This morning, we begin a new series that I have titled, “The Love of the Triune God”. In this series, I want to dive deeply into the great ocean that is the love of God. I’ve felt called to do this for a number of reasons. For one, our culture does not understand love. We do not understand it when it comes to our friendships, our families, or our romantic interests. We much less understand the love of God. For another, I find increasingly that Christians, impacted by that culture, do not understand love either. We struggle to reconcile the nature of God in his love and justice, and so many Christians have taken to overemphasizing one to the detriment of the other. Some Christians read 1 John 4:8, which says “God is love”, and conclude that God cannot judge people or send them to hell because he is defined by love. Others defend God’s justice by hedging on his love for his creation. I want to remedy these confusions on love, as far as I can, by considering the whole arc of God’s revelation through the lens of his love. To do that, we are going to move through five sections of the love of God and our call to love like God. These sections will probably take us the better part of a year to work through, but they will lead us to the heights of theology as we do. Those sections are: The Complete Love of God, the Creative Love of God, the Common Love of God, the Covenantal Love of God, and the Commands of Love.
We cannot start without first defining what we mean when we use the word “love”. I am beyond thankful to have had parents and grandparents who lived out the definition of love for me. My parents recently celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. I’ve had a front row seat to 45 of those 50 years, so I can tell you that they were not all roses and rainbows. My parents were married at twenty-one, while they both were in college at Auburn University. My father paid his way through Auburn, and he scraped and scrounged to pay for an engagement ring and a honeymoon in Pensacola Bay, where their hotel view looked out over the oil refineries. Mama still has the piece of paper where Daddy scratched out every detail of their trip, down to how much gas it would take and what they could spend on meals. It got easier after college, for a time, but that hardheaded Skipper gene meant that Daddy couldn’t work for anyone but himself, so he started his own business in 1987, when my mom was pregnant with her third child. Mama put up one month’s salary from her job as a teacher as seed money for my dad’s new venture. She helped solder circuit boards upstairs in our house. Through love, they have persevered in good times and bad to raise three children and seven grandchildren. My grandparents’ stories are even better. Both sets of grandparents were married for close to 70 years. Both married in high school. In fact, Lavaughn and Jackie Skipper snuck out of junior prom to drive to Mississippi to elope because her parents didn’t approve of Lavaughn. She became pregnant with my dad shortly after that, gave birth, and then went back to finish her senior year while Papa drove a log truck, worked on diesel engines, and even drove cross country to make ends meet. Ben and Renee Kilpatrick married in high school, and Granddaddy dropped out of school and lied about his age to enlist in the Navy during WWII. His oldest son, Mike, was born while he was in Japan, and he didn’t know his son for two years.
I tell these stories because they stand in stark relief to our modern understanding of love. Our culture defines love as a feeling. Love is an emotion that determines our very identity. Who you love determines who you are. Since Governor Ronald Reagan signed the Family Law Act in California in 1969, no-fault divorce has grown to make up a staggering 90% of divorce cases. We all know of marriages that fell apart for no other reason than the fact that one or both of the spouses “fell out of love.” They “lost that loving feeling”, as the Righteous Brothers sang. The idea that love is defined by our feelings is steeped in our culture. As Elvis sang, “Wise men say, only fools rush in, but I can’t help falling in love with you… as the river flows, gently to the sea, Darling, so it goes, some things were meant to be.” And, as Tina Turner asked, “What’s love, but a second-hand emotion?”
This definition of love as an emotion that happens to us, like being carried along by the river, didn’t begin with Elvis or Tina Turner, though. We owe that shift to the Romantics of the 18th century. The Romantics, building on the earlier views of the Sentimentalists, believed that morality should be defined, not by virtue or Scripture, but by nature. They thought that, if man were just to get back to nature and allow himself to be inspired by its beauty and wonder, then he would act in a way that was truly moral. This put the emphasis on the self and how one feels. They argued that what feels natural is what is truly good. What mattered was to be true to oneself, regardless of the cultural norms and accepted virtues of society. The famous Romanticist, Percy Shelley, abandoned his wife Harriet while she was pregnant with their second child for Mary Godwin - later known as Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. He justified this betrayal as a moral decision because he was pursuing his “highest love”. This shift from understanding love as a virtue to understanding it as a feeling has corrupted the very foundation of love in our culture. It destroys even what it means to be a friend. As CS Lewis complained, “Then came Romanticism… and the exaltation of Sentiment; and in their train all that great wallow of emotion which… has lasted ever since… The exaltation of instinct, the dark gods of the blood; whose hierophants may be incapable of male friendship.”
So, if love cannot be defined by our emotions, how should we define it? The theologian, Robert L Plummer has defined it this way: “Love is a relational and practical concern for another, rooted in the nature or disposition of the one loving and resulting in tangible expressions of that concern.” But, I think the ancient philosopher, Aristotle, had the best definition of love: “[Love] is willing for another person what you believe to be good things, not for your own sake but for his and being inclined, so far as you can, to bring these things about.” From these two definitions we can understand the following. First, love is an act of the will. Love is not first and foremost something you feel but something you purpose to do. This is not to say that love does not or should not involve the emotions. It certainly should and does. As we will see, even God expresses his love in terms of his emotions. But, love is not sustained by emotion and should not be defined by a feeling. Rather, love is a virtue. It is something we cultivate. It is something we should pursue, because in expressing love, we take part in the very image and nature of God.
