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People say that they believe in love, that all you need is love, and that love always wins. While our culture may attempt to strip marriage of its sacredness, the desire to love and be loved remains, for cohabiting, marriage, and remarriage are as popular as ever. Aristotle argued that no one would choose a life without friendship, even if he possessed every other good. People need love.
Sadly, love in our day has been so redefined and twisted that what most people mean by love isn’t love at all. By love, most mean something like momentary affection, lust, or desire. But true love, biblical love, is much deeper and more all-encompassing. Love begins and ends with God. God expresses His love among the persons of the Trinity before the foundation of the world, and that love flows out into His creation. His people are returned to Him by means of His love in Jesus Christ, and our ultimate end is to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength (Deut. 6:5)—communing with Him eternally, where we will love Him purely, finally, and forever.
In the meantime, we plod along in this broken and confusing world. Love in this life is often expressed like light through cracked windows: refracted, partial, and dim. This is especially true in the church, though we’re told that we’re brothers and sisters who should have a family affection for one another, “bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:2). And that’s not to speak of the workplace and the larger world, where love is so misunderstood that it’s hard to speak of it without wondering whether someone has ulterior motives.
Over the course of my time in the church, I’ve come to realize that we often think about how the world distorts love, but we rarely consider how the church struggles with it. Jesus Himself dealt with this, reprimanding the Pharisees for tithing mint and cumin and neglecting the weightier matters of the law (Matt. 23:23). They were more concerned that Jesus was healing on the Sabbath than that, out of His love and compassion, He was healing at all (Luke 14:1–6). This is what Christianity becomes when it goes wrong: legalism that misses the whole point. If the world will know us by the love we have for one another (John 13:35), then that must begin in earnest in the house of God. Perhaps instead of demanding that the world understand love, we work on helping the church understand it first—not simply in word but in deed. That’s what Jesus did. He didn’t just tell people to love. He demonstrated His love in dying for us (Rom. 5:8).