What Is Love?

Everyone agrees that God is love and that Christians are supposed to love. Almost no one agrees on what the word means, and the confusion is not harmless. It has produced a church that mistakes niceness for love and calls hard truth hate, and a world that mistakes feeling for love and calls the end of the feeling the end of the marriage. Scripture is not vague about it. It tells us where love comes from, what it does, what it refuses to do, and how you can tell whether it is in a man. The answer runs through the temple, through the Spirit, and, at the end, through a car waiting to turn left.

God never asked for a house

Start with the temple, because the temple is where the presence was, and love is how you know where the presence is now. When David wanted to build God a house, God's answer was a question: "Go and tell my servant David, Thus saith the LORD, Shalt thou build me an house for me to dwell in? Whereas I have not dwelt in any house since the time that I brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this day, but have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle" (2 Samuel 7:5-6). He never asked. He walked with His people in a tent. When Solomon built the house anyway, God filled it, "consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices; and the glory of the LORD filled the house" (2 Chronicles 7:1), and Solomon himself said at the dedication, "But will God indeed dwell on the earth? behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee; how much less this house that I have builded?" (1 Kings 8:27). Then God told Solomon what the building was for: "I have heard thy prayer, and have chosen this place to myself for an house of sacrifice" (2 Chronicles 7:12). A house of sacrifice. Not a house to live in. Within a few centuries the building had become the idol, and Jeremiah stood in its gate and said, "Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these" (Jeremiah 7:4). Isaiah said where God had been looking all along: "Thus saith the LORD, The heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool: where is the house that ye build unto me? and where is the place of my rest? For all those things hath mine hand made, and all those things have been, saith the LORD: but to this man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and trembleth at my word" (Isaiah 66:1-2). To this man. The house He wanted was a man with a contrite spirit. And Jesus, walking out of the Temple for the last time, called it something He had never called it before: "Behold, your house is left unto you desolate" (Matthew 23:38). Your house.

Where He was going with all this He said the night before He died: "At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you" (John 14:20). Temple within man, man within God. Paul said it to the Corinthians as if it were obvious: "ye are the temple of God, and… the Spirit of God dwelleth in you" (1 Corinthians 3:16). And the last page of the Bible closes the circle: "And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it" (Revelation 21:22). The presence that walked in a tent and filled a house of stone now lives in the people, and that is the whole point of the Spirit who remained (see Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me). So the question this letter is really asking is: how do you know the temple is occupied? How do you know the glory has not departed? The Bible's answer is one word.

Love is where He comes from, not where we get to

"And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him" (1 John 4:16). Read the verb. God is love, and to dwell in love is to dwell in God. John does not say love is something we produce and offer up; he says love is where God is, and being in it is being in Him. Four verses earlier he had said how you can tell: "No man hath seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in him, and he in us, because he hath given us of his Spirit" (1 John 4:12-13). Love, dwelling, and the Spirit given, in one sentence. Paul says where it comes from: "And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us" (Romans 5:5). Shed abroad. Poured in. It is the first fruit of the Spirit he names: "the fruit of the Spirit is love" (Galatians 5:22). And Jesus makes love and abiding the same act: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love" (John 15:9-10).

Put those together and the claim of this letter is not an inference; it is John's definition. Agape is the fruit of the Spirit in an abiding branch. A man can be pleasant, generous, loyal, and self-sacrificing while resisting, quenching, or opposing the Spirit, and every one of those things can be real, but he cannot love as God loves, because that love is not his to manufacture. It is shed abroad, or it is absent. Which is why John can say the hardest thing in his letter without apology: "He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4:8). Not "loves poorly." Knoweth not God. And why Jesus made it the one mark by which the world would identify His people: "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13:35). Not their doctrine, not their buildings, not their politics. The fruit.

Love requires a real no

If love could be produced on command it would not be love. That is the plainest reason the will has to be free: a God who determines the answer has not been loved, He has been echoed. He did not make puppets and call it love. He wanted a bride, not a signatory, and a bride who could not have said no has not said yes.

This is why Scripture keeps reaching for marriage when it wants to say what God is after, and why the sharpest word it uses against His own people is not rebellion but adultery. You cannot betray a contract; you can only default on one. You can betray a covenant, and only a covenant entered freely.

Irenaeus put it in one line in the second century: "there is no coercion with God, but a good will towards us is present with Him continually" (Against Heresies IV.37, a chapter our library does not carry, so this sentence is quoted from the standard Ante-Nicene Fathers text and not verified against our own copy). God does not force the outcome. He secures it, and securing without forcing is the harder power, not the weaker one. The fuller case is in Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail and TULIP, Tested.

