This Is Love
August 12, 2008 – 10:52 pmHow do you define “love”?
First John 4:9 warns us NOT to try to define it based on ourselves: “not that we have loved God but that he loved us.” We do love God and love people, but the Bible says that we can’t use our meager loving to define love. We are to use God’s love for us and God’s love for himself.
The Ben Hutton paraphrase of 1 John 4:9-10: “This is the most loving thing ever, and should be an example of how to love: a Father sent his Son on a mission to die, and as part of that death, the Father punished the Son for the sin of many people by pouring out his righteous fury on him.”
God’s chief example of love involved wrath and death. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t comfortable. But it was glorious. The objective fact was that God’s actions were loving.
Too often we rely on our subjective feelings to determine whether actions are loving. But often, we feel wrong. Just as our thoughts and our actions need to be sanctified, so do our feelings. And what is most loving might also be what is most painful, and not feel loving at all – especially in the short-term. Looking back, things are often different.
Back in the day, some of the guys in Crusade liked to throw the term “bricking” around. It consisted of speaking truth, in love, into each other’s lives. It often felt, at the moment, like you were getting hit with a brick. But that’s how it has to happen sometimes. Life is war.
First John 4:7 is startling: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.”
Love is distinctly Christian. Nonchristians “love” each other… but according to the Bible, not really. There must be something distinct about the Christian way of “loving” that makes it love. What makes it distinct is that Christian love is not about subjective feeling (though it often includes that), but about objective Fact.
One way to describe God’s love: “his commitment to do everything necessary (most painfully the death of his only Son) to enthrall us with what is most deeply and durably satisfying—namely, himself.”
It works the same for us – we love others by working to “enthrall them with what is most deeply and durably satisfying.” We love others by pointing them to that which is the greatest good and the greatest joy: God. We love others by making them happy in God! This is our goal with both Christians and nonchristians – that they would be know God.
Verse 7 says that love comes out of “knowing God”. To help others know God, we need to know him first. Love necessarily flows out of knowledge of God.
Verse 12 says, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” We make up for the fact that nobody has directly seen God’s face by loving them – showing them God!
Verse 10 says, “he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” The ultimate loving act was God doing what was necessary for us to be with Jesus forever in heaven. God gave us himself by taking our sin and punishment upon himself.
Why? So that we would know and enjoy God forever.
Does your definition of love match up? Are you really loving people? Christians? Nonchristians?
-Ben
One Response to “This Is Love”
Nice, now do a post sometime on what the bible means by truth. Should be good as well
By david on Aug 13, 2008