What is Love?

Today is February 12, do you know what that means? That means Valentine’s Day is just around the corner! Are you ready? With a newborn at home Katie and I aren’t planning on doing very much this Valentine’s day.

With a day meant to celebrate love coming in just a couple days I thought I’d take the opportunity to talk about love. But first we have to ask the question, what is love? Well if you google the definition of love you get simply “an intense feeling of deep affection.” If you watch movies and television you get the impression that love is this mysterious and overwhelming force that compells you to be with someone, even if they’re a terrible match for you and the forces of all of life and nature are trying to keep you apart. Yet just as you mysteriously “fall” into this emotion you can just as mysteriously “fall out” of love and suddenly it would be completely unfair and terrible of anyone to expect you to remain committed to the person that you moved heaven and earth to be with.

It’s just this sort of definition for love that leads people to excuse their poor decisions with phrases like “love is blind,” “we just don’t love each other anymore,” “I fell in love with someone else,” “I know he hurts me but I love him,” and “love is love.”

Are we satisfied with this definition of love? If this is how the world defines love, how does the Bible define it? As disciples of Jesus we want to learn from Him how best to live and what values to hold and so we turn to the Bible that He inspired to see what it has to tell us about love.

See the Bible has a lot to say about love, and what scripture about love is more famous than 1 Corinthians 13? You’ve probably heard it at nearly every wedding you’ve been to. Let’s refresh ourselves by reading 1 Corinthians 13

1 Corinthians 13 ESV

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 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.

Beautiful stuff, right? Well what if I told you that this chapter is one of the most misunderstood and misapplied chapters of all of Scripture? Partly because of how often it’s been used out of context in wedding ceremonies, this chapter often gets mixed up in ideas of romantic love and thought of as a beautiful description of the kinds of things that love inspires in mankind. This is nearly the opposite of what this chapter is saying.

That’s because when you take this chapter into context it’s actually Paul rebuking the members of the Corinthian church for not being loving. It was written by Paul around 55 AD to a church in a city called Corinth, and he wrote it in part because they had written him asking questions and in part to respond to rumours he’d heard about the church’s conduct. Throughout the letter Paul is addressing issues in the church and accuses them of not being patient or kind. Of being envious and boasting and being arrogant and rude and so on. So when Paul describes love here it isn’t just an eloquent reflection on the nature of love but a stinging contrast to the recent behaviour of the Corinthian church.

This chapter in particular is in the middle of Paul's discourse about the proper use of Spiritual Gifts in the church and serves to emphasize the importance of love over any gift. The Corinthians were using charity and spiritual gifts to enhance their own reputations in the church community rather than for the sake of loving God and their neighbors.

Now I’m not going to get into a whole thing about whether the spiritual gifts still operate today because I don’t think that’s relevant to this particular sermon. Maybe I’ll open that can of worms some other time. Yet it does help to understand what Paul is saying if you understand that he’s talking to the Corinthians about supernatural gifts given to them by the Holy Spirit such as prophecy, words given for edification and teaching to the church from God, and tongues, speaking in other languages that the speaker doesn’t know by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So this already sheds a whole new light on the chapter, but perhaps even more relevant to the discussion is the word “love.” See in English we just have the one word for love. I love my wife, I love my friends, I love pizza and God loves me. That’s all the same word. The New Testament however is written in Greek, and you may have heard before that in Greek there are four words for love. There’s “storgi” which means affectionate love and is the kind you have towards non-humans, like pets or favorite foods etc. “Eros” refers to romantic love and it’s where we get the word “erotic” from. “Phileo” means friendly or brotherly love and is where we get the name of the city “Philadelphia.” Finally the forth word is “agape” which was a rarely used word that Christians sort of adopted and used to describe the love of God. So in Greek I’d say that I “eros” my wife, I “phileo” my friends, I “storgi” pizza and God “apape”s me.

The word used throughout this chapter is the word “agape.” Paul was very fond of this word for love and used it frequently to express the sort of love that God has for us and that we should in turn have for God and for others. The word agape was not invented by Christians but it was rarely used before the New Testament, so they could be said to have adopted and popularized the concept.

The way that Christians decided to define this fourth kind of love is very different from the way the world defines love. When I say the world by the way I basically mean culture in general, in contrast to what the Bible and Christianity have to say. Christians decided to define love by the character of God and of Jesus.