A God of order, and what His love looks like at scale

Here is something I wrote years ago, in a testimony, about what was shown to me when I finally stopped opposing God. Not hidden knowledge, but simple things I had not understood about His desire for us: that God has set a certain order in the world, that we can see how His way is fair and just, that even sin can bring a godly sorrow that leads to repentance, and that everything He designed works together for His good. It was a steep contrast from my secular education, which taught that all things came from chaos and through chaos, when even destruction and decay follow an orderly path. Our God is not a God of disorder but of peace, and His peace is the way, and His way is the truth, and this truth is the Word of God; and because of our iniquities and our desire for disorder, the Word became flesh and His flesh was sacrificed on our behalf, so that we could be healed and reunited in communion with Him, so that we could abide once again in His love. Paul said it in six words: "For God is not the author of confusion, but of peace" (1 Corinthians 14:33).

That matters for love, because love that comes from the God of order does not produce chaos in the one it touches. It produces peace. And the reason is the plainest example I know, and it happens at every intersection in America. A car is waiting to turn left. The driver coming the other way has the right of way, and he stops and waves the left-turner through, because it seems like the kind thing to do. It is against the traffic law, and the law is not being petty. The left-turner now has to guess whether the wave is real. The drivers behind the kind man have no idea why he stopped. The car in the next lane over has the right of way too, and is not stopping, and cannot see the wave. The left-turner who trusts the kindness pulls out into that lane. Nobody in that intersection meant any harm, and the one most likely to be hurt is the one being helped. The rule was the love; it was written so that a thousand strangers who cannot speak to each other can trust each other. The wave was the feeling, and it broke the very order that made the road safe. His order is not the opposite of His love. It is the shape His love takes when it has to hold every human being who has ever lived at once.

Nice is not love

Which brings us to the confusion that has done the most damage. Nice does the thing that feels loving and is comfortable for the giver. Love does the thing that is right for the other and pays for it. The Bible is full of nice men who caused disasters, and it never once calls what they did love.

Eli was a kind father to two vile sons, and God's charge against him was that he "honourest thy sons above me" (1 Samuel 2:29) and "restrained them not" (1 Samuel 3:13); he lost the sons, the priesthood, and the ark. Saul was sent to destroy Amalek and "spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen… and all that was good" (1 Samuel 15:9), the merciful-looking act, the one the people liked, and it was the disobedience that cost him the Spirit; his own explanation was "because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice" (1 Samuel 15:24). The prophets of Jeremiah's day told a dying nation what it wanted to hear: "They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14). The church at Corinth had a man living with his father's wife and was proud of how accepting it was: "ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned" (1 Corinthians 5:2). And three days after Saul died on his own sword, an Amalekite walked into David's camp carrying the crown and a better story, "I stood upon him, and slew him" (2 Samuel 1:10), because he was sure it was what David wanted to hear. David's verdict: "Thy blood be upon thy head; for thy mouth hath testified against thee, saying, I have slain the LORD’s anointed" (2 Samuel 1:16). The pleasing lie killed him, by his own mouth. Five men doing the comfortable thing. Five disasters. Not one of them is called love.

A seventh-century monk, Maximus the Confessor, gave the church a way to catch the counterfeit in yourself. In his chapters on love he names the root of every disordered passion with one word, self-love, and then offers a test: the one who loves God loves every man alike, because God Himself does. That is not his invention; it is Matthew 5 read slowly. "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you" (Matthew 5:44), and the reason given: "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). Then the test in Jesus's own mouth: "For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?" (Matthew 5:46). Luke keeps the hardest clause, "he is kind unto the unthankful and to the evil" (Luke 6:35). So ask it of yourself: is what I have the same toward the man who wronged me as toward the man who helped me? Where it is not, the shortfall is the measure of how much self is still in it. Nice fails that test every time, because nice is for the people who make it easy. And it is the other half of the intersection above: the rule is love because it holds for a thousand strangers alike, and the wave is feeling because it picks one.

Paul's definition of love has a line in it that the world skips: charity "rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth" (1 Corinthians 13:6). And in Romans, "Let love be without dissimulation. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good" (Romans 12:9). Love that cannot abhor anything is not love; it is the wave at the intersection. The wisest man in Israel said it the other way: "Open rebuke is better than secret love. Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful" (Proverbs 27:5-6). And the Lord Himself, to a church He was about to spit out: "As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent" (Revelation 3:19). The rebuke was the love. The kiss would have been the enemy's.

But hard is not love either

Now the guardrail, because this section will be read by hard men looking for permission, and Scripture gives them none. Truth without love is a different sin, not the cure for niceness, and God rebuked it just as sharply. James and John wanted to call fire down on a Samaritan village that had snubbed Jesus, and He turned on them: "Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them" (Luke 9:55-56). Jonah was right about Nineveh's sin and wrong about everything else, and sat under a gourd hoping to watch a city burn. Job's three friends said many true things about God, and God's verdict on them was "ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right" (Job 42:7); Job's name for them was "miserable comforters" (Job 16:2). The Pharisees "bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers" (Matthew 23:4). Being right is not the same as loving, and the man who wounds without grief has not read the whole verse. Faithful are the wounds of a friend.

