Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 368 | What Is Love?

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Today we're taking a break from the news and focusing on the topic of love from a biblical, theological perspective, just in time for Valentine's Day! Christians don't need to worry about the ever-changing standards the secular world has for what love looks like, but rather we should be concerned with conforming to God's definition of love. C.S. Lewis wrote about four types of love: storge, philia, eros, and agape. Although there is a healthy and godly place for each of these types of love in our lives, they also present an opportunity for Satan to sow corruption. --- Today's Sponsor: ScoreMaster: Enroll in minutes & see how many points you can add to your credit score! Go to ScoreMaster.com/ALLIE today. -- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey guys, welcome to relatable. Happy Thursday. Hope everyone has had a wonderful week so far. So today, as promised, we are not talking about the news. We're not talking about politics. We're not even talking about culture. We are talking about love. I told you guys that we would do a more theological episode.

And so that's exactly what we're going to do. Now, if you are watching this on YouTube or even those of you who are listening to this, it might look different if you're watching. It might sound different if you're just listening. That's because I'm having it. to record from home today. So I've got my handy dandy computer and ringlight and AirPods. So hopefully it sounds and looks okay, but I know it's not the same as my beautiful set and wonderful microphone that I typically have. But we are going to make do. And I'm very thankful for advancements

and technology that I am able to do this. So today, we're talking about love. And what I'm going to do is to go through the different kinds of love that I'm going to talk about how they are manifesting themselves in society today in a more perverse way that we need to be aware of. And then what these types of love are supposed to look like and how we should pursue them as Christians. So this is not necessarily like heavy theology or anything like that. I'm going to use CS-Lewis's four loves kind of as a basis for all of this and use scripture and of course the gospel to talk about what this love means, of course, in light of Valentine's Day. And I hope that you, in this episode, feeling encouraged and feeling uplifted in the midst of all of this

craziness, I realize that that's what a lot of us are craving. That's what I've gleaned from the messages that you guys have sent that, yes, you like hearing about the news and politics, and you want someone, at least from my perspective, to make sense of of the chaos. But sometimes what we also need is to just take a step back and to remember what's most important. We actually need that all of the time, but sometimes we need to remove our focus

from what's going on in the world and kind of take that burden of trying to know and care about everything off and to remember what grounds us, what keeps us saying, what holds us together, what lifts our eyes up in the midst of all the craziness and the confusion

that goes on in the world. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about love. This might be the most bastardized word in the English language, the most misused, the most misunderstood, the most misapplied, manipulated word that we have. Whether it's confusing lust in love or jealousy in love or tolerance in love, we confuse it and get it wrong a lot.

And it's not just the secular world that gets it wrong. We Christians get it wrong. The church can sometimes get it wrong. We can idolize certain types of love. And it's really important that we get this right. What love really is, particularly as Christians, because we are constantly told by non-Christians that what we believe is not actually loving, that it is not loving to believe in John 14, 6, for example, that Jesus is the way, the truth, the life, and that no one comes to the Father

except through him. We are told that it's not loving to believe in Romans 323 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, that it's hateful to call sin, what God calls sin, to call truth, what God calls truth, to share the gospel, to do mission work, to be a Christian in any way that is countercultural. We are told, often today at least, that that is hateful. The only type of Christianity that is acceptable to much of the world today is the one that looks and sounds so. much like the world that it's almost indistinguishable. So we have to have the same views on abortion as everyone else, on marriage, on sexuality, on gender, on morality, on morality, on politics, on media, on entertainment, on truth. As long as Christians look and sound just like everyone else, we are considered acceptable and loving. But anything, any doctrine or any practice

that ventures outside of what secularism approves of, many consider to be hateful and wrong. And not everyone who doesn't share our faith, of course, believes this way, by the way, but increasingly, it seems, many do. Our responsibility is not to be considered loving by the world, but rather to conform ourselves to God's definition of love, his definitions, I should say, of love. First John 4.8 says, God is love. There are people in and outside of the church that this is, is their, this is their favorite verse. Almost everyone knows this verse. First John 4-8, God is love. God's very essence is love. Everything he does is therefore love. Everything he says is love. Every decree, every law, every action, every non-action is defined by motivated by and characterized by love. Love is everything that God is and everything love truly is.

can be found in God. That means if we get wrong what love actually is, we get wrong who God actually is. And if we get wrong who God is, we get wrong what love is. To know God is to know true love. And those who don't know God can have glimpses of forms of love because it's a gift of what we call common grace

that he's given to all people. Someone who is not a Christian, for example, of course, can love their friends well, loves their family, can love their spouse, their kids, their country. We are made in the image of God, which means that we are all made with a capacity to love, passionately, selflessly even. The Triang God is in constant communion, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, all embodying love, self-sufficient in their love. And we made in the image of the triune God also long for this kind of eternal love and fellowship. We were not made to be in isolation. We were made for love.

