Unhuman Love.

My wife and I were talking a bit ago about how twisted the concept of love - particularly God's agape love - has become. Under the influence of the World, pressing constantly upon the Church as it does, believers have adopted the idea that Christian love is uncritically tolerant, all-embracing, without defined borders or structure, forsaking all judgment and ultimately reflecting the character of an individual's heart rather than an objective reality originating in God. As a result, the Church has received into its midst aggressively corrupting influences that have rendered the Church (in the West, at least) largely impotent, resorting to entertainment (aka "Worship Services") or pagan thought and practice (ala Benny Hinn, Todd White, Beth Moore, etc.) to cover its growing power-deficit spiritually.

There are a number of converging points in the matter of godly love that supply a well-rounded, biblical conception of Christian agape love that have gotten...fuzzy, reworked under a relativistic and moralistic thought-current within the Church. Following are some thoughts that might help clarify and correct modern misconceptions about agape love.

"Love is patient and kind."

For folks who are passive, naturally inclined away from conflict, who are disposed by personality toward pleasing and accommodating others, this sounds like an excellent start to the definition of godly love. To them, this sounds like a license to do what comes naturally to them: embrace everything; never criticize another; always hug, never hurt; be nice.

There's nothing wrong, of course, with this sort of thinking - so long as it is tempered by a complete, biblical conception of God's love. Hugging is a very good thing; accepting others despite their "claws," and "horns," and "teeth," showing them patience and kindness when they are ugly and mean, is good and right (Ephesians 4:32; 2 Timothy 2:24-25). As a default setting, you can't generally go wrong with patience and kindness.

But, then, we see Jesus, the kindest and most patient of all, over-turning the tables of the money-lenders and pigeon-sellers, chasing them from the temple (Mark 11:15-17); we read of Jesus confronting the Pharisees with some very sharp language, calling them "hypocrites," and "the brood of vipers" and "sons of hell" (Matthew 23:15, 27, 33); Jesus even snaps a bit at Peter, saying to him, "Get behind me, Satan." (Matthew 16:23) Whoa! What happened to being patient and kind? Jesus isn't being very nice!

The more tough-minded believers want to use these occasions to deflate entirely the idea that love is patient and kind. Jesus was a hard, in-your-face dude, so enough with the milquetoast niceness stuff! But just like the more retiring, gentle, passive believer, these more A-type believers are trying to conform Jesus to their own preferences and personality rather than the other way 'round, making Jesus just a reflection of who they are.

This is the problem, really. We stop at the parts of agape love that suit us best, camping on them and exaggerating them out of all proportion, at the same time reducing and confining the other aspects of God's love that we don't much like. We do this, of course, because we are coming to God's truth out from under the control of the Spirit who would bring us to a more balanced, biblical understanding if we would put ourselves under his will and way.

"Love does not envy or boast."

This seems a strange sort of observation - mainly because it seems very obvious. I don't know of anyone, saved or not, who thinks a boastful and envious person is a particularly loving one. These things appear very plainly to be contradictory to love. Perhaps, though, what Paul is doing in this part of the description he gives of agape love isn't clarifying the nature of this sort of love so much as letting the envious and boastful believers know they are fundamentally out of alignment with God (who is Love). Paul is saying, "Stop kidding yourself. If you're a boastful, envious person, you ain't a loving person."

Boasting and envy arise from Self, from the old, fleshly, self-centered, Adam nature that was in control of us before we were saved, not from God. Boasting and envy reveal that God has not yet been enthroned in the believer's heart. Until He is, the humble, self-sacrificing love He has shed abroad in the believer's heart in the Person of the Holy Spirit (Romans 5:5), remains stifled, prevented from filling, and overflowing from, the life of the child of God.

"Love is not arrogant, or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful."

Again, even non-believers see that this is so. Generally, people - saved or not - don't confuse arrogance, rudeness, selfishness and irritability for love. This bit from Paul, then, isn't so much, I think, about enlightening his readers about the nature of love, but reminding them that such behaviour is completely incongruous with the claim to be a child of the God who is love. (1 John 4:8, 16)

"Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth."

Paul here contrasts truth with wrongdoing. Interesting, eh? One of the implications in this being that wrongdoing is fundamentally against and apart from the truth. The essential character of wrongdoing, of sin, is falsity, deception, a departure from what is true. And love - godly love - does not ever rejoice in such a thing; agape love does not celebrate sin - even when the culture does. Pre-marital sex, adultery, homosexuality, gender confusion, the I-am-my-own-god current of modern thinking, these kinds of wrongdoing (and the myriad other ones, too) are anathema to godly love, however much the World promotes them.

At the heart of every sin stands a devastating lie, a falsehood, that God promises will give birth always to DEATH. (Romans 6:23; Galatians 6:7-8; James 1:13-15) To tolerate sin, then, to turn a blind eye to it, or worse, to encourage and celebrate it, is to foster death in the sinner. How is there love in doing so? There isn't. And can't be!

God's love is inextricably bound up with truth; agape love is always according to truth - even the truth that judges and condemns the lies and sin we have come to practice and adore. There is no real agape love that diverges from the truth, that is, from God's truth. (1 John 3:18) This is because God is Truth (Exodus 34:6; Deuteronomy 32:4; Psalm 31:5; Isaiah 65:16; John 14:6; John 14:17, etc.) Out of God arises everything we know to be real and true. As Christian philosophers have said, God is the "Ground of All Reality." To deny Him and His truth, then, is to deny reality. This is exactly what is evident - within and without the Church - as a departure from God leads to greater and greater delusion and societal dissolution in western cultures.

God's love, then, confronts and rebukes falsehood and the sin it produces - not for self-righteous reasons - but because those lies and sin lead to death and keep us from richly enjoying our Heavenly Father. Any believer, then, who proposes to love blindly, uncritically, without attendance to God's moral truth, accepting sin in order to accept the sinner, is not showing godly love, but, I believe, hatred. What can one call the conduct of a person who knows the terrible danger toward which another is moving but who encourages them toward it?

More to follow later.

I can't think of a better example of what Paul wrote here than Christ's life described to us in the Gospels. Humbling himself, Jesus "emptied himself" of his heavenly power and glory and "took upon himself the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men" (Philippians 2:5-8). Though the world was made by him, all the life in it formed and sustained by his power (Colossians 1:15-17), Jesus "came unto his own but his own received him not" (John 1:11).

Right from the start, people were trying to kill him. Herod killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of babies, trying to wipe Jesus out. Though Christ escaped the murderous hands of this evil ruler, death was always the ultimate goal of Christ's time on earth. He was the "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29), in love, bearing the sin of wicked humanity, enduring the terrible suffering of the cross in fulfillment of his Father's will.


This old hymn has always struck me very powerfully - especially the chorus: "He could have called ten thousand angels." The restraint, the enormity of will, the incredible depth of Christ's love, first for his Father, and then for you and me, well, it staggers the mind. But it is this love, I believe, that Paul had in mind as he wrote 1 Corinthians 13:4-7.

None of us in our own human resources can love like this. Oh, we might sacrifice ourselves for a loved one, for someone we knew loved us also, but who would die for the sake of an enemy, for someone who had treated us awfully and we knew wanted us dead? But this is agape love, the love God calls all of His children to express to each other and to the dark and dying world around them.

Romans 5:6-10
6 For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet perhaps for a good man some would even dare to die.
8 But God commends his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
9 Much more then, being now justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath through him.
10 For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.

1 John 4:9-11
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

We can only ever love this way as God fills us with Himself, with His Spirit of love (Romans 5:5), who indwells all born-again people, and through us pours His love out into the lives of those around us. This happens, though, only as we get out of God's way, as we humbly present ourselves to Him as living sacrifices, just as our Saviour did. (Romans 6:13; Romans 12:1) God will not force us into the role of a "vessel sanctified and meet for the Master's use" (2 Timothy 2:21). We must consciously, all day every day, live in submission to His will and way. As we do, the impossible, supernatural love of Christ fills and flows from us into a World desperately in need of it.

Will you, then, "present your body a living sacrifice unto God"? Will you, filled by God's supernatural love, "bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things"? I hope and pray so. To live this way is, actually, to live the normal Christian life.

More to follow later.

I John 2:17 said:

Of course in 1 Corinthians 5 he lists off a bunch of sins and says don't even eat with a fellow church member who's like this. So, presumably his whole discourse on love later in the book has to be read in that light.

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Both passages are read in the light of each other. It is the "love" of the World that loves indiscriminately, without judging right from wrong, good from evil, accepting all uncritically. God doesn't love this way. God hates sin. It corrupts, it deceives, it destroys and God will have no fellowship with it. And so, we read in Scripture:

Psalm 66:18
18 If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me:

Isaiah 59:2
2 But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear.

1 Peter 3:12
12 For the eyes of the Lord are over the righteous, and his ears are open unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord is against them that do evil.

I John 2:17 said:

The problems is how do you discern what the truth is about another church member.

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Matthew 18:15-17 lays out the process believers are to follow with one another when problems between them arise. The process is intended to bring about understanding and reconciliation, not division.

I John 2:17 said:

How often are innocent people railroaded. Answer -- all the time.

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Do you have any concrete data bearing this out? Or is this just rhetorical hyperbole?

I John 2:17 said:

With no formal juridicial system existing in a church how do you discern the truth about someone.

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See above.

I John 2:17 said:

Will truth just be apparent via the inherent benevolence of the collective church members?

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No. Both the word of God and the Holy Spirit have crucial roles to play in how love and holiness are brought together in Church life.

I John 2:17 said:

The bottom line is, these ad hoc admonitions by Paul about love on the one hand, and on the other not associating with sinners in the church, do not in any sense constitute some sort of divine or even sufficient mechanism to engender the sort of church life he would like to see. Iow, I think we need to resist the temptation of viewing the content of his letters as "holy writ" or with an overly exalted sense of their value.

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Well, here you and I part company very sharply. Like the apostle Peter, I view Paul's letters as divinely-inspired Scripture (2 Peter 3:15-16), and as such universally-authoritative and binding upon all Christian believers.

I John 2:17 said:

The other thing is -- Paul contradicts himself as in Romans 14:4 where he says who are you to judge another man's servant. He's implying a whole range of topics in which there will be differing opinions in the church.

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Paul is expressly and specifically dealing with issues of conscience, not of divine command in this instance. And in this realm of conscience there is room for differences among believers - as Paul explained. Where, then, is Paul contradicting himself? Regarding divine commands, all must conform, but in matters of conscience unconstrained by divine command, there is liberty.

I John 2:17 said:

And even if a Church member goes and confronts another on his own (as per Christ's admonition in this regard) how likely would it be he would mischaracterize what the other guy did, or not have the whole story, etc. Then is he gonna go find some other church member to gossip about this guy to get him kicked out.

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Which is why it is so vital for the process of Matthew 18:15-17 to be followed, in tandem with prayer, the enlightening guidance of the Holy Spirit, and the holy standard of God's word which, among other things, enjoins believers to deal with each other with patience, kindness, grace and love. The writers of the NT are careful to point out that contentiousness, strife, jealousy, and so on are marks of the absence of God, of a lack of the Holy Spirit's control, over the hearts and interactions of believers (Titus 3:3-4, 10; James 3:14-15; Romans 1:28-32, etc.). If, then, such fractious conduct is occurring within the Body of Believers, it may be recognized for the carnal, sinful thing it is - and dealt with accordingly.

I John 2:17 said:

edit2: I think Christ said, "If your brother sins against you then go and show him his fault, and if he refuses to listen bring someone else along, and then if he still refuses to listen tell it to the Church and if he still refuses have him put out." Even this doesn't constitute a sufficient or equitable mechanism for justice. Where is the provision for the guy to mount a defense.

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??? Surely, you don't think this is a one-way street, do you? The idea of Matthew 18 is to bring understanding, to "clear the air" with face-to-face discussion, in godly love, believers working toward unity, not division. Any believer, then, who thinks they can just deliver a "you offended me" notice to another believer and demand an apology without further word does not understand Scripture.

I John 2:17 said:

And furthermore, Paul contradicts himself (again in 1 Corinthians) where he says, "Why not rather be wronged then take things before the church".

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1 Corinthians 6:4-7
4 So if you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church?
5 I say this to your shame. Can it be that there is no one among you wise enough to settle a dispute between the brothers,
6 but brother goes to law against brother, and that before unbelievers?
7 To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?

In context, Paul is decrying the Corinthians going outside of the Church, outside of the Body of Believers, to settle disputes among themselves. It is better, he says, that they just endure the wrong committed against them by a fellow believer than go beyond the Church with their disputes. Even to have arrived at such a pass is, Paul points out, a spiritual and moral defeat. He isn't, then, indicating that believers should not sort out their grievances with one another, but that they shouldn't do so under the ajudication of unbelievers, who have neither the advantage of the authoritative wisdom and standard of Scripture, nor the guidance and control of the indwelling Holy Spirit to aid them.

There is always so much one could say about each of the facets of agape love the apostle Paul laid out in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. It's impossible in my short posts to do an exhaustive treatment of each facet, and I recognize this. Instead, I'm just offering thoughts that come to mind in the moment I write on the passage. This last part of Paul's definition or description of agape love, short though it is, contains a great deal of truth. To get at all of the "meat" in Paul's description, though, you'll have to do some of your own "chewing" on it.

Anyway, the unfailing nature of agape love, God's love, seems to me both reassuring and defeating all at once. It greatly bolsters my confidence in my adoption into God's family to know His love for me never ends (or, in the KJV, "never fails"). He was not put off by the ugliness of my heart (Jeremiah 17:9), by my sin-cursed condition (Ephesians 2:1-9; Titus 3:3-5). No, He endured the snapping, snarling wickedness of my natural unregenerate condition and said to me, "Taste and see that I am good." And having become one of His, when I stray, He pursues and disciplines (Hebrews 12:5-11), when my ugliness surfaces, He forgives and transforms (1 John 1:9; Galatians 5:22-23), when I stumble and fall, He lifts me up, dusts me off and says to me, "Continue on. The prize of the upward call in Christ Jesus awaits you." (Philippians 3:12-14) Wow.

It's so easy, though, to understand God's love through a human lens, seeing His love through the lesser, corrupt, human "love" I possess naturally as an unregenerate creature. But such love cannot be said to "never end," never to fail. Human love is fundamentally contingent: If you love me, then I'll love you. But God extends His love to us in Christ while we are His enemies. And though rebuffed again and again, He continues to offer us His love until we pass into eternity. Amazing. That's a love we can trust, that we can depend on.

But, it's also a love I don't have within myself naturally. Called by God to this sort of unfailing, unending love, I find myself quickly at the place where His call exceeds my ability to fulfill it - in my own strength: Someone cuts me off in traffic; someone treats me disrespectfully; someone takes advantage of me: someone accuses me unfairly; someone gossips about me to others; someone rebuffs my overtures of friendship; someone ignores the sacrifices I've made on their behalf - these (and a multitude of other instances besides) are all it takes for me to arrive at the end of my own love, resorting to bitterness, resentment, isolation and anger instead. God's love exposes my human weakness, the tenuousness of my natural human love, forcing me to acknowledge its frailty and selfishness.

This is, of course, what God intends. It is only when I find myself at the end of my own resources that I begin to look seriously for how to access God's resources. My approach at one time was to say to God, "Gimme some of your love." I thought He'd dole out a packet of divine love to me, enough to get me through the situation in which I needed it. I'd find my heart warm, full of unassailable affection for my enemies, when God answered my prayer. This didn't happen, though. Nothing happened, actually.

I didn't understand, you see, that God IS love (1 John 4:8, 16), He is Himself the love He would give to me. To ask for more of God's love is to ask for more of Him, for a greater filling of myself with Him. But all I wanted was a bit of His love for the moment. I wanted a feeling of love, in particular, a sudden, overwhelming "warm fuzzy," instead of the anger and resentment I was naturally feeling. To be filled with God requires a wholesale giving over of myself to Him, entire submission of my life to Him all the time, but there were lots of points of compromise in my life that I didn't want to give up. I wanted to obey God and love as He loved me in this one instance but I didn't want to yield up every corner of my life to Him.

God doesn't fill me with His love, however, with Himself, until I willingly submit to His wholesale control of me. His unending love is mine to express to others only as I am fully His. This is so because God intends to express Himself through me, not place Himself under my control to be expressed as I see fit. I am His vessel of communication, not the other way 'round.

In a sense, then, it is only in defeat that I begin to enter in to victory; only when I am totally at the end of my own love will I begin to wrestle with these truths and enter into them. But when I do, God's unending love - God Himself, really - is not only mine to enjoy but flows out my life into the lives of those around me powerfully and consistently.

There's a lot of "meat" in Paul's divinely-inspired words, eh? Chew away!