Jesus is perfectly loving, and as disciples of Jesus we should strive to love the way that He love. So what does the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth have to teach us about love? It teaches us a lot about love and those things fall into three categories:

Love is Essential

Love is Active

Love is Eternal

1. Love is Essential

Now I want you to keep in mind that this chapter was not written in a vaccuum. It comes in the middle of along letter and is actually a sort of digression in the middle of a different discussion. Paul in Chapter 12 has just finished talking about the proper use of spiritual gifts in a Christian Church, namely that although different people have different gifts they shouldn’t view any one person as better than any other because of the gifts that they’ve been given, culminating in a call to unity in the body of Christ. He ends chapter 12 by saying that he will show the Corinthians (and by extension us) “a still more excellent way,” which is what we get in chapter 13. Then Chapter 14 resumes the discussion on spiritual gifts. So we read in 1 Cor 13:1-3

1 Corinthians 13:1–3 ESV

So if we look at this in context we see that Paul is actually rebuking the Corinthians here. He’s been talking about how the Corinthians are perverting these spiritual gifts in the previous chapters, especially speaking in tongues, and here he gives an exaggerated list of perfected versions of those spiritual gifts and calls them basically useless without love.

This is not to say that Paul is against those spiritual gifts, he says in verse 1 of chapter 14 that the corinthians church should “earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy.” This chapter is not to make less of spiritual gifts but to make more of love. Love is the chief Christian virtue and without it nothing else matters.

I mean, I think we’d all like to see more miracles in our church wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t we love to see people healed, lives changed and prophecies shared? But none of those things is what’s going to fix the church in North America. The most important thing of all is love.

And Paul doesn’t just list showy spiritual gifts, the discussion culminates in 1 Cor 13:3

1 Corinthians 13:3 ESV

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

You can give literally everything you have, even your own body, to giving ministry and it won’t mean anything if you don’t have love. In fact Paul goes so far to say that these things are not just nul but negative in the absence of love. If he does these things without love he becomes “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal” he becomes “nothing” he gains nothing.

And this rings true doesn’t it? If we expend all of the energy in the world to do amazing ministry in this church but we aren’t loving people than we only make matters worse. It would result in either increasing our reputation instead of Jesus’ reputation, or in people being turned off from the gospel entirely because of an experience they have of us.

So if love is so important, if everything we do here is meaningless without it than we better make sure we understand what this love is, right? So we talked about what love isn’t in the introduction to this sermon, so let’s look at what the Bible has to say about what love is.

2. Love is Active

So how does the Bible define “Love”? Well in place of a definition based on emotions and passions the definition Paul gives in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 gives us a definition based on 16 verbs. In other words the love that the Bible talks about is not based on feelings which are difficult to control and impossible to manufacture, but on actions, some we are called to do and some we are called to avoid. Let’s look at this list together, shall we? 1 Cor 13:4-7

1 Corinthians 13:4–7 ESV

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.

What a beautiful, challenging list. See the thing that happens when we think too much about this in the context of romantic love is we can get this subconscious idea that the feeling of love produces these effects. So if you feel love for someone it inspires you to be patient, kind, not envy or boast, etc. But this feeds into our cultures tendency to believe that love is this unpredictable force that comes and goes and that if it just decides to up and leave than you’re excused from doing those things. The truth is much harder. The truth is that love is what love does, so it actually works the other way around. If you love someone it means you do these things for them. If you want to be a loving person than you need to be patient with people. And remember that the Bible calls us to love everyone not just our spouse and families.

So how are we doing? Can we say that we are patient with our spouses? Kind? That we don’t envy or boast? That we aren’t arrogant or rude? That we don’t insist on our own way? That we aren’t resentful? That we don’t rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoice with the truth? Do we bear all things, believe all things, hope all things and endure all things with our spouse?

What about our kids? Our fellow Christians? Neighbors? Strangers? Enemies? Do we live up to the calling that love has for each of us?

Now a lot of those characteristics about love are pretty straightforward and I don’t have nearly enough time to go deeply into each one anyway, but I wanted to talk about a few in particular. First I want to point out that in verse 7 when it says that love “…believes all things,” that can sound like naivete, and I know at first blush my instinct is to think this opens the door to allowing all sorts of abuses and manipulations, but that’s not what Paul is getting at here. The New Living Translation translates this phrase as “never loses faith” and I actually think that’s a better translation of the greek verb here, πιστεύει, which comes from the word for “faith, belief, and trust.” Or in other words, since we’re talking about love between people primarily in these verses, than we never lose faith in people just because they hurt us and wrong us. We always hold out the hope that people can be redeemed.

I also think it’s especially important in our modern context to point out verse 6, which says that 1 Cor 13:6

1 Corinthians 13:6 (ESV)

[love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

This is probably the biggest conflict between the world’s definition of love and our definition of love. The world seems to conflate so called “tolerance” with love. They seem to think that it’s impossible to love someone unless we accept everything they do uncritically. The problem with this is that we sincerely believe that many things people are doing are wrong. So to love them is to not rejoice in their wrongdoing but to rejoice in the truth. That means that sometimes the most loving thing to do is to confront someone about the things that they are doing that we believe are wrong.