love, to receive and to give love. Now, let's talk about these different kinds of love, and we'll get more into the kind of misunderstandings of what love is, both in and outside of Christianity, and we'll also talk about what Satan in particular hates about these forms of love and how he tries to pervert them and tries to distract us from them. So C.S. Lewis wrote a book in 1960. It is compiled of radio talks that he had given in 1958 called the four loves. He categorizes love using four Greek words. I hope that I'm pronouncing them correctly. I'm sorry if I'm not. So Storgay or Storgi, meaning the natural familial type of love, philia, meaning a friendship love based on common interests, on bonding experiences. Number three, eros, meaning romantic love. And then number

for agape, meaning unconditional love. But first in the book, he discusses affection and the different types of affection that we see and that we experience in life. And he categorizes affection in three main ways. Need love, gift love, and appreciative love. And here is how he defines them. Quote, need love cries to God from our poverty. Gift love longs to serve and even suffer for God. Appreciative love says, we give thanks to thee for thy great glory. Need love says of a woman, I cannot live without her. Gift love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection, if possible, wealth. Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist, even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, but rather have it

so than never to have seen her at all. These are the kinds of love that all of us experience. Lewis argues in our lifetimes, and he also argues that we experience them in four different contexts or ways. And so number one is through that store gay love, the kind of familiar, love. This is a natural kind of love that, for example, parents feel for their children. It is involuntary. It's innate. It's almost just there. We just have it. We love our family, not necessarily because they share our common interest or even because of the quality time that we've spent together, but because we just do. Evolutionary biologists would say this kind of love exists innately for the sake of the

perpetuation and protection of the human species. So, for example, the protectiveness and affections that mothers feel toward their young is what compels her to keep them safe from predators to make sure that they have food and help them grow into strong, incapable adults so they then can have children and do the same thing. And as Christians, we see that this is part of our humanity because God made us this way, not just because we are his image bears, but also because it is what helps perpetuate human existence. Of course, because we live in what Christians call a fallen world, a world that has been marred by sin, tainted by sin, since the disobedience of Adam and Eve,

in the Garden of Eden, not every mother or father loves their child well. Not every parent's child relationship is defined by this overflowing natural love, but that is how it should be. Parents and children and siblings possess this kind of familial, diffusive, natural love toward each other. This is the kind of love that we most innately feel. And usually loves without bias, loves through mistakes, loves with familiar affection, and weather's many storms, because it's just there, because it is natural, not necessarily by choice, but almost because we are born with the sense of loyalty to those who are related to us, especially those in our immediate family. This is necessary. This is a good form of love. Then there is filia love, which Lewis describes

is the friendship love that can occur naturally just through clicking personalities, but also is created through bonding experiences or shared interests and common goals. This kind of love can be a need love is what he would call it. Many of us have been in a time when we feel that we desperately need a confidant or a companion and to share life with platonically. We want to talk to someone who's gone through a similar experience or season. It can also take the form of gift love in that we love our friend and want to do and give what is best for them.

It's very often an appreciative love in its healthiest form. It probably should be. We admire a friend just for who they are. We admire their personalities. We admire their gifts. We enjoy being in their company simply because we appreciate and are grateful for who and how they are. This can also be a very enduring love.

It's less natural than Storgie or Storge love, and therefore more often a choice and a series of choices, a choice to forgive, to keep in touch, to be honest, to encourage, to show up for this person. It is not as unbiased and undiscriminatory as Storge familial love, but for that reason, it can be stronger because it attaches itself to specific particular people for specific particular reasons and sometimes for specific particular seasons as well. Three, there is Eros love, which can be romantic love or even something as faced as lust. So it can be a true appreciation love.

The kind of stand back in awe of someone's beauty and amazingness love, it can be gift love wanting desperately to make this beautiful, attractive person happy, or to give them pleasure. It can be a need love. They can't sleep, can't eat, can't think about anything else, can't hold you tight enough kind of love. It can be a very healthy sexual attraction or it can be much more superficial and dangerous. It can be objectification. It can be a ravenous kind of love and lust that doesn't care at all for the dimensions of a person or the well-being or happiness of the subject of this affection. And then lastly, there is this agape love, which C.S. Lewis argues that it is the love which all other loves have to be in subjection to.