So Paul attaches rules to the hard word, in the same breath he commands it. "Speaking the truth in love" (Ephesians 4:15). "If a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted" (Galatians 6:1). "The servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men… in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves" (2 Timothy 2:24-25). I wrote, in that same testimony, the only version of this I know how to keep: when I say that certain ways of thinking are foolish, it is not because I mean to harm. It is because I wish them to not be harmed. If that is not true of the hard word, do not say it.

Both at once, which is what love looks like

The Bible's picture of love is never nice alone or hard alone. It is both, from the same mouth, in the same visit. Nathan walked into David's throne room and said "Thou art the man," and before he left the room he said "The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die" (2 Samuel 12:7, 13). The wound and the balm from the same friend, and David restored; one man had told David a pleasing lie three chapters earlier and died for it, and another told him the truth and he lived. Jesus, to the woman taken in adultery, in this order: "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more" (John 8:11). Jesus, to the rich young ruler: "Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest" (Mark 10:21); the love comes first in the sentence, and then the hardest word the man ever heard. Paul, after the harshest letter he ever sent: "For out of much affliction and anguish of heart I wrote unto you with many tears; not that ye should be grieved, but that ye might know the love which I have more abundantly unto you" (2 Corinthians 2:4). And Paul to Peter, "I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed" (Galatians 2:11), which ended, years later, with Peter writing of "our beloved brother Paul" (2 Peter 3:15). The rebuke that is love ends in a brother, not a casualty.

Here is the test that sorts the three. Nice serves the giver's comfort. Harshness serves the giver's anger. Love serves the other's good and pays for it. Eli and Saul spared themselves. James and John and Job's friends indulged themselves. Nathan and Paul risked themselves. C.S. Lewis, who had buried a wife by the time he finished writing about it, put the cost in one line: "To love at all is to be vulnerable." And in an earlier book he had already said what love is when the feeling is gone: it "is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will." A steady will for the other's good, at cost to yourself, that will wound if it must and will grieve while it wounds. That is agape. It is what the Spirit produces, and it is what the flesh cannot.

The portrait, and the end

Read 1 Corinthians 13 again, not as a wedding reading but as a description of the Spirit's fruit in a man, and notice how little of it is feeling. Charity "suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). Every line is a choice. Every line is something the flesh does not do on its own. That is why Paul could say that without it prophecy, knowledge, faith that moves mountains, and even martyrdom "profiteth me nothing" (1 Corinthians 13:1-3); those can all be done by the flesh. Love is the one thing that cannot. And it is why "love is the fulfilling of the law" (Romans 13:10): not because love replaces the commandments, but because the Spirit who writes the law on the heart produces the love that keeps it, "for this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments" (1 John 5:3).

And Jesus tied it to the end of the age. Asked for the signs of His coming, He named wars, famines, false prophets, and then this: "And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold" (Matthew 24:12). Not the faith of many. The love of many. Cold love is the sign, because cold love is the Spirit quenched, the temple with the glory departed, the branch that has stopped drawing from the Vine. Ichabod is a loveless church. And the same chapter ends where this whole site keeps ending, on the two servants and the ten virgins: the ones who kept the oil and kept watching, and the ones who did not (see The End Times).

Augustine spent ten homilies on this one letter, and the thing he keeps returning to is how little there is to remember:

Divide thyself over a multitude of pages. That is the temptation of a site like this one, and the answer to it is not fewer pages but a shorter question underneath all of them.

Tertullian, two centuries earlier, had pressed the other half of John's letter, the half that tells you how to know whether the love has finished its work in you:

Where this lands

God never asked for a house of stone. He asked for a man with a contrite spirit, and then He moved in, and the way you know He is still there is love: not the feeling, which comes and goes, and not the niceness, which serves you, but the steady will for another's good that the Spirit pours into a branch that abides. It will tell the truth. It will bear the cost. It will grieve while it wounds and run down the road when the prodigal comes home. It is the fulfilling of the law, the fruit by which the world was told to recognize us, and the thing that goes cold when the end draws near. So the whole question of this letter comes back to the one word every other letter on this site keeps coming back to. Abide. Stay in the Vine, and the fruit is love. Leave it, and you can still be nice, and it will not be enough.

1 Corinthians 13 read whole, Words That Carry the Freight gathers this letter's word, agapē, with seven others. The early church on 1 John 4 is gathered at God Is Love. Related: The One Word, Over and Over, Who Walked Away in John 6, What the Word Says, and What We Believe It Means, Take Not Thy Holy Spirit From Me, The Vine, Loving the Church You Disagree With, Is a Third Temple Coming?, The Bored Ear, Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail, C.S. Lewis, and Every Warning, Gathered. Maximus the Confessor's test is paraphrased from his Four Hundred Chapters on Love (First Century), where self-love is named the mother of the passions and the lover of God is said to love all men equally; no public-domain English text is available to quote. The passages in the author's voice about order and peace are from his own testimony, written years before these letters. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of God are marked in gold, the words of Christ in purple. C.S. Lewis is quoted briefly under fair use from The Four Loves and Mere Christianity.