To Encourage You

1 Peter 1:22 “Having purified your souls by your obedience to the truth for a sincere brotherly love, love one another earnestly from a pure heart”

One of the most loosely used words in our world today is the word “love.”  Jesus told us that to love was the greatest commandment of God. Listen to His words, from Matthew 22:37-40: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” So, what did Jesus mean when He said this?  In a world where the word “love” is used frequently by believers and nonbelievers alike, is all love the same, or are there different meanings of this word? Obviously, the answer is “yes,” for we don’t mean the same thing when we say we love chocolate ice cream as when we say we love our children.  So, as the Bible tells believers to “love,” how does the same Bible define how this word is to be understood?

As one example of this definition, we can look to the verse above from 1 Peter, in which the word “love” appears twice.  However, if we were to read this word in the original Greek language in which it was written, we would see that two different words for our word “love” have been used.  The first word is “philadelphia,” here translated as “brotherly love.” It’s a natural love that exists between those who are alike in some way, such as those who belong to the same family.  And because all believers are in the family of God, they are all brothers and sisters in a spiritual sense.  They should be naturally drawn to each other because of this.  It’s that bond that we sense immediately when we meet another brother or sister in Christ.

Recently we bought a new freezer.  The man who delivered the freezer I had never met before. As we talked, he informed me that he was originally from Laos. He informed me that he was a believer and he talked about the persecution his family had experienced when the communist government came to power there. As we spoke, my heart was drawn to this brother, and I’ve been moved to pray for him and his family ever since.  That’s what brotherly love is.  It’s a natural response of supernaturally united hearts.  And as the verse above tells us, it is to be sincere, i.e., not hypocritical. It’s not to be in word only.  It looks for opportunities to be expressed.

But then there’s another “love” in the verse above. It’s the Greek word “agape.” It’s the highest form of love. It involves an act of the will. It involves sacrificial service to others. It’s the same word that’s used in the well-known verse, John 3:16, which tells us that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” This was a love that God expressed to His enemies. It was a choice He made that elicited from Who He was rather than from whom the objects of His love were.  As the verse above states, this love is an earnest love, which means “stretched to the limit.” It’s the love that Jesus explained in this way: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13), and that’s exactly what Jesus did, even though those “friends” were, so often, sinners. 

And then, the verse above tells us that this “love” is one that elicits from a pure heart. It’s a heart that is not motivated by sin.  It’s a clean heart that has been made that way in the only way a heart can be cleansed, and that is by God. It’s the desire for such a heart that David expressed as he cried out to God in repentance for the wickedness of his adulterous “love” affair with Bathsheba: “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a rightspirit within me” (Psalm 51:10).

So, when you use the word “love,” is it these things that you are thinking about? Is God’s definition of the word the same as yours?  You see, the Bible tells us that “God IS love” (1 John 4:7). John, the disciple who wrote this, often called himself in the Scriptures he penned, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” John came to know full well what the love of God looks like.  And what that love looks like is largely foreign to a world in which the word “love” is used so much.