It is charity love. It is altruistic love. It's a love that demands nothing in return. The love that is a choice made time and again over and over through the ups and the downs of feelings, the unconditional, enduring type of love that we must show all people. This is the kind of love that puts others' interests before our own. It's the kind of love that is self-denying in nature. It is the most accurate description of what God is and what he has shown to us, a charitable, generous, selfless, undeserved, almost to us a logical kind of love that he bestows on you and me,

people who at one point wanted nothing to do with him, rebels, not because we are good, but because he is good. It's also this love that compels Christians to the kind of love that most people do not understand. A gracious, forgiving, sacrificial type of love toward our fellow man that is only possible in Christ. Here is how C.S. Lewis describes it. Quote, taking in the poor, illegitimate child is called charity. Charity means love. It is called Agape in the New Testament to distinguish it from Eros, sexual love,

store gay, family affection, and filia friendship. So there are four kinds of love, all good in their proper place. But agape is the best because it is the kind God has for us and is good in all circumstances. There are people I mustn't feel arrows towards and people I can't feel Storgia for. But I can practice agape to God, angels, man, and beast. To the good and the bad, the young and the old, the far and the near. You see, agape is all giving, not getting. Read what St. Paul says about it in 1, Corinthians.

Theans chapter 13. Love is patient and kind. Love does not envy or boast. It is not arrogant or rude. It is not insist on its own way. It is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends. Then look at a picture of charity or agafe in action in St. Luke chapter 10 versus 3335. This is the story of the Good Samaritan who cares for the man beaten by robbers, helps him and pays for his room at the inn. And then better still, C.S. Lewis says, look at Matthew chapter 25, or chapter 25 versus 31 through 46. This is the passage of Jesus explaining that what we do for the least of these, we do also for him. You see, C.S. Lewis says

that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for him when he was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem. Now, think about that. C.S. Lewis uses the word baby. You see that Christ counts all that you do for this baby exactly as if you had done it for him when he was a baby. Now, I don't want to get into politics, but just think about how that applies to some social political issues today, that what we do or what we condone for babies who are considered part of the least of these here on earth, Jesus is saying, you are also doing unto him as he was a baby in the manger at Bethlehem. C.S. Lewis goes on, you are in a sense, sharing in the things his mother did for him.

Giving money is only one way of showing charity to give time and toil is far better, and for most of us harder. And notice, though it is all giving, you need to expect any reward. How you do gets rewarded almost at once. So this is the kind of a nonsensical love that God calls us to. It's not a natural love. It's a supernatural one. In ourselves, we want reward, we want return, we want recognition, but agape love is more concerned

about the receiver of the love than it is about recognition or return or reward. So satisfied, it's agape love and simply being love that it doesn't need to be reciprocated to persist or to be joyful or to be grateful. That is God's love towards his children, which are those who are in Christ. that is how he has called us to love one another. We all fail at this on a daily basis. I know I do in how society as a whole, often the evangelical church included, has failed to teach us what love really looks like. And Satan is taking advantage of all of these misapplications

and misinterpretations and distractions from love. And I will describe all of that in just one second. So all love can be perverted. And this is what Satan loves to do. He hates true love. He hates store gay love, familial love. So he will do a variety of things to break it down. He will turn a mother's love for her child into smothering or spoiling.

He will turn a child's love for his parents into lifelong dependency. He will use this kind of love to deter necessary discipline by parents of children to return to kind of, to create a kind of blind loyalty that covers up and just. justify his wrongdoing, or he will let it rot and replace it with hate. He will use social media. He will use social movements, bad influences, spiritual warfare to encourage children to hate their parents. He will encourage mothers to resent their children for ruining their lives or ruining their bodies or ruining their careers. He will tempt fathers to take out his stress on his wife and children through bitterness, abuse, or cruelty. He will drive brother to hate brother like Kane and Abel

or sister to be jealous of sister, Satan hates that we are made in God's image and naturally have a propensity toward love of our families. He hates how the family structure reflects the gospel, how marriage between a man and a woman, as Ephesians 5 tells us, reflects Christ in his bride, the church. He hates that parents love for their children, either biological or adopted, reflects God's intense love for his children and gives us a glimpse into the sacrifice that was made, God sent his own son to die on the cross on our behalf. He hates everything reminiscent of God and his love. He hates all things related to him, anything that reflects him. So he will either pervert it or he will do away with it. And that's why he always relentlessly has his eyes

on the family. He wants to break it apart. He wants to break it down. He wants to weaken it. He wants to redefine it to the point of being completely arbitrary, replace it with the state or any other entity so that the gospel reflection in it so naturally and powerfully has will be done away with. He wants to convince mothers to kill the children in their womb. He wants to convince fathers to walk away from their responsibilities. He wants to convince children that their parents hate them. He wants parents to be made to believe that they have no special authority over their child's life. He wants husbands and wives to grow bitter, resentful, nagging, dissatisfied, constantly wondering what they're missing out on outside of marriage, willing to

