What is Love? -- I John 4: 7-21

In this passage, John returns to one of his favorite subjects, love.

John isn’t talking about the love that is portrayed in the popular media or Christian culture.

For example, John probably wouldn’t understand our notion that love is a feeling. There is a feeling people often have when they are in love. But that’s really called affection, not love. There certainly should be feelings of sympathy and affection in love, but then that’s not love. A car has a radio, but that doesn’t make a radio a car. Love is bigger than affection. The idea of love as something we “feel” is unknown to him, and to the Bible.

If you are a parent, do you love your children?  Of course! Did you ever feel like strangling your kid? Probably! If you’re married, do you love your spouse?  Naturally!  Did you get angry with them?  Sure! Loving a person doesn’t mean we never get angry or disgusted. Love remains with us even when there are not feelings of affection.

We say that love is a choice. But if we choose to love, then we can choose not to love. If my love depended on me always making the right choices, then love becomes a burden quickly. Yet Jesus says our yoke is easy and our burden light. Love is not so much a choice as the reason we make choices.

A third mistake we make about love is to call only action. But just because we do for others, doesn’t mean we love them. Charity is good, but charity doesn’t prove love. Just because we are doing something that looks loving doesn’t mean it really is loving. Acts of charity are no proof of love. Paul said, “If I give away all I have, and even give my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.”

So if love isn’t a feeling, or a choice, or an action, what is it?  Into what mental category does love fall.  Let me suggest that love is more than a feeling or a choice or an action. Love is something different. It is what people used to call a virtue. 

A virtue is a habit we intentionally develop to be more like God. It is a pattern of life and thought that governs forever the shape of our life and bends us forever to the Good. The opposite of a virtue is a vice. A vice is a bending or shaping of our life in the opposite direction. A virtue is something we cultivate and develop with God’s help over a long period of time. As we walk around every day, we are not aware of even possessing a virtue, since it just feels normal to us. But other people see it in us, because it is natural to us. It is something we try very hard to develop. It is a habit of thinking, feeling, and acting.

The fruit of the Spirit, spoken of in Galatians 5: 21-22 are such virtues. They are the virtues that are produced by the Holy Spirit’s work in our lives. These fruit do not come automatically, but over time through the practice of being obedient to God’s word.   The fruit of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Notice what comes first—love. They do not come just by prayer or just by some kind of Spiritual osmosis, but through the practice of doing what God commands in every situation. They are not feeling –how does a person feel faithfulness or self-control. They are choices we make, but they are also the reason we make those choices. They are aspects of Jesus’ personality that we seek to incorporate in our personality.

Let’s say a kid wants to be a basketball star. So he studies the life of Michael Jordan. He doesn’t copy everything Michael does, but he isolates certain aspects of his personality—his diligence, his perfectionism, his ability to come back after adversity. He tries to imitate those qualities that will make him a great basketball legend. Those qualities are Michael Jordan’s virtues.

Love is the virtue of Christ. Love is from God—it is God’s virtue. Everyone who loves is born of God, that means, he has allowed one of God’s virtues to be born in him. 

Loving as God loves is not natural to us—it is an unnatural act to us. But through prayer and obedience what at first is unnatural becomes natural.  Being loving becomes a healthy habit. A habit is something we do that feels like we were always supposed to do it. Once an act has been repeated a few times, then it starts to feel natural. In fact, it feels as if we have always done it that way.

Loving my family is a habit of the heart. When I don’t feel love for my kids, I still love because I always have. When I do something that makes my wife mad I feel guilty about it, because I have a habit of caring how she thinks. My whole personality is bent around supporting her and doing good for her. I don’t just feel love for my wife or choose lo love my wife. 

When a person says, “I don’t love my spouse anymore.” What they are really saying is this. “I have gotten out of the habit of loving my wife.” Habits that are not practices soon lose their power. But we can rebuild a habit in our lives quickly if we are willing to work at doing so.

But we have to have a reason to rebuild a habit of love. In the case of my wife, I have a good reason for keeping that habit going. My love for my wife is based on my relationship of my love to God, which is also a habit. If I quit practicing the habit of love to my wife, and God has told me to love her, then I am also breaking my habit of doing everything first because I love God. When I stop loving my wife I also stop loving God.  I can live without my wife, I cannot live without God.

