A Word About Love
A Word from The Word
Those of you who know my teaching and preaching know that I place great store in the verbal inspiration of scripture. This means I believe that the Holy Spirit led the authors of various scriptural documents to use specific words.
For many years now, Christians have relied on translations—and someone else’s study of that translation—to understand those words. This has led to many—even most—Christians having little understanding of some important aspects of their faith. Good teachers of the Word address this by doing their study and sharing the meaning of important words we would not otherwise fully understand. In this way, we are able to fulfill Jesus’ command to “teach them to obey all that I have commanded.” (Matthew 28:20)
In that spirit I would like to share a series of posts where I share a word (or a cluster of words) and briefly explore the meaning of that word and how it can strengthen our faith and inform our obedience to the King! Thanks to our old friend Jim Van Hook for the idea!
I have already posted some blogs that do something similar, but for this series I want to begin with a word that may be the most frequently studied word in the New Testament. That said, it is still one of the most important and most misunderstood. It is “love”.
Jesus commanded us to love. We are to love God. We are to love our neighbors (defined much more broadly than most of us would!). Those of us who are husbands are to love our wives. We are even told to love our enemies—and the people Jesus was talking to lived under Roman occupation. Their enemies could and often did beat them, steal from them—even kill them.
Why is it so important to understand this word? First, because it describes God’s love for us. If we don’t know what it means, we don’t understand our relationship with Him! Second, Jesus said our love would be how people would recognize us. Finally, we all want our relationships to be strong, but only by loving others will this happen.
So, what does love mean? Too often we simply decide what we think the English word means and read that into scripture. But the New Testament wasn’t written in English. It was written in Greek, and the Greek word the Holy Spirit used in all these passages is “agape”. If we look up the word agape in New Testament Greek dictionaries we find that it basically means doing whatever is in the best interest of the other. It has absolutely nothing to do with feelings, which is why Jesus can tell us to love whether we feel like it or not!
As a marriage counselor I constantly struck by the fact that Christian couples who are struggling in their marriage have often stopped loving the other because they “don’t feel like it”. In most cases, they aren’t even praying with and for the other. They have in fact stopped loving the other. This isn’t something that happened to them. It is something they stopped doing!
The good news is that God never stops loving us. It doesn’t always feel good to us (see Hebrews 12) but it is always what we need. And, regardless of what has happened between us and another person—or group of people—we are capable of doing what is best for them. And when we do—especially when we don’t feel like it—we are showing the world what Jesus has done for us!
I hope this is helpful to you. Please feel free to share this with anyone else who might benefit from it—and watch for the next Word from the Word next week!
Know Jesus and Be Faithful!