What is love?

Have you ever paused to consider what comes to your mind when you hear the Bible's encouragements to "love one another"? We bring a lot of baggage to that command because we all have an idea in our heads of what love entails. The key to answering the question "what is love," involves considering what the Bible calls loving. And it should be no surprise to us that often what God calls loving is not what our world calls loving.

Almost Love

A couple popular notions of love are the following: being nice and being affirming. Let's examine these.

1. Being "nice." To be thought of as loving in our day, we are expected to say only positive things. Because self-confidence is the highest virtue in our culture, anything that could damage that self-confidence is seen as unloving. But what happens when preserving a friendship or caring for a fellow believer demands saying things that will be difficult? While our "do whatever makes you happy" culture doesn't have much of a category for this, it's worthwhile to remember that the Bible doesn't instruct believers to be nice. Instead, it instructs them to be gentle. This *both* keeps us from being jerks and allows for the possibility of speaking the truth.

2. Being "affirming." A close relative to "being nice," being affirming is seen as the ultimate test of love today. Friendship is supposed to mean unqualified acceptance of anything, at any time. But what if you see a friend walking headlong toward spiritual (or physical, or emotional) danger? Is there any room for honest warning in the age of affirmation?

Biblical Love

The Bible always connects love with the truth. Consider a couple of verses.

Ephesians 4:14-15 so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ,

The way we show love to one another is by protecting one another from the schemes of the devil. In order to do this, we must "speak the truth in love." Speaking the truth is easy for some of us - often we do it without love. Seeming loving is easy for others of us - often without ever getting around to speaking the truth. Biblical love involves both: truth and love.

Colossians 3:12-16: Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Do you see the connection here? Part of "putting on love" involves "teaching and admonishing one another." This means that loving one another means having the ability to speak the truth to one another. This is the mark of a healthy friendship and the mark of a healthy church family.

1 Corinthians 13:6 . It's helpful to remember that even the "love chapter,", so often read at wedding ceremonies, reminds us that "Love takes no pleasure in evil, but rejoices with the truth."

Examine your heart. Which side do you err toward? Would you be more tempted to speak the truth harshly? Or would you be more tempted to be thought of loving as the world sees it that you are never quite able to stomach speaking the truth? Ask God to search you and know you and to give you grace to grow in your biblical love toward your friends, family, and fellow church members.