Note: This is not intended to be a theological exposition. It’s just some thoughts I’ve had as I learn and grow as a Christian.
I’ve heard churches and pastors talking about loving others my whole life. I’ve read all the passages in the Bible about God calling us to love others. However, despite close to two decades of church and Bible teaching, I still did not understand what loving others should actually look like.
When I think about it, all I can really remember learning is that God wants us to love people like he does, so we should do good things for each other and speak truth in love. Maybe I missed some teaching along the way, but the more I’ve been exposed to the American church the more I’ve realized that we have a poor understanding of what loving like God actually means.
There seems to be two schools of thought: the first is the idea that love is acceptance and tolerance, an emotional feeling that includes everyone and excludes any kind of confrontation or judgment. This understanding of love means taking people as they are and never trying to change them. The other perspective on love has a focus on truth and action. I’ve been told that love is a verb and can be boiled down to acts of service or kindness. Additionally, people who ascribe to this thought emphasis the need for truth and accountability, to call one another out when we see sin and “speak the truth in love.”
I’ve heard some attempts to find a middle ground between these two definitions. For example, for someone who is struggling with a particular sin, people say to love and accept the person and hate the sin.
There is some truth in all of these ways of understanding love, but none of them contain a whole picture and there are several problematic parts to each of them. If we are going to love like God, then we need to understand how God loves us.
Love is relational.
Relationship is the entire point of believing in God. It’s the whole story of the Bible. In the garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve sinned, their relationship with God was broken. The entire journey of the gospel after that is God restoring our relationship with him. This theme is in every interaction between God and Israel, every biblical character’s story, every explanation of the gospel. And the foundation of this relationship is love, the whole reason Jesus went to the cross.
Romans 5:8 says, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
If love is relational, that also means that it is messy, like relationships are messy. The biggest flaw of the two most popular understandings of love is that they are black and white absolutes, with no room for broken people in broken relationships trying to navigate a broken world. A total tolerance policy doesn’t allow for much needed growth and speaking truth in love without considering feelings and situations can do incredible harm. Love does not mean the same solution for every scenario and every person. Relationships don’t work like that and people don’t work like that.
Love means knowing when to listen, when to encourage, when to gently confront, when to offer solutions, and when to stay silent. Love means knowing how to agree to disagree, and how to admit when we’ve been wrong.
There is no way to list all the ways love should/can look, because it isn’t quantifiable like that. The best way I’ve found to understand love is read the Bible and really look at the way God interacts with people, especially in the New Testament. Look at the whole story, not isolated incidents, and don’t be distracted by theological points or confusing doctrine. Just look at him and people. It was revolutionary to me.
Aside from our poor understanding of love, the other major issue is that we don’t give love the importance God puts on it. Over and over, Jesus tells us to love one another. He even calls it the second greatest commandment out of all the commandments God gave to Israel. And if that isn’t enough for us to get the point, Paul gave us 1 Corinthians 13. I believe that this passage has become so familiar to us that we’ve lost the gravity of its meaning. It’s become cliché, written on cards and spoken at weddings, turning it into a good-feeling verse. These are not bad things, but we’ve become immune to the powerful statement that it is.
In this passage, God says love is the most important thing in our lives. God says that all our Bible and theology knowledge, our faith to perform miracles, our charity to the poor is worth nothing if we don’t love. In effect, God says that everything we do in our lives should be informed by love. That is the importance God places on love, and so often we, myself included, do not uphold it.
Love is a complicated topic because it isn’t quantifiable, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand. There is no way I can address everything there is to say here, though I may revisit this topic in the future as I myself learn. I just hope this blog may introduce you to the broader picture of love and spark an interest in exploring it further.