Love born from a desperately hopeless need.
How fitting, then, that in this season of remembrance and celebration we honor the birth of the One who came as love made flesh. As the Apostle would later declare, “God is love.” And as Nat King Cole so memorably sang,
“Love was made for me and you.”
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Pastor Mark
Mark, the eighth of nine children born to Reuben and Henrietta Meeks—dedicated church planters with nearly 30 congregations established across California’s Central Valley—is a preacher's kid who grew up immersed in faith and service. With over forty years of experience teaching, discipling, and ministering to communities, including the hospitalized and incarcerated, Mark responded to God's call to pastoral ministry. He holds degrees in civil engineering and public administration, as well as a Master’s in Theology from Fuller Seminary, equipping him to serve with both practical insight and spiritual depth.
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