The Nature of Love
PATH ONE
The Right Ordering of Our Love for God
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend . . . the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
EPHESIANS 3:18-19
There is a crying need today for the right ordering of love. Our nature as human beings is to love and to seek love, but Eros, or romantic love, is overrunning our lives and making it impossible to find balance and satisfaction. Its unbridled lust, mindless greed and relentless pursuit of power is destroying our capacity to give and receive love. As a result, the law of love—the “royal law,” as James calls it—is noticeably absent and desperately needed.
This is why God repeatedly calls us to his love. Scripture is filled with countless examples of this teaching. “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev 19:18), “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut 6:5), and “He is good, for his steadfast love endures forever” (2 Chron 5:13)—these are just a few of the many passages on God’s love.
To deepen our understanding, God repeatedly points us to Jesus as the most glorious embodiment of his love. Consider these teachings from Jesus’ life: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven” (Mt 5:43-45). “Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said . . . ‘love your neighbor as yourself’” (Mt 19:16, 19). Elsewhere, Jesus sums up our life with God in these words: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself ’ ” (Mt 22:37-39).
The Nature of Love
Paul amplifies Jesus’ teaching in 1 Corinthians 13, his highest and most famous treatment of love. Here and elsewhere he emphasizes the nature of agapé love, a term used more than a hundred times throughout Scripture. This emphasis reflects Paul and the early Christians’ desire to contrast the self-giving love originating in God with the self-preserving love typified by Eros.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. (1 Cor 13:4-8)
To get at the essence of Paul’s teaching here, we could substitute the words “a self-centered person” for “love” and reverse the action. Here’s how it would read: “A self-centered person is not patient; a self-centered person is not kind. A self-centered person is envious and boastful and arrogant and rude. A self-centered person insists on his or her own way, rejoices in wrongdoing and does not rejoice in truth. A self-centered person does not believe anything, hope in anything or endure anything. A self-centered person always fails.”
What a dramatic contrast! This inversion simply yet dramatically illustrates that God’s agapé love is beyond any capacity we possess as humans. We cannot on our own sustain the kind of perfect love that originates in God alone.
How then do we understand the nature and purposes of God’s love? Whole theologies have been built trying to answer this question. God himself tells us simply that his nature is best known through pure love. God is agapé love and agapé love is God (1 Jn 4:16). There is no quicker or better way to understand God than to experience this divine love.
Because it is fundamental to human nature to love and seek love, the central purpose of our life with God is learning to love in such a way that all of our heart’s longings—both natural and supernatural—are satisfied. Rightly loving God orders all the other loves common to human existence. We now turn to those who can aid us in the right ordering of our love for God.