Let’s Talk About What Love Does

 

If you do a search on this website for the term love, you will find numerous references both to the term and to whole articles regarding the subject of love. The third part of my book, Let’s Talk About Matters of this Life, is an entire section on the doctrine of love in the New Testament. It is also published in full on this website. (see)

An overview of my bio will give you a clue as to why this subject has been so important to me as a Christian. My experiences as a child growing up in foster homes and then being adopted into a family left me with one question that motivated me to want to understand love from God’s point of view. What is love? That is why I chose to do a thesis on the topic for my doctoral degree at Western Seminary.

One of my first counseling sessions as a pastor was with a couple who had driven over a hundred miles to receive marriage counseling from a Christian counselor. When the wife asked the counselor “What is love?” the counselor sat back in his chair and repeated the question over and over but failed to give a definition. All the way home, the wife kept asking “What is love?” “What is love?” “What is love?” When they arrived home, she packed her bags and moved out.

As a last resort, they came to me, a young and inexperienced pastor, and asked “What is love?” I gave them what I had learned from personal study up to that point. They went away with an answer, incomplete as it was, and as a Christian couple determined to practice what I showed them in the Scriptures.

When I returned to Western Seminary for my doctoral degree, one of my goals was to extend my understanding of biblical love. I did exhaustive research at the Rose Memorial library on the campus of Biola University, Talbot Seminary, and Rosemead School of Psychology in La Mirada, California. After reviewing the topic in detail, I decided to omit the well-known passage in 1 Corinthians 13 from my study. The reason for this is that I was looking for the New Testament definition of biblical love. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us what love does, not what it is.

When seeking to find a definition of a term, we need to ensure that we are observing all of the contexts where the term occurs and, from there, posit an accurate definition. The apostle Paul was not seeking to define love, but to explain what love does and does not do. The context in which we find this chapter is in a letter addressing multiple problems facing the congregation of believers in Corinth and the surrounding region of Achaia. The term he used is agape (the noun).

Agape is found sixteen times in this epistle, nine of these in the thirteenth chapter. It is couched in a triplicate of chapters on the misuse of spiritual gifts. It summarizes how the willful decisions we make every day affect our relationships positively or negatively. Agape, as I discovered in my research of the New Testament, is the term used for a willful choice to act one way or another depending on how we view the object of our attention and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Unlike the second term for love in the New Testament, philia, which is never commanded, every command to love is the verb, agapao.

Let’s examine what love does and does not do. First, agape supersedes prophecy, knowledge, and faith. In other words, there is nothing in life greater than to make choices based on what God has revealed in His Word to be the right choices.

Christians are constantly held to the world’s standard of love which is everchanging. But biblical love will never change whether coming from a teacher who claims to be a prophet or even an entity claiming to be a messenger from God.

Second, there are no circumstances that can arise that will change our need to make choices based on agape. We can feed the poor or seek to overcome the latest existential threat to human existence, but if the choice is not consistent with the Word of God, it is not profitable.

Notice the list of things Paul gives of what love does and does not do:

            Love is patient.

            Love is kind.

            Love is not jealous.

            Love does not call attention to itself.

            Love does not put oneself above others.

            Love does not act unbecomingly.

            Love does not seek its own.

            Love is not provoked.

            Love does not act on the bases of wrongs committed in the past.

            Love does not take joy in unrighteousness committed regardless of the reason, but only rejoices in the truth.

            Love bears all things.

            Love believes all things.

            Love endures all things.

In a simple and abiding statement, love does not let circumstances dictate how we act toward others. This was the opposite of how the Corinthian believers were treating each other and how we see so many professing Christians speaking and acting today.

In the final analysis, love, i.e. making choices, must be based upon what God determines is right, not man. Agape is what all creation is about. It is to choose to love God and to choose to love our neighbor as ourselves. Nothing will ever change this.

Throughout this letter to the Corinthian Church, Paul addresses behavior on the part of individuals in the church who were acting contrary to what was pleasing to God. Sometimes we are in circumstances that require us to act contrary to the way the world thinks we should act. In his letter to the Church in Rome, Paul exhorted the Church to “be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”[i] In another place he wrote, “…whatever is not of faith is sin.”[ii] Faith here does not refer to what we believe, but to the content of our faith, what God has revealed. In the next chapter, he wrote:

And concerning you, my brethren, I myself also am convinced that you yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all knowledge, and able also to admonish one another.[iii]

God has given us a roadmap for our Christian walk. That road is agape love. This is what we must do in every circumstance and toward others.

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[i] Rom 12:2.

[ii] Rom 14:23b.

[iii] Rom 15:14.