Have you noticed that love is little more than a cliché these days? The ways we talk about love, the ways we express love, the ways we measure love, and even the ways we ask for love can all be so shallow! As the drama just illustrated, love often lacks substance. It is often touchy-feely or it is pure emotion or it is a mood to be sustained.
As REO Speedwagon sings, "Cause I can't fight this feeling anymore." And as the song Marci's character quoted in the skit suggests, "Well I've been up, down, trying to get the feeling again. The one that makes me shiver, makes my knees start to quiver, every time you walk in."
As you listen to modern music, whether it be country music, MTV, or VH1, you get the distinct impression that love is something that just mysteriously wells up from within, seizes us, takes control of our lives, and gives us an irresistible urge to, well, you know, "Cut loose, footloose."
What is love?
It is as if love is a kind of unseen force that rudely rips into our lives and jerks us in an unforeseen direction, wreaking havoc on all of life's precious relationships in the process! It is as if love is some kind of computer programmer that comes along and starts hitting our buttons to manipulate us to act in certain ways. Some even speak of love as something that victimizes us. They think that love is just as likely to "hurt, scar, wound and mar" as it is to bring joy into our lives!
By far, love is one of the most misunderstood and misused words in the English language. As Gary Chapman says in his book The Five Love Languages, "Love is a most confusing word. We use it a thousand ways. We say, 'I love hot dogs', and in the next breath, 'I love my mother.' We speak of loving activities; swimming, skiing, hunting. We love objects; food, cars, and houses. We love animals; dogs, cats, even pet snails. We love nature; trees, grass, flowers and the weather. We love people; mother, father, son, daughter, parents, wives, husbands and friends."
And if that isn't confusing enough, Gary Chapman points out that we use love to explain behavior. " 'I did it because I love her' says a man who is involved in an adulterous relationship. God calls it sin, but he calls it love. The wife of an alcoholic picks up the pieces after her husband's latest episode. The psychologist calls it co-dependency, but she calls it love. The parent indulges all the child's wishes. The family therapist calls it irresponsible parenthood, but the parent calls it love."
Only in our culture can love mean everything and nothing at the same time. Love is used to justify virtually every type of behavior under the sun including homosexuality, adultery, abuse, and workaholism. Just name it! But one thing is certain. Love cannot mean everything it is assigned to in our culture! There has to be a way to differentiate between the real and the counterfeit, between the pure and the polluted. There has to be a way to distinguish between the true love God calls us to and the shallow, cliché, bumper-sticker, soap opera, American top 40, feel-good kind of love that our culture obsesses about.
The Greeks attempted to do this by using four different words to describe love.
A first Greek word for love is "phileo".
Phileo quite specifically refers to brotherly love. Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, is named after this kind of love. The basic idea behind phileo is friendship, or liking. At school you sit with your friends. You sit with people you like or enjoy the company of. On the weekends you open your home to people who you have natural affinity for. When someone you care about becomes ill, you show concern or phileo love and visit with him or her in the hospital or send a card.
In many cases phileo was used more generically. Over time it became a kind of generic utility word that expressed the Greek's general liking of a given person, place or thing. They would use it to express their enjoyment of the weather, a certain activity, or something that brought them satisfaction, like a hotdog.
A second Greek word for love is "stergo."
Stergo is used to describe family love. The love between parents and children. The cartoon image of a stork delivering a newborn baby to parents is the closest equivalent I can think of for the Greeks' stergo love.
The basic idea behind stergo is mutual love and especially family love. This kind of love includes mild forms of affection. It is a father putting his arm around his son. It is a mother hugging her child. It is a grandparent tucking her grandchild in at night. It is also used to describe the love between a master and his dog. The dog and his master have stergo, or love, for each other. They play together and share affection.
Stergo was not used to describe the kind of love between a husband and wife. Their love, as we will see in a moment, went a bit further. Stergo was never used to describe the love neighbors showed to each other. It was never used to describe the love between friends. Friends didn't have stergo, they had phileo. They had brotherly friendship love.
A third Greek word for love is "eros."