What if I don’t show charity to my neighbor?  Showing charity to my neighbor is not just an act, it is habit I have developed in thought, feeling, and action. Again, it is an expression of the virtue of loving God. To become lazy in my charity is become lazy in my habits before God. To neglect loving my neighbors is to neglect loving God.

God commanded me to love, so I love. That means that whenever I have had to choose between doing something loving for God, my spouse, or for my kids I have chosen to love, so that love has become part of my nature. And obedience to God my purpose in life. 

In the old days, the church understood this. They used to write books about developing Christian virtues. Now they write books telling church people how they ought to feel. We hear sermons on how we are to get excited about the faith, how we should feel close to God at all times, how we should experience the joy of living. Guess what?  None of us experience Joy all the time. It is hard to imagine Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane expecting to receive a feeling of joy to replace the anxiety, or Christ on the Cross whistling, “I’ve God the joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” He had pain. He had suffering. But he also had love in his heart.

How do you know if you love God?  If you have to ask the question, then you probably don’t. A true lover doesn’t sit around thinking of love. They are thinking about the other. They work, think, feel, and act for the benefit of the other, without being aware of it necessarily. They don’t think about love—they just love. They may have to think about love at first, but then it becomes so natural to them that they are not aware they are loving.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a well-known account of the life of a young Jewish girl who was hidden with her family by Christians during the Nazi occupation. After the war, when the book became famous. The Christians in the town who saved the Jewish people were asked about their heroism. They responded, “What heroism? We just did what anyone would.” They didn’t’ experience it as being brave, they just had developed the virtue of goodness until it became second nature to them. They could not imagine how decent people would act in any other way.  

When a person is honest, it never occurs to them to cheat. They couldn’t imagine how a person would be happy if they got ahead of another though deception. When a person is faithful, it never occurs to them to have an affair, since their orientation of life is to their spouse. When we love God, the thought of not going to church just doesn’t appeal to us. It is part of our nature to be in God’s house. Our love for God is just part of who we are.

What we need in the church is not more people feeling love, or even acting loving, but more people who habitually love God and others. This may seem unnatural at first, but only at first. Once we have developed the practice of loving, we will naturally do the loving thing even if they don’t feel like it.

The habit of love develops in several areas.

Emotionally, it involves the development of empathy or affection of others. Part of learning to love people is learning to like them as well. Think about coffee. No one naturally likes coffee. It as an acquired taste. But once it is acquired, then there’s nothing like a sweet cup of coffee in the morning. If we can learn to like coffee, then we can learn to like people who we are not naturally attracted to. There are few people in the world that we cannot learn to like or at least tolerate. And while empathy comes more naturally to some or others, there is no one that we cannot learn to at least emotionally appreciate.

In the choices, love is the habit of putting other people’s good above our own. This element of love involves trust, because it means we trust that God is looking out for our own interests while we look out for others. We don’t change that choice when we get frustrated or anxious, and say we made a mistake, without denying God’s provision at the same time.

This is particularly true in marriage. Once we have taken a vow before God, then the only way to love God is to keep that vow. We stay married in spite of how we feel. We have made a vow and the loving thing to do is to keep the promise we made.

In action, Love means doing what is best for others. That doesn’t mean doing what feels best to others, but what actually moves them forward towards flourishing. Sometimes that means making the person we love mad. We don’t love so we can be liked, but because God want us to seek their highest good.  It is not loving to let a leech continue to leech off people, nor is it loving to conceal another’s crimes. Sometimes love means letting a person walk away from you and never return.

“God is love.” God’s thoughts, actions, and feelings are bent in our direction. Sometimes we make him mad. Sometimes we displease Him. But this changes nothing. He still loves us, and is bending in our direction. Loving God is the same-- bending all we are in His direction.

One day I came back to my office after vacation. There on the ceiling I spotted a mushroom growing out of a spot of mildew. The mushroom had grown in a “u” shape, with the head up against the ceiling. Before I knocked it down, I asked myself why the mushroom didn’t grow straight down. There was something in the DNA of mushrooms that bend them into growing always upward. The mushroom didn’t think about it, it just grew that way. 

Love is just the same. We don’t think about it.  We just bend that way.