fantasize to detach from their marriage. He wants their love to grow cold. He wants them on edge with each other. Constantly looking for flaws instead of covering faults with love. He wants irreconcilable differences. He wants infidelity, either in thought or in action, he hates marriage. He hates the parent-child relationship, he hates adoption, all that God created to be good in the family he wants to destroy. Storge is a type of love, and therefore it is a love that Satan hates and he will go after. He hates Fulia love. He hates the common grace gift of camaraderie. He hates the intimate friendship that we see between, for example, to people in the Bible, David and Jonathan,

a relationship that our modern Western sensitivities can't even read without wondering if there was a romantic aspect to it. But in reality, it was absolutely a form of phileia, a friendship love that we today, unfortunately, are scared of that we often run away from. Christians in general today don't seem to do a good job of encouraging intimate friendships. Friendships builds not just on admiration and appreciation, but a vulnerability, a willingness to carry one another's burdens. Many people in church, I've noticed, see the people that we worship with or that we go to Sunday school with or in small group with is just one compartment of our lives, but aren't our real friends that we're willing to actually struggle with, to live life with.

The Christian turn that we hear a lot is do life with. I know that's not true for all of you. Many of you, thank the Lord, do you have deep abey. friendships that you've found in the church. But I also know that many of you don't. You've tried to get plugged in. You've tried serving at various ministries. You've tried to pursue friendships.

But you keep getting the feeling that the people in your class or your group or the people that you're worshiping with, that they don't really need to be your friend, that they aren't interested in truly getting to know you and being a part of your life. Or the people around you at church, you feel like they don't talk about real things. or you hear them talk badly about someone else or gossip about someone that you know and you don't feel comfortable opening up to them. They give you the feeling that they can't be trusted with your secrets or your sins or your struggles. And so everyone just kind of stays superficial. Deep friendships can be really hard today. And Satan likes it that way. He relishes and how isolated

we've become, even before this past year, he adores this kind of hyper individualization that we've allowed to dominate our lives by way of personalized technology, social media, and joy seeing that we have been locked in our homes without being able to meet the love needs that all of us have as human beings. He wants us to feel fragile and fragmented and alone. He loves to get people into isolation so he can throttle them, tempt them with doubt, with self-loathing with despair. Just as he tempted Jesus in isolation, he will tempt us in the same place. He wants our minds. He wants our hearts. He wants our joy. He wants our peace. He wants it all. He hates it. He hates it. He hates good things. He hates that which reflects God. He hates you. He hates us. He hates the image of God in us. He hates the

goodness of God displayed in friendship. He hates the light and transparency that confiding in and confessing to a friend brings. He hates the burden sharing of friendship. He hates the laughing, the levity. He hates the forgiveness, the endurance of a good friendship. We are called God's friends when by grace through faith, we are saved from our sins. So no wonder Satan hates it. He doesn't want any earthly representation of it. He wants rivalry, conceit, deceit, jealousy, slander, anger, grudges, bitterness to build up between two people. He wants us to regard everyone who doesn't agree with us or anyone who calls us out for our sin or someone or anyone that we don't see as important anymore or who doesn't serve us in the way that we want to be served anymore as toxic to justify

turning our back on them and letting go of them. He wants to put every excuse in our minds to not forgive, to not reconcile, to think ourselves better than other people to exclude to betray. He wants people to find better friendships outside the church than within the church. Rosaria Butterfield is a Christian author. She lived as a lesbian for over 20 years before becoming new Christian and she talks about the strong community and friendships that she felt among other LGBTQ people, Christopher Yuan, he's been on my podcast. He shares a similar story in his books. He's written about the same thing. Friendships in identity subcultures are very strong and it's part of what makes them attractive. We all want to belong. We all want to be understood.

We all want to have some kind of identity. We want to bond with people who have common interest and experiences and struggles. Friendship is something that we all long for, and we will take it just about anywhere that we get it. If the church is not offering better, deeper, more enduring, sweeter friendships to people, to lonely people, to people struggling with sin, which is all of us, by the way, to single people, to people often rejected by society or rejected by their families, then we are failing. No one in our churches today should feel lonely. And I'm thinking, as I am saying this, by the way,

of all the times that I have failed at this and all of the times that I have also felt like I have been failed in this, all the times that I did not greet someone who looked on familiar at the Sunday service or all the people that we haven't invited into our home or all the people sitting by themselves that I haven't bothered to even wonder if they actually want, to be alone or if they're quietly hoping someone will notice them and welcome them. I'm thinking about churches I've been to in the past where there were a hundred different hurdles to jump over

to get into a small group where everyone already had their established click and just we're not interested in opening them up where I felt just kind of ignored. I think about the times. I've tried to build friendships with people in a church and there's just no reciprocal desire to get past a surface level relationship. And I just feel like sometimes I haven't known what to do. And so if that's you, I know I've been there. I have failed in this. I have been failed in this. So I can't pretend to have all of the answers to formulate perfect friendships