What is Love?

WHAT IS LOVE?

We often read throughout the Bible that love is from God. For example, 1 John 4:7 says very clearly:

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.

Now picture, if you will, a street gang where the members actually love one another. They swear an oath upon membership to be ready and willing to die for each other. In fact, in this particular gang, several members have already laid down their lives for their fellow members! Without a doubt there is love for each other. Yet this gang has raped hundreds of women, stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars of goods from innocent people and bashed and killed dozens of people, several of them not related to gangs or gang warfare.

Can we say that this love is from God? I hope you can clearly see that it isn’t. If it is not from God it means that the love which emanates from God and is of God has something distinct and unique about it.

Two verses bring out that distinctiveness

1 John 4:10 says

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.

Firstly we see that the love of God includes a love for the unlovable. God reaches out to those who don’t deserve to be loved. A love that loves only the lovable is a wishy washy kind of love indeed.

1 John 3:10 say s

This is how we know who the children of God are and who the children of the devil are: Anyone who does not do what is right is not a child of God; nor is anyone who does not love his brother.

This verse ties love to righteousness. True love which is from God is coupled with righteousness and does not indulge in sin or rebellion even against one’s enemies. True love from God is pure and holy.

So we can see that love from God is distinctively different to the love of the world. Only those who are born of God, that is, those who are filled with the Spirit of God can love with the love of God.