Love, Love, Love, but What is Love?

In American Christianity today, you can find a common theme across nearly every church and Bible study, and that is the theme of love. Love has become central to the message and culture of Christianity over the past several decades. After all, love wins, and we are to have crazy love. However, with all of this talk about love, I have noticed that love rarely gets defined, and it generally gets diluted into a mush of meaning.

Love, when undefined, can be quite a dangerous proposition, as feelings are inconsistent and untethered. If love is a feeling alone, then the rule of love becomes the harshest tyrant to deal with, as feelings ebb and flow with circumstances, and circumstances can—and often do—change on a dime. Love certainly cannot be defined as a feeling by itself when it comes to the Christian context, especially when we consider Christ’s command for us to love God and to love our neighbor. Love must be tethered to something in order for us to have stability in our lives and in our actions towards others.

Feelings fall short both in tethering the bounds of love and in granting love a consistent effect. It is vital that love has tethered bounds, or we may love someone to a place of self-destruction. Think of the drug addict; if we love them, we cannot give in to their feelings and enable them to continue to get more drugs. If we give in to their feelings or let our feelings of compassion rule us, their life ultimately continues on the path of destruction, and we can in no way say we were being loving towards our neighbor. If we allow feelings to define love, we also run into the potential problem of being inconsistent. Even the most compassionate person on this earth will grow weary in their feelings at times towards people and not feel like being loving.

Fortunately for us, the Bible doesn’t define love as a feeling, nor does it leave love undefined in terms of the boundaries of love. Love is a choice and an action. Sometimes you may not feel like loving your neighbor, but through discipline, you can choose to love your neighbor and take the right action towards them. In our romanticized world, it may seem peculiar to say that love requires discipline and choice of action more than it requires spontaneity and feelings, but it is true. Consider how God chose to love us and took action towards us in the famous words of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”

God also defines the bounds of our love in 2 John 1:6: “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it.” Did you catch that? Love is inside of God’s commandments, and we need to take deliberate action and walk inside those commands in order to be loving towards our neighbor.

Here are some more passages to build on this truth:

John 14:15: “If you love Me, keep My commandments.”

John 14:21: “He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”

1 John 5:2-3: “By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep His commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome.”

Love, in many ways, is a worthy topic for Christians to consider and give their attention to, but we must make sure we understand what the Bible means by love. Biblical love is always in connection with the commands of God, and this means that it is always opposed to sin. We cannot love others while we are simultaneously supporting or encouraging someone to sin. Our love must be defined by the commands of God. This often means that to show real love, we have to partake in difficult conversations that require us to tell others they are wrong and need to stop what they are doing and turn to Christ.

Real love takes real actions to obey and establish the commands of God in our lives. Choose to love God and love your neighbor today by obeying the commands of God. This will be a crazy love in our day, and it will ensure that love actually wins.