What Is Love?
As I've listened to my secular friends, I get the sense that for many of them, love is the highest virtue. If something is loving, it's automatically good. If it's love, there's no higher authority that can question what's being done. It sounds like, "Follow your heart," "love is love," "you do you," and "love wins." It sounds good. But somehow, it keeps turning "love" into whatever I want it to mean.
1 John 4:7-21
⁷Beloved, let us continue loving one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows him. ⁸The one who does not love has never known God at all, because God is love. ⁹This is how God's love was made visible in us: God sent his one and only Son into the world so that we might live through him. ¹⁰This is what love is: It is not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. ¹¹Beloved, if God loved us in such a way, then we too are bound to love one another. ¹²No one has ever seen God. Yet if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is brought to its full measure in us. ¹³This is how we recognize that we live in him and he in us: he has given to us of his Spirit. ¹⁴And we have seen and testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. ¹⁵Whoever openly declares that Jesus is the Son of God — God lives in that person, and that person in God. ¹⁶So we have come to know and put our trust in God's love for us. God is love, and whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them. ¹⁷This is how love reaches its full measure with us, so that we can stand with confidence when judgment day arrives. Because as he is, so also are we in this world. ¹⁸There is no fear in love. Instead, love in its full measure drives out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and anyone who still lives afraid has not yet been brought to fullness in love. ¹⁹We love, because he first loved us. ²⁰If anyone claims, "I love God," and yet hates his brother or sister, that person is a liar. After all, if someone will not love a brother or sister he has seen, he cannot love a God he has never seen. ²¹And this is the command we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother and sister.
As soon as he mentions love, John shows us that God's love is defined by how much it cost him. My grandmother lost one of her sons to heart failure, and she once told me she thought about him every day after that. It was a wound that faded, but never went away. I cannot imagine sending my children to die for the benefit of their enemies, or doing so myself. God doesn't love with slogans, but by leaving heaven, becoming human, and walking to a cross. At the cost of his life, he made the amends on our behalf. At your workplace, are your co-workers lifting each other up, or trying to outcompete each other? It's precisely when we were ignoring God and undermining each other that God took the initiative. He came after us while our backs were turned against him. God's love goes first because if we had to go first, it would never happen. I was up late one night, trying to figure out my strategy. I knew that God was loving, but I mainly felt oppressed by the weight of my sin. I had justifications and explanations, but I couldn't convince myself. I even laughed. Who did I think I was, that I could secretly hide my real motivations from God? All I could do was keep rehearsing what I knew to be true until I finally drifted off to sleep again. John promises that the sin is paid for, the Spirit is alive in me, and the coming judgment is already settled. When God's love lives in us, fear keeps getting evicted. Writing Bible studies from my home office means I can avoid a lot of difficult people. It's much easier to write about love than it is to get into my community and love a particular person. But John says "we love, because he first loved us." His definition of love cuts through all my spiritual sentimentality. I can test my spirituality by whether or not I'm habitually loving specific people. It can be as mundane as washing the dishes or making the bed. Apart from this, my claim to be a loving person, or a super spiritual person, is a lie. A skeptical friend complained at church that it's hard to believe in a God you can't see. After the meeting ended, one member of the group went to talk with him in a gentle, caring way. He was making God's love visible. When we define love, we turn it into something convenient and easy to do. But when God defined love, he went to the cross. He goes first and furthest so we can live our lives with him. Because he is with us, we are bound to love our neighbors.
In your own words, what does it mean that "God is love"?
What's one specific way you have let your culture define love for you?
What's the name of one person you cannot love?
Put a reminder on your calendar that simply says, "He loved me first." When it pops up, ask God, "Who do you want me to love?"