Series: On Being a Christian
#4: What’s Love Got to Do with It? Part 2
October 12, 2008
In her classic diva style, Tina Turner asks a very perturbing question: What’s love got to do with it? I think this is a very basic question of life and perhaps that is why this song has garnered so much popular appeal, even to our day. I find it quite fascinating that many if not most of our popular love songs can easily be tweaked to make it a love song between God and us.
Last week we saw in pop culture the epic struggle between good and evil and how that struggle shows up in many movies, television shows, plays and books. Again that theme resonates with us because it is a battle endemic in human nature and our world—the struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan. The Bible and Christianity are not removed and out of touch with our lives (as Bill Maher contends) but are at the very core of our being and of human experience.
We have been talking about a 3-legged stool that represents what it means and what it looks like being a Christian. Because of much confusion and false teachers, the Apostle John in his 1st letter is describing to the early Christians what a follower of Jesus looks like. He describes the 3 core essentials in a Christian’s life: obedience, love, and belief. These are the 3 legs of a stool as it were with each one no less nor no more important than the others. These 3 legs are the foundation of and hold up the stool of Christian experience in a believer’s life. In this letter John repeats the legs of obedience and belief twice but the leg of love John repeats on 3 different occasions. There is no clue as to why this is within the context of the letter but we can extrapolate some possibilities. It seems that love is the glue that holds obedience and belief together. In effect John is saying that unless my obedience is for others, that obedience is deadly. In the same way unless my belief changes the way I interact with others then my belief is pointless. 1 John 4: 7, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.” 1In verse 20 we read, “For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen. And He has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.”
Did you get this? To love God is to love one another. They are inseparable. The evidence of our love for God and our Christianity is how we love people. What’s love got to do with it? It has everything to do with it. But this love that John is talking about is a certain kind of love, and is certainly not the kind of love that pagans and even Christians often ban tee about with trivial ease. Some of you probably already know this, but the Greek language uses many words that we in English use for love. For example: I love ice cream. I love my wife. I love my dog. I love you. I love my kids. Jesus loves me. I love the Cleveland Browns (sometimes!). I love to snorkel. I love it when a plan comes together. Do I love ice cream the same way I love my wife, my car, my roses, or my favorite sports team? No, they are all different kinds of love, but in English we use only one word to describe it. No wonder we are so messed up when it comes to love! In Greek there are different words for love that you would use depending on the kind of love you are talking about. I love you is the word phileo which is brotherly love. Loving the game of golf or your dog is storge love. Sexual love is eros love. God’s love for us is agape love—a perfect or unconditional love, the highest and most pure kind of love.
John is saying that our love for one another should not only be phileo, but also agape, and when we agape we also phileo. Let’s go back a couple weeks ago when we looked at Love Part 1. If you remember we learned about God’s hesed a Hebrew word that is often translated in the Bible as grace, mercy, or loving-kindness. We also learned that there is no word in English that captures the full orb of this word, hesed. God’s hesed is a passionate, devoted loyalty of a superior to an inferior, especially when that loyalty is undeserved. Hesed is active. It is something you do not something you feel. This is love and this love is so totally opposite the kind of love that we tend to love with, the kind of love we see depicted in popular culture, the kind of love that is self-centered, prideful, and egotistical.
Somehow we have gotten this crazy notion that to love someone means that we accept them. Which means to accept everything about them as good, that we cannot make judgments about them, and that we cannot disagree with them. How is it then that God can hate sin and what sins does to us, yet at the same time love each one of us? We are not talking here about phileo love nor storge love and certainly not erotic love. We are talking here about agape love…the highest love and of hesed, God’s passionate loyalty to us even though we don’t deserve it. We love the sinner but hate the sin. So, no, we are not talking about love as we commonly understand it and commonly use it in popular culture. We trivialize love and then attempt to spiritualize and aggrandize this popular concept of love, making it the basis of our Christianity. We attempt to impose on God, our concept and understanding of love. And so we are totally confused equating God’s love with our carnal love. We don’t love unconditionally and we don’t do hesed either! When God calls us to love one another and John is saying that loving God is equal to loving one another it is very important that we have the right understanding of love and what love is. When we are called to love one another that is not a call to have some kind of emotional feeling for people. Love, as the Bible defines it, is choosing the best for another person regardless of the cost to you. Again love is something you do not something you feel. So it really doesn’t matter how you feel about someone. What matters to God is how you treat and relate to the other person. So, you may not like someone and still love him or her. You may be at odds with someone and still love that person(s). You may not agree with their lifestyle and still love them.
That is why God can love sinners and still send them to hell. That is why we can say to those who live the homosexual lifestyle: you are wrong but we still love you. The world can’t handle this kind of love because they don’t understand and know that kind of love. It is foreign to them. So they conclude that we are to love everyone ergo in order to love them, we accept how they live. Again this is imposing our concept and understanding of love upon God. Isn’t it precisely because you love your kids that you tell them, “Don’t play with matches” and “Look both ways before you cross the street?” Isn’t it because you love your kids and grandkids that you tell them, “Don’t drink” and “Don’t smoke pot or snort cocaine?” Love and acceptance is not the same thing, although that is what we are told time and time again by social humanists, which by the way is a pagan worldview and not a Christian worldview.
Love is not primarily an emotional feeling. Love is an action word. Love is doing. If it were based on feeling God would have never sent Jesus into our world. He would have destroyed us all from his anger because of our disobedience and sin, but even in His anger, God did the loving thing and sent Jesus to deliver from the penalty and power of sin. He sent Jesus to give His own life so that sin’s hold on us might be broken and we could be free.
And this is why Jesus told us to love our enemy and to do good those who persecute you. Most of us don’t have particularly fond feelings for our enemies be they Al Quada or the next-door neighbor or our boss. But love is not fond feelings. Love is the doing of kind and affirming acts, and of doing the ‘right’ thing. Love is obeying God’s will even when you don’t feel like it. Let me repeat: love is choosing the best for another person regardless of the cost to you.
That is why love is so critical, and that is why love has everything to do with it. At its core love is not some second hand emotion. Love is not some tingling feeling that runs up and down your spine. Love is not, as Tina Turner croons, some “old fashioned notion.”
Love is at the core of the universe. Love is in the air and is in all that God has created. Love is at the heart of our Triune God. Love is at the heart of the cross of Jesus at Calvary. That is why John writes (1 Jn 4:10), “In this is love, that God loved us and sent His son.” Love is at the heart of God’s pursuit of you. Love is at the heart of our relationship to one another. God gives Himself totally to us. That is love.
The only way we can love one another is to allow God’s love to flow freely to us and through us. But here’s the rub: you cannot love people in your own strength and by our human love. It is impossible to do hesed and to love unconditionally with agape love. It is only as you experience God’s love flowing in and through you can you love people as God loves them.
“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear…. We love him because He first loved us.” (1 John 4: 18,19)
What’s love got to do with it? Everything!