Eros was used to describe the love between a husband and wife, between male and female. Our English word erotic comes from the Greek word eros. Eros referred to the hormonal, instinctual, visceral, emotional longing and craving desire a couple felt for one another. Eros was purely physical. It was feeling-driven. It was love at first sight.
The Greeks, because they delighted in the body's beauty and celebrated sensual desires, were infatuated with this type of love. To the Greeks, eros was an irresistible power that drew two people together. Eros would forget all reason, will, and discretion on its way to ecstasy. Eros knew no moral limitation. It set aside all moderation and balance. To the Greeks, love without eros wasn't really love at all.
If the Greeks had soap operas, they would celebrate eros. If the Greeks sang love songs, they would ache and yearn for eros. If the Greeks ever fantasized about the perfect, romantic relationship- you guessed it! Eros, eros, eros.
Our culture promotes only certain types of love.
Now, before we move on to the fourth kind of love, it is worth mentioning that our culture only promotes phileo, stergo, and eros. The love on the tube always involves friendship, family, and passion.
In recent years love on the silver screen has eliminated family and has focused almost exclusively on eros. The casts of "Friends", "ER", and "Survivor" feature people who are single, free, and hungry for eros. Hollywood and the media have popularized sexual love. They have elevated it to the highest status possible, while blinding us to its inability to effect the kind of love that brings true satisfaction.
Now don't get me wrong, there is a place for eros in Christian marriages. There is a place for eros love in relationships where a husband and wife have committed themselves to one another for a lifetime. But a marriage can never be sustained on eros alone. Eros fades. Feelings come and go. The attraction wears off. The flame eventually burns out. The intense and exciting becomes predictable and mundane. The beautiful and handsome gets wrinkly and worn. The healthy and erotic and tantalizing gets sick and deteriorates. Even our desires change.
Dennis McCallum and Gary Delashmutt in their book The Myth of Romance say that there is no such thing as a true love that will indefinitely sustain a strong sensation of romantic excitement (eros). By nature, humans are unable to sustain such a prolonged intense emotional experience.
Romantic feelings come and go. Something deeper than eros has to kick in order for a marriage to last. Something deeper has to carry a marriage through the dark valleys of life to the finish line, and it most certainly will not be eros. Even friendship love and family love, phileo and stergo, are not enough. Another kind of love is needed.
A fourth Greek word for love is "agape."
Agape love referred to the generous move by one person for the sake of another. It refers to a parent's willingness to do everything for an infant that does little more than disrupt sleep, spit up, mess its diaper, and cry for food. It refers to an individual's willingness to care for his or her parents as they grow older and are unable to feed, bathe, or even dress themselves. It refers to a friend's willingness to step in and leverage all of his or her resources to help someone who is going through a difficult time.
In the first century, Christians took the Greek word agape, redefined it, and then insisted that agape love permeate every relationship. Husbands were to agape their wives. Christians were to agape one another in Christian community. Christians were to even agape their enemies. It was agape love that would see the marriage relationship through every imaginable circumstance, till death dous apart. It was agape love that would unite the Church under one banner, Christ. It was agape love that would turn enemies into friends and transform culture.
The Bible uses "agape" to describe God's kind of love.
The early Christians had a very unique way of defining this kind of agape love. They would say that God is love. They would say that God is agape. True love is the sum total of everything God is and does for us through Jesus Christ. True love is Christ sitting with his enemies and making them his friends. True love is Christ laying down his life for us and dying on a cross for our sins. As the verse says, "Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends." John 15:13 (NIV) True love is Christ extending forgiveness to his enemies even as they nailed him to a wooden cross, "Father, forgive them, for they know do not know what they are doing." Luke 23:34 (NIV) True love is Christ spending tireless mornings, afternoons and evenings with needy mobs that had absolutely nothing to give Jesus in return. True love is Christ reaching out to the blind, crippled, leproid, and diseased.
Here is what we know about Christ's love.
Christ's love was choice-driven, not feeling-driven.
In the garden of Gethsemane we find Christ wrestling with whether or not to die on the cross for our sins. On the one hand, he knew that if he were to go to the cross on our behalf, it would be the single greatest expression of love ever shown to man. He knew his death would open up a way for men to experience forgiveness, to receive power, and inherit eternal life. He knew that our destinies weighed on the balance of his decision to go to the cross.