And this is where we should start. We should love in the way that God loves because love is ultimately defined by God. So, in the time we have remaining, let’s understand how the Bible talks of love by understanding the steadfast love of God from Psalm 136. From this text I want you to recognize the four ways that God loves: his complete, creative, common, and covenantal love.
First, from verses 1-3, recognize that God’s love is complete. When we read this Psalm, we recognize right off the bat that this was a responsive song of the people of Israel. It reads like one of our responsive readings. You can imagine the priests singing “Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good”, and then the congregation responding, “For his steadfast love endures forever”. After every praise offered to God, the Psalmist connects that praise with God’s love. So, this whole Psalm is a definition of God’s love. That love is first defined by the response: “For his steadfast love endures forever.” The Hebrew for “steadfast love” is hesed, which could also be translated as “kindness” or “graciousness”. It is a word that is often associated with the core of God’s character in the OT. In Exodus 34:6, when God allowed Moses to see his back as he passed by, God defined himself in this way: “The Lord, The Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” This is an astonishing declaration, given its context. This comes just after the Israelites had been caught making a golden calf while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Law. God had relented from destroying them, and in his grace he declares this. Even in his wrath, even when the people are as far from him as they can be, the thing that most defines God’s character is his steadfast love. As John would say in 1 John 4:8, “God IS love.” This complete love is connected to his goodness and his rule. The Psalmist says that we should give thanks to the Lord for he is good, and this goodness flows from his steadfast love. We should give thanks to the God of gods and Lord of lords, and his sovereignty over all things also flows from his steadfast love.
Next, in verses 4-9 we see his creative love. All of God’s creative works are attributed to his steadfast love in these verses. He did great wonders, made the heavens, spread out the earth, established the sun and moon in their orbits, all out of his great love.
Then, in the largest section of the Psalm, verses 10-24, the writer exalts God for his covenantal love. He checks off all the works that God has done for the people of Israel and connects them with his love. He killed the firstborn of Egypt, parted the Red Sea, destroyed the armies of Pharoah, led his people in the wilderness, conquered Canaan, gave them the land, and even now protects and provides for them. Some of this is striking, and it gets to the heart of this seeming conflict between God’s love and justice. Notice that the Psalmist praises God for killing the firstborn and the armies of Egypt. Wait a minute! I thought that God is all love, which must mean, according to some Christians today, that he could never judge or condemn? Yet, here, these acts of destruction and condemnation are evidence of his love. This is why it is so important to define God’s love on God’s terms, not on our feelings. God’s love is most evident in the fact that he is just because in his justice he defends that which is most precious - his own character. But, his love in this is also evident in the fact that he showed grace to a helpless, worthless group of people - the descendants of Abraham. As Moses reminded the Israelites in Deut. 7:7-8, “It is not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all the peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers.”
Finally, we see the common love of God in verse 25. Even though God shows a special love to those he chooses, this doesn’t mean that he has no love for all mankind, even the wicked. The Psalmist reminds us, “he gives food to all flesh, for his steadfast love endures forever.” God’s love is seen in the fact that he does not consume the world in fire every moment of every day. And, even more than that, he shows mercy to those who resist him even to death by giving them food, shelter, family, friends, good work, and many years of life. As Jesus said in Matt. 5:45, “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” God is loving and kind to all humanity, and that is evidenced in the simplest of things that he provides for everyone.
Friend, love is not defined by a good vibe or a flutter in your stomach. Love does not come and go with the wind. Love is an act of the will. And, God has acted in love toward you. He gives you good things like rain and sun and food and shelter. But, his love is most evident in the gift of his son. God gave his son, Jesus Christ, out of his great love for this world, so that the world might be reconciled to him. Won’t you turn in faith to that God of love today?
Brothers and sisters, our love is an act of will, not an emotion. How we love our neighbor is not defined by our feelings for him, but by our desire to serve God. How we love our spouse and children does not begin with those most natural of impulses, but with a commitment to Christ. So, may we will the good of the other as we walk in love.
Bibliography
Aristotle. Rhetoric. 350 BC.
Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves. New York: HarperCollins, 1960.
Morgan, Christopher W. The Love of God. Wheaton: Crossway, 2016.
South Dakota Department of Health. "Marriage and Divorce." Department of Health. 2021. https://doh.sd.gov/media/2athypa5/vitalstats-2021_marriagedivorce.pdf (accessed July 11, 2026).
Trueman, Carl. Strange New World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022.
1 (South Dakota Department of Health 2021)
2 (Trueman 2022)
3 (Lewis 1960)
4 (Morgan 2016)
5 (Aristotle 350 BC)
No comments:
Post a Comment