Love. There’s an important word that has become so overused and distorted that it’s become almost meaningless. Today love can mean anything. Indeed, the cliché “Love is Love” is about as meaningless a statement as there can be, for if love can mean anything, then love has lost its meaning altogether.
Love does have meaning in the Holy Scriptures. In fact, the Greek language of the New Testament often uses different words to highlight different aspects of love: eros (romantic love; the love between a husband and wife), philia (brotherly love; the shared love among people), storge (familial love; the love between parents and children), and agape(unconditional love; the love God has for all people, and the love to which His people are called). Each of these words reflects a distinct and meaningful aspect of love. I suppose the challenge for us English speakers is that English has only one word for love.
When I was a young boy in elementary school, I remember kids struggling to clarify the meaning of the word like, which is related to love: “Do you like Suzie? Or do you LIKE like Suzie?” I assure you, there was a HUGE difference between those two usages of the word “like.”
Love originates in God, who is love (agape) (1 John 4:8). We cannot truly love others if we do not first receive and return love for God, who is love. This truth is encapsulated in the First Commandment: “You shall have no other gods.” In his Small Catechism, Martin Luther explains the First Commandment this way: “We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things.” Moreover, we can only give to others what we first have ourselves. Before we can love others, we must first have God’s love. The result is that when we love others, we love them with God’s love, the very same love we have received from Him. The same is true with other gifts of our Lord: when we give to others, we give of the Lord’s gifts; when we forgive others, we forgive with the Lord’s forgiveness.
True love, love that comes from God, will never go against His Commandments. God’s commandments are not arbitrary restrictions, but gifts given for our good and for the protection of our neighbor. It is not loving to bless what the Lord has not blessed, to call good what the Lord has called evil, or to call evil what the Lord has said to be good. Love seeks the true good of the other, not merely what feels kind in the moment.
Of course, God’s love is ultimately not an emotion or merely a relationship; God’s love is a person, the Son of God, Jesus Christ. Jesus taught that we are to love God above all things and to love our neighbor as ourselves. He even taught that we are to love our enemies. Why? Because God has loved all people in Jesus. Yet Jesus did not command us to imitate our enemies or to bless and affirm deeds that are contrary to His Father’s will. Quite the opposite: in love, Jesus called sinners to repentance and told them, “Go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). It is not loving to fail to warn those whose deeds are harmful to themselves and to others.
St. Paul wrote extensively about love, saying: “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4–8).
The love St. Paul describes is the love that God is, the love He has shown to us in Jesus, and the love we are called to show to one another.
Here is the bottom line on love: “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another… We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:9–11, 19).
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