But on the other hand, Jesus agonized over the cross. Did he want to be put on a humiliating, one-sided public trial? Did he want to be spit on and whipped with a glass shard-laden leather strap? Did he want to be struck, beaten, and stripped naked by Roman soldiers in front of his own mother and brothers? Did he want to carry his splintery wooden cross through the streets on his skinless, lacerated, whip-mutilated back? Did he want half-inch iron spikes being driven, one blow at a time, through the bony, resistant joints of his wrist and ankles? Did he want to hang on the cross, writhing in pain, being eaten by mosquitos, and being gawked at by passersby while gasping for his next breath?
Do you think Jesus ever really felt like going to the cross? In the garden, Jesus agonized over it. The scriptures tell us that as Jesus prayed, "...his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground." Luke 22:44 (NIV) If it were me in that garden, I'd have been running as fast and as far away as I could. Yet Jesus prayed and made a choice, "Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done." Luke 22:42 (NIV)
Jesus made a decision based not on feeling, but on God's will. Agape love is a decision. It is a commitment. It is a choice. As John Stott once said, "Love is not a victim of the emotions, it's a servant of the will, it is a choice. Our emotions are the caboose, not the engine. God's love doesn't wait for a warm, tingly sensation to take over. God's love is a servant of the will. God's will."
God's love is choice-driven, not feeling or emotion-driven.
God's love is self-sacrificial, not self-gratifying.
God showed us his love by making the biggest sacrifice imaginable. God sent his only Son to die on the cross for our sins. Jesus poured out his blood on that cross to bring us to God.
True love, agape love, God's love, sacrifices and pours itself out. True love paddles upstream. It is unnatural, it is painful, it requires discipline and extraordinary effort. It says "yes" to God's will when everything within cries out "STOP!" It lays down its life, it bends over backwards and it gives even when it does not receive. It is patient and kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, nor rude, nor even self-seeking. It is not easily angered, it keeps no record of rights and wrongs. It never delights in evil, but it rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts. It always hopes and it always perseveres. Sacrificial love never fails. (Paraphrase of 1 Corinthians 13)
In contrast, falling in love, eros, doesn't require any effort at all. It is like catching a wave with our surfboard. When you are "in love", loving is virtually a form of self-gratification. But true love paddles on with or without the surf of emotion and feeling. True love loves "no matter what the cost, for the long haul!"
God's love is choice-driven, not feeling or emotion-driven. God's love is self-sacrificial, not self-gratifying.
God's love is growth-oriented, not disabling.
True love doesn't happen overnight. As one author said, "The key is not to find the right person, but to become the right person: a person who has learned to practice Christian love." True love, agape love, is something we have to grow into.
In the garden of Gethsemane, I told you Jesus was contemplating the single greatest expression of love ever shown to man. It wasn't an easy decision or even an easy sacrifice for him to make. But Jesus prayed and we are told God sent an angel to strengthen Jesus. Apart from God Jesus couldn't have done it, but with God all things are possible.
Throughout the scriptures, we are commanded to love one another. Some of us are struggling to love someone we no longer have eros for. Some of us are struggling to love our children. Some of us are frustrated. We are angry, we are disappointed, and we perhaps want to throw in the towel. Some of us are struggling to love someone we just don't like, someone who is different from us, who makes us feel uncomfortable, who is excessively needy, who steals all our time, who places demands on us, or who is always taking and never giving. Some of us are ready to give up on our marriages or to permanently sever ties with a family member.
What God wants to say to all of us this morning is that love is a choice. Love is a choice to follow God's will in every area of life. Don't wait around until you "feel" like loving. Love is a choice, not a feeling. Love is going to cost us something, just as it cost God something. Love is something that develops in our lives as God works his power in us. Love doesn't happen overnight. Jesus spent his entire life preparing for the garden of Gethsemane, and even then, he still needed God's power.
Right now, God wants to fill you with his love and empower you to show agape love to those you are struggling to love.
In conclusion, I want to leave you with the words of 1 John 4:7-12 (NIV). "Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is make complete in us."