IT’S NOT YOUR MOTHER’S KIND OF LOVE
When anyone says “what the world needs now is more love” skeptics will say “Yah sure” because they know that human love is not able to generate peace. The skeptics are right. Human love does some good at the personal/micro scale, but is ineffective at the national//global/macro scale.

Godly love, however, is effective at any scale — even global. People who don’t believe that Goldy love has the power to affect people globally need to stop thinking of Godly love like they think of human love. Who knows, maybe if they understood God and how he works in the hearts of people, they would do their part to make the world a better place by loving their neighbors.

It is always good to begin study by defining terms. Humans are good at defining words. See this link, this link and this link for some common definitions of human love. 

Love is ubiquitous in religion, art, music and elsewhere in modern culture. The definition of love changes from person to person but everyone knows when they have it and when they don’t have it. In general, people who have a strong sense of being loved, respected and accepted thrive and people who are unloved, disrespected and rejected do not thrive. God’s love empowers everyone who receives it to thrive in spirit, soul and body.

Most humans are well acquainted with human love because they experience giving it and receiving it. We love our spouse, we love our children, we love our job, we love our favorite football team, we love summertime, we love our favorite sports, we love a good movie, and so on and so on. 

Human love almost always includes tangible emotional and physical qualities. We can show love with a look, a touch, a gift, speech, a hug, sex, a card, and many other creative ways. Human love almost always demands a positive response. If the object of human love does not extend a positive, reciprocal response relatively quickly, further expressions of human love might not occur. Continued expressions of Godly love are not dependent on reciprocity.

Human love never completely or reliably reveals the character of the one who loves. Even in deep relationships people have secrets that they hide in order to present their best image to others – especially the people  from whom they hope to receive love – so that they will always be seen as worthy and desirable objects of reciprocal love.  In that respect, human love is always dishonest to some degree. 

No matter how strong or enduring it may be, human love is always vulnerable to changes in time and circumstance. It may start hot and then grow cold. Or it can start cool and then grow hot. And too often it disappears into divorce. None of these variables are present in Godly love.

Godly love is mysterious – except to Jews and Christians who accept by faith that God loves them because the bible tells them so. They also experience something they call love from God when they worship with others. They do not realize, however, that what  they experience in worship is emotion — not Godly love. That kind of human emotion is not a feature of Godly love. People who understand what Godly love is, and is not, know it when they experience it. People who don’t know what Godly love is will not notice it at all because they are not in the habit of listening to their hearts.

Everyone – including those who believe in God and those who don’t – will be surprised, maybe even shocked, to learn that Godly love should not be interpreted from a human, cultural perspective. To say that God’s love is like human love wrongly elevates human love and egregiously reduces the nature, quality and power of God’s love. To think that God’s love is equal to human love is another example of creating God in the image of man. When God says that his ways are not man’s ways, he includes the matter of love. Therefore, we do a great disservice to God and to ourselves when we equate Godly love with human love. 

The reason that human love is not the same as God’s love is that the bible is full of symbolism that represents spiritual things in natural terms. Love is one of those spiritual things. This is especially true in the matter of loving your neighbor as yourself which is a mystery to most people. To understand how to love your neighbor, you must first understand that Godly love and human love are not the same. 

Godly love is the full expression of who God is because God is love. This means that everything that God says and does expresses who he is. Because he never changes, his love never changes. Here is how God describes himself:

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It is no understatement to say that these qualities do not apply uniformly or consistently in humans – even in Jews and Christians who claim to be created in God’s image. Some religious people may exhibit some of these characteristics some of the time, but they are not common to all people all of the time.  That is because people are not like God.

Since God is love, and since God’s character includes these qualities, it is accurate to say that these qualities are all expressions of his love. That is why we see most of these qualities summarized in the well-known verses of 1 Corinthians 13:3-8. These qualities are not a complete definition of who God is or the nature of his love. They are only summary introductions to Godly love. 

Verbal details of who God is and the nature of his love are distributed randomly and often throughout the bible, but words cannot describe the fullness of Godly love that is experienced only in the heart.  Understanding of Godly love begins when we read the words in the bible but is only fully known spiritually in our hearts when we know him in our hearts. To know him is to know his love because God is love. Furthermore, it is impossible to know how to love yourself and your neighbor without knowing these deeper, finer points of Godly love. 

Human love may express some aspects of Godly love some of the time but will never express all of those qualities all of the time. This unpredictability of human love contrasts radically with God’s love which never changes because God never changes. For this reason, anyone who wants to obey God’s command to love your neighbor as you love yourself must not use human love as the standard for how to love your neighbor or love yourself. In everyday matters human love is acceptable and even desirable. But, people who dare to imagine that their love for their family, friends and neighbors accurately represents God’s love are mistaken. No human can faithfully express the finer points of Godly love in all their relationships all the time.  

The main words for love found in the bible draw on Greek 1, Greek 2, Greek 3 and Hebrew definitions of love. It is somewhat useful to review these definitions of love even though they are inadequate to understanding Godly love. 

One excellent way to begin to understand Godly love is to observe the biblical contexts in which love appears other than the context of loving God and/or your neighbor. Review of the following links shows how love is integrated into other very important biblical doctrines:

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Each of these doctrines is strongly associated with God’s character and beliefs held by those who claim to love him. Love is the common element in all pairs of doctrines. That means that the other words in the pairs are to be interpreted as equivalent expressions of love (e.g. faith = love; grace = love; mercy = love; etc.) Doctrines like faith, grace and truth, therefore, are not different from love, they are equivalent but different expressions of how to love your neighbor.

People who claim to love God but do not embody these characteristics in their daily lives are much deceived.  They are not born again into the likeness of God. They violate the Third Commandment.

Scripture tells us that Godly love is not just something we do as an act of will or feel emotionally. They tell us that love is an expression of who we are just as love expresses who God is. With this idea in mind, just as the bible says that God is love, it can be said that Tom is love, Dick is love, Harry is love, Mary is love and Jane is love – provided that they love God and their neighbors from their hearts.