So Let's Define This "Love" Thing.

Up until fairly recently, I was pretty closely involved in local church that I liked pretty well.  As time passed I began to suspect that I had issues with some of their ideology, but I hung on because I was very deeply invested in one of their small groups, a group aimed specifically at mothers.  This particular church had a bit of an odd small group set-up, the individual groups are done in "semesters" of about 4 months, and at the end of those 4 months, all the small groups take a break and people are invited to sign up for the next round, or semester.  The group I was involved in had a core group of 5 or 6 moms that signed up each semester, and then a smattering of others who came and went over the course of 2 or 3 years.  I invested myself more deeply into that moms' group than I had ever invested in any other group or relationship, outside of my marriage, and the women in it I considered true friends and sisters, and I was more truly vulnerable with them that I have ever been with anyone in my life.  We pushed each other, challenged each other, held each accountable, wept together, prayed ardently for each other, and when the "semesters" would end, we would continue to meet together "unsanctioned," because we were invested in each other, we loved each other, and  we shared fellowship on a level that is sorely missing from today's Church.  It was real.  And I miss it desperately.  With every fiber of my being I miss it.

My relationship with that group slowly started to unravel as my issues with the larger group's ideology started to become more pressing than I could ignore, and I started to raise questions in the smaller group setting.  And on one very specific occasion, I got into a (perfectly civil, though rather tense) disagreement with one of the group's leaders about the encouragement/admonishment precept, and the definition of Biblical love.

I had recently had a not-quite-as-civil FB debate with someone about the idea of Biblical hate (Romans 12:9), and I was sharing with the group where I was struggling with self-doubt, specifically in the area of having a gentle spirit (1 Peter 3:3-4).  I have of course done a lot more research and hard study on this idea since then, but at the time it was a fresh and painful struggle.   This leader suggested that I "fast love," for 40 days, and by this I /believe/ she was saying to only "love" people for 40 days.  But as I considered admonishing to be one way to truly love other Believers,  I said: "Yes, but (as this debate had been going on for some minutes by this time), what do you mean when you say 'love?'" and she replied, "Radical acceptance."  At this point the other leader politely interrupted us and steered the conversation in another direction, as it was decidedly tense, and causing tension, even when that tension is the bi-product of an ardent pursuit of truth,  is generally frowned upon.  But that was the moment when I knew that I was probably going to lose the rich and rewarding and hard-fought, hard-won relationship with this small group of believing women that I so cherished. A meeting with these same women leaders some months later to discuss some of my issues led to my family choosing to finally leave the church, and while my heart was still fully vested in that moms' group, it was made clear that continuing to participate wasn't going to be an option.  And in the end, I lost almost every relationship I had built during my time with that group.  And all over this crazy little thing called love.

Because the thing is, friends, it really IS all about love. The problem is, we've allowed the climate of our culture and the pursuit of cultural relevance to diminish, dilute, and cloud what the Bible is saying, what God's intent for us is, when He uses the word "love." I hear a LOT about "loving on" people and the local community being the highest good, which as far as I can tell means being very pleasant and inviting and friendly and accepting and throwing large social events, but as I was researching for this blog, it became more and more apparent that that is not at all what Jesus was talking about when He used the word love.  So .....if it really is all about love, it seems paramount that we effectively define the term.

Now, I am by no means a scholar, but I was raised by one, and I went to a Christian college where I picked up a little knowledge here and there.  I took a particularly tough course my junior year called Bible Study Methods, and while it it made me crazy and ate up all my evenings and weekends and cost me sleep, it did give me the basic tools to do some deeper digging when I find that I want to more fully understand a Biblical passage or idea.  So bear with me for a second, while we get scholarly.

There are 4 different types of love in the Greek language, and, extremely simplified, they are romantic/sensual love (eros), brotherly love (philia), familial love (storge), and divine love (agape). Generally speaking, there's not a lot of debate or confusion about the first three, so we are going to focus on the fourth, Agape.
Vine's Expository Dictionary tells us this:

"Christian love, whether exercised toward the brethren, or toward men generally, is not an impulse from the feelings, it does not always run with the natural inclinations, nor does it spend itself only upon those for whom some affinity is discovered. Love seeks the welfare of all (Romans 15:2) and works no ill to any (Romans 13:8-10); love seeks opportunity to do good to all men, and especially toward them that are of the household of the faith (Galatians 6:10,  1 Cor. 13,  Colossians 3:12,  Colossians 3:14). Christian love has God for its primary object, and expresses itself first of all in implicit obedience to His commandments (John 14:15, John 14:21, John 14:23; John 15:10; 1 John 2:5; 1 John 5:3; 2 John 1:6). Self-will, that is, self-pleasing, is the negation of love to God."

So there are a few ideas here that I want to focus on. First, agape love is entirely counterintuitive to humans, it's sacrificial, selfless, and unconditional; it's bestowed upon another with complete disregard to the merit or worth of that person. By that I mean, it has nothing to do with feelings, you don't love someone because he is lovable or deserves love or has any way made himself worthy of that love.  You  love him because you choose to love him. It's a deliberate choice that has nothing to do with the worthiness or "lovability" of the loved.  And this sort of love cannot be achieved without knowing Jesus.  It is a divine love that emanates directly from His nature and cannot be experienced or facilitated in any way other than through a relationship with the Living God.  

Second, the Bible makes it excruciatingly clear that the lynchpin of this divine love is obedience. I mean, really, there's no way for it to made any clearer, and it comes straight out of the mouth of walking, talking Jesus at least four times in the NT. In John 14:15, He says, “If you love me, keep my commands," and goes on to repeat that basic idea several more times.  He makes it VERY clear, there's no way around it: obedience = love.You might want to sit with that one for awhile before we move on. 


Third, in order to keep His commands, we have to know them!!  It seems that there should be a Duh Factor here, but there are so many people that believe that a relationship with Jesus is mostly a spiritual experience, and almost entirely ignore the practical application side of it.  There is, indeed, a moment of spiritual conversion, the moment that the Spirit descends on and indwells a person, and that person becomes a new creation.  And it's at moment that we truly experience God's love  for the first time.  But then what comes after that?  Now it's our turn, to follow the greatest commandments: love God and love one another (Matthew 22:36-40).  And since we know that love of God = obedience to God, the next step is to learn the basic standards of living that God calls His people to adhere to, ie: His commands.  Lucky for us, our loving God had pretty much everything we need to know written down and compiled into a single volume for us, easily accessible to most of us and ready to be studied at any time.  All we have to do is take the time and make it a priority.  The fact of the matter is, we CANNOT effectively love God or each other if we don't prioritize studying His Word.  Period.

Fourth, one of the reasons that love equals obedience is simply that God deserves our obedience; He is owed complete and unquestioning conformity to His will and implicit submission to His lordship in our lives. But there's also a practical side to it: His commands have everything to do with how we should live and how we should treat each other.  If we are stealing, we are hurting whoever we steal from.  If we are sleeping around, we are taking what doesn't belong to us and defiling the bodies of others. Cheating, slandering, lying,  - all of these things God tells us NOT to do, and all of these things hurt our neighbors. It's all very basic: practically applying God's commands to our lives (ie: obeying) causes us to treat others with true divine love by default.

Fifth, nowhere in the Bible or in my other studies have I been able to find a time when agape love is synonymous with radical acceptance.  In fact, by its very nature, the "radical acceptance" paradigm seems to invite complacency and self-will.  I myself feel like it would be immensely easier for me to get stuck in the quagmire of my own sin if I knew that the people around me were far more likely to pat me on the shoulder and say, "Everyone struggles, we love you regardless, take your time on your journey," than, "Whoa hold up, you are messing up bad here we love you too much to just let it go."  Admonishment IS indeed a tool to be used to more effectively love other! I can't find anywhere in my study that tells us to "radically accept" other believers who are willfully sinning, but I can find a dozen places where it says to admonish them and hold them accountable.  Because radically accepting their sin is just allowing them to travel a path of self-destruction outside of God's will, and therefore outside of His love, wherein admonishing them to obey God's commands shows them true love and in turn pushes them to better love God and others.  Round and round it goes!!

This topic is huge, I probably should've called  this "Part 1," and not tried to tackle it all in one day.  There is no way I have done it justice today, and no way that I have covered or adequately defined every aspect of divine love, but I have learned the basics of what I was trying to learn and shared what I was hoping to share, I think.  I would recommend reading everything that Vine's has to say about agape, and I also found these two links (this one defining the terminology of 1 Corinthians 13, and this one about admonishing one another in love) to be very insightful.  And as always, I encourage you to click on all the Bible links and get into the Word for yourselves, and if you have any questions, comments, or disagreements, please do leave a comment!  There's nothing I want to see more that truth ardently pursued and Christ's mind revealed, and I will always do everything I can to facilitate that.