The Wrong Kind of Love

Loving someone a lot and loving someone rightly are two very different things.

To love someone a lot is easy but unpredictable. This is what the world calls love. It is to measure the rightness of love by intensity of feelings and strength of desire. It is supposed that greater feelings must necessarily equate to greater morality.

This kind of love leads to countless heartaches as feelings change over time. Or perhaps the feelings were just disoriented in the first place and come to their logical conclusions. This kind of love is fickle, unreliable, entirely subjective, and is the way that most people in the world view love. It is also one of the prevailing secular narratives for determining morality.

Love that is measured by magnitude and not morality is ultimately not truly love. This is what many people fail to understand in modern conversations on love. With the moral aspect of love discarded, the only measuring stick for secular love is our subjective, ever changing, and selfish feelings.

Christians ought to be very cautious in those conversations about love that focus on feelings and intensity. This isn't because feelings don't matter, but because left to themselves our feelings are subject to sinfulness. 

Our feelings, especially that most important feeling of love, must be submitted to God and His standards of righteousness. Most of what the world tells us of love is bereft of righteousness because it only recognizes the subjectively felt intensity of emotions. 

To love someone rightly is an entirely different thing. It is a move from quantity and magnitude to quality and morality. If we aim to love someone rightly we are forced to disregard the magnitude of our affections towards someone and instead examine the morality of our actions towards someone. For Christians, that morality is ultimately measured by God's righteousness.

This kind of love doesn't let us off the hook easy. It isn't just those who we feel like loving that we have to love. We have to love hard people in hard places.

This means we have to examine how we love the "others" that we don't hold much affection for. Whoever that unlovable "other" is for you, you had better search your heart and God's Word diligently to see whether you are loving them rightly.

I suggest two starting places for examining your love.

First, look at those people in your life who you regularly interact with. Who is unlovable or difficult to love? Is your marriage or  are your other relationships built on sentiment or on a commitment to righteousness? Have you allowed fading or wavering feelings to convince you that you no longer love someone?

Secondly, examine where you are on a socio-political spectrum. How do you respond to:

• Black Lives Matter? 
• Blue Lives Matter? 
• ISIS? 
• Either totally-unfit-for-office presidential candidate? 

Whoever it is that our culture and politics are telling you to distrust, dislike, or vilify they are probably deserving of better than what your heart has given them.

Love isn't agreement or endorsement. That is what the world's shallow, sentimental notion of morality and love calls for. Don't play by those rules.

Neither is love vilification, dismissal, or condemnation.

Someway, somehow Christians need to find a way to reclaim love as our hallmark. Let us love the world and "others" rightly, deeply, and sacrificially. It is what Christ did for us.