What is Biblical Love?

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Your understanding of the cross shapes how you see sin, salvation, and the hope we have in Jesus. Thanks to your support, we are offering this booklet for a donation of any amount. Visit solomedia.org slash offers to receive your copy today. Just last year, Oxford University Press published a book called Love a History. And it's sort of this philosophical examination of love, tracing how love as this idea has developed over time. There's a focus on the different religions of the world, psychology, philosophy.

It's really interesting and the book begins like this. Can love be understood philosophically? Ask someone in love and they're likely to say it can't be. Love every lover knows is something we feel in our hearts, not something we think in our heads. Reasoning about love thus will strike some as missing the point. Anyone who has been in love knows very well that love's vastness and intensity resist analysis. So the funny thing is after that statement, there are some 300 plus pages of analysis because as the writer goes on to say, love is just something that's so vast that you simply have to analyze it. And the fact of the matter is, depending on who you ask, you're going to get a different definition as to what love is. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, said that love is a seeking of complementarity by finding someone who represents one's ideal self. Probably sounds like gibberish to you.

It did to me when I first read it. But if you've ever heard the saying opposites attract, that's where this idea comes from. Complementarity is the thought that we're drawn to people who meet our personal and psychological needs. We're looking for that wholeness, that fulfillment. Other modern psychologists have described or defined love as a triangle that's made up of three ingredients. You have intimacy, passion, and commitment. If you look at the dictionary definition of love, oftentimes the focus is on a deep feeling or a deep affection. Others tend to emphasize the romantic nature of love or the romantic aspect of love.

Love is passion. One of the fascinating things about the book is as it traces the history and development of love, it notes that early on love oftentimes was considered this deep transcendent reality, rooted in something above and beyond us like God or a universal principle. But as society has become more and more secular over the years, people have stopped thinking about love as a transcendent reality and have focused on love's relationship to the immanent, the things we can see and touch with our hands, stuff. This development as it's happened from transcendent to immanent has put us in a really tough situation when it comes to defining love. We live in a world that is obsessed with talking about love.

We just don't want God to be a part of the conversation. And if, as the apostle John said, God is love, 1 John 4 verse 8, then to remove God from our definition of love is sort of like trying to define the taste of something without using words. This is why we're left with definitions today like love is love or love is a deep feeling or affection.

Surely we can do better than that. Well, there is one chapter of the Bible that's probably worth more than all of the books put together on love that are out there. It's 1 Corinthians chapter 13, the love chapter. It was written by Paul not as a philosophical examination, although it is very deep and not as a poem, although many have noted that 1 Corinthians 13 is really beautiful. It's why many people have it read at their wedding ceremony. No, 1 Corinthians chapter 13 actually was written as a rebuke to the church. This is tough love if ever there was such a thing, and it's given by the apostle Paul to the church at Corinth.

Here's what he said, 1 Corinthians chapter 13. If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

If I give away all that I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 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. As for prophecies, they will pass away. As for tongues, they will cease. As for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.

When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully even as I have been fully known. So now faith, hope, and love abide these three, but the greatest of these is love.

Now just to give you a little bit of context because that's important. The Corinthians were a church that was passionate about spiritual gifts. They were extremely gifted.

By spiritual gifts, I mean tongues and prophecy. This was something that they were zealous for in Corinth. The problem was they had a high degree of spiritual giftedness and a low degree of spiritual love. And so here in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, Paul is rebuking them. He's pointing out the fact that, look, you can have all of these gifts, all faith, all knowledge, all understanding, and yet if you don't have love, it's worthless. In one sense, and I think this is remarkable, Paul is subordinating the gifts of the Holy Spirit to the fruit of the Holy Spirit. If you have the gifts of tongues and prophecy and all of these manifestations of the Spirit, and yet the love of God is not being exhibited in the church, well, there's a real problem.

There's a real malfunction. In fact, he even goes further than that. It's not just having all of these gifts without love that is worthless. He says even the sacrifices, the great acts of service that you do as a Christian, whether it's giving to the poor or giving up your body to be burned, that martyrdom, done apart from love, devoid of love, profits you nothing. And here we're given a clue, our first clue as to what love is. Love is an action.

It does involve movement, but it's also a motivation, goodwill. It's possible to do externally good things apart from love. And Jesus and the apostles taught that that was a great problem. True love desires the good of the beloved. It doesn't do good in order to get something from someone, but it's an act of self-giving for the sake of the one who is loved. This is something that Jesus mentions in the Gospels in Matthew 6, verses 1 and 2. Remember he said, beware of practicing your righteousness before others in order to be seen by them, to be praised by them. The reality is that's not love.

It's not about serving them and honoring God. It's about making yourself great. So then we can say that love does involve feeling, a motivation even, but it isn't just feeling or motivation. Love is best defined by verbs. And in verses 4 through 7, Paul uses some 13 verbs to describe what love does and what love does not do. First he says that love is patient and kind.

Isn't that wild? We typically don't think of patience as a way to gauge whether or not I am a loving person, but if you're wondering, am I a loving person, you can ask yourself, am I patient? What is patience but long-suffering?

Bearing with those sometimes who are difficult to be alongside of, that's what patience is. Or we could also ask, am I kind or am I cruel? And not just kind to the people who are easy to be nice to, easy to be kind to our friends and the people who think just like us.

Am I kind to the people who test my patience? Now it's interesting that Paul begins with kindness and patience in his description of love, and it highlights for us the fact that for Paul, central to defining love was the action of God himself. If you think about a passage like Romans chapter 2, for example, where the apostle Paul is talking to people who are struggling with sin, he says to them this, Do you suppose, O man, you who judge those who practice evil and do it yourself, that you will escape the judgment of God? Do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

See, if God has been anything towards sinful humanity, it's patient and kind. But then Paul goes on to highlight what love doesn't do, and this is what's so fascinating. This is why I said 1 Corinthians chapter 13 is a rebuke, because as Paul is listing these things, you know, the things that love isn't, love doesn't do. Each of these things is something that earlier in the letter of 1 Corinthians, Paul had accused the Corinthians themselves of doing. So, for example, love does not envy or boast. In chapter 3 verse 3, Paul said to the Corinthians, There is envy and strife among you, or some translations put, there's jealousy and strife among you, but it's the same Greek word. In chapter 5 verse 6, he said to them, Your boasting is not good.

He goes on to say love is not arrogant or rude. In chapter 4 verse 18, Paul said, Some of you are arrogant, as though I were not coming to you. And then in chapter 5 verse 2, quite plainly, he says, You are arrogant. The word rude there is used in chapter 7 verse 36 to describe the treatment of virgins within the church.

It means to behave dishonorably or shamefully. Well, in chapter 11, Paul said that the conduct of some of the wives in Corinth was bringing shame upon their husbands. Just a little later in the same chapter, Paul talked about how the rich were bringing shame upon the poor because of their conduct during the Lord's Supper.

Actually, some of the rich were getting drunk during the celebration of Holy Communion. Love does not insist on its own way, is not irritable or resentful. If there was ever a group that insisted on its own way, a group of Christians that did this, it was the Corinthians. In chapter 10 verse 23, Paul told the Corinthians, Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor, precisely because the Corinthians were insisting on their own way at the expense of others, especially in the controversy related to meat sacrificed to idols. The word resentful in verse 5 translates to Greek words, which mean to calculate evil. Paul says love doesn't keep a list of other people's sins in order to bring it up whenever they make us mad, to crush them with it. But that's exactly what the Corinthians were doing.

Back in chapter 6, they were suing one another in pagan courts, essentially parading one another's sins before the watching world. Now hopefully you can see what the Apostle Paul is doing here. This isn't just a philosophical examination of love or a poem about love. No, he's extolling the goodness of love, while at the same time saying to a group of Christians, You guys are completely missing it. Love is not impatient or harsh. It's generous, it's content, it's modest, it's humble. It puts the needs of others first. It's not prickly, but pleasant, helping, rejoicing in the good of another, rejoicing in the good of your neighbor, lamenting over his suffering and his sin as though it were your own. It sticks with its commitments. It's full of hope in God.

True love, he says, is unassailable. That's what love is, and that is what we as Christians are called to. It's the fulfillment of God's holy law. That's what Jesus said. And so we should ask ourselves, Can this love be found in me?

How hard would one have to search in order to find it? You know, Paul said to the Romans in Romans 5, verse 5, Hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Here's the beautiful thing. In Jesus Christ, the transcendent love became imminent. He could be seen and touched by the hands of sinful men. And this love, this God, could have sued us for everything we had, taken our lives from us. But instead of keeping a record of our iniquities, he forgave all those who place their trust in him. If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

But with you there is forgiveness that you may be feared. Psalm 130, verses 3 and 4. There is no greater love or example of love than Jesus Christ. And if we've benefited from God's patience and kindness, if we've benefited from God's love, then we as God's people must be marked by love.

This is what made the situation in Corinth so tragic. Above everything else, Jesus said that his disciples are to be known for their love for one another. John, chapter 13, verse 35. Not the cheap and shallow love we sometimes get in modern worldly definitions, but the love of God in Christ Jesus. We'll never perfectly love God like Jesus did, at least not until we're in heaven. But we can't truly love God and at the same time hate one another. What is love?

John said it. God is love. And Paul said love looks like goodwill and sacrificial service after God's own example. We love because God first loved us. of Michael Horton's book, Ordinary, Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World. In an age marked by burnout and sensationalism, Horton shows us what it looks like to live a deeply normal, yet profoundly meaningful Christian life. To get your copy, simply head over to solarmedia.org slash partner to join us in encouraging even more people to grow in knowing God and seeing everything in His light.