I mean think about it, if we believe that someone is living in sin and they’re harming their relationship with God, even if nothing else, how can it be loving to just let them continue to harm themselves unapposed? That sounds more like enablement than love. You wouldn’t call a parent loving if they were “accepting” of their child’s heroin addiction. You wouldn’t call a friend “loving” if they allowed their friend to drink and drive. You get the idea.

So if love is defined by what we do and not what we feel than suddenly statements like, “I know he hurts me but I love him,” and “we just don’t love each other anymore,” and “Love is love,” become silly and meaningless. Love moves from being this uncontrollable force that excuses our sinful actions and becomes a measure of how we’re obeying God’s call to reflect His character.

And if love is a mysterious feeling than it comes and goes, but the love that Paul describes never ends.

3. Love is Eternal

Now that doesn’t follow just from the action verbs that Paul gives in verses 4-7, but it does follow when you realize that love is rooted in the nature of God. Hence why verses 8-13 describe love further in this way 1 Cor 13:8-13

1 Corinthians 13:8–13 (ESV)

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.

So not only is love essential and the spiritual gifts useless without it as we learned earlier in this chapter, but love will outlast all these spiritual gifts. This is because one day “when the perfect comes” we won’t need prophecy or tongues or special knowledge from God because we’ll be fully in the presence of God in a way that we never were before. Paul uses two metaphors to explain this, first of a child growing up. There are lots, and lots, and lots of things that children do that are normal and expected of them while they are children but childish when they grow up. Like picking the peanuts off of your peanut butter toast and eating them first. So we are like children now who need help understanding God and His word, but the day is coming when we will be like adults and know God fully just as He knows us.

He also uses the metaphor of a mirror, which because of improvements in technology needs a little explaining. In Paul’s day mirrors were made mostly of polished metal, and in fact Corinth was well known for producing these metal mirrors. They didn’t produce nearly the clear image that mirrors made of glass produce, and needed to be frequently polished to work at all. So Paul compares our image of God now as blurry and needing constant refreshing to one day when we will see God clearly the same way we see someone we’re looking at straight in the face.

So we won’t need those spiritual gifts any more. We also won’t need charity, because no one will be needy. Yet love will always endure. This is because in the words of 1 John 4:7-8

1 John 4:7–8 (ESV)

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

Love is eternal because God is eternal and God is love. When the perfect comes, or in other words when Jesus returns and creates a new heaven and new earth, we will live forever in love. So if we’re going to be loving and being loved for eternity, why don’t we start getting in some good practice now?

Conclusion: Dwell in Love

So after this amazing discussion and definition of love, at the very beginning of Chapter 14 Paul gives us our two word application for today’s sermon: “Pursue Love.” Love should be our overall goal, our number one priority. Without it everything we do is useless. If our goal is to be disciples who make disciples than the words of Jesus in John 13:34-35 give love as the defining characteristic of Jesus’ disciples.

John 13:34–35 ESV

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Love is the greatest virtue of a disciple of Jesus, and is characterized by how we treat others and will last an eternity so we should pursue love with everything that we have.

Now if we stopped here you might be left with the misconception that the application is to try to love people more with our actions, but then my friends we would be doomed to fail. If you try to swap in your name for the word love in verses 4-7 if you’re anything like me you’ll cringe at how inaccurate that sounds. “Josh is patient? Josh is kind? Josh does not envy or boast? Josh is not arrogant or rude?” Maybe on a really good day. See we all know that this is beyond our ability.

So where do we get this love? It is a fruit of the spirit. We don’t get it by trying hard and incrementally improving, we get it as a gift from the Holy Spirit, as we read in Ga 5:22-23

Galatians 5:22–23 ESV

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

There’s a lot of overlap between this list and Paul’s definition of love, isn’t there? See where we fail we need the Spirit to step in. Because God is love , and love comes from Him and His nature 1 John 4:7-8

1 John 4:7–8 ESV

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

God is love means God has all those qualities of love listed in 1 Corinthians 13. If you fill in the name of Jesus intead of our names suddenly it fits, doesn’t it?

“Jesus is patient and kind; Jesus does not envy or boast; he is not arrogant or rude. He does not insist on his own way; he is not irritable or resentful; he does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

So it is by abiding in Jesus that we too can strive to be loving, and so make our ministry and our gifts actually mean something. Jesus is perfectly loving, and as disciples of Jesus we should strive to love well because nothing we do matters if it isn't done in love and love will endure even to the end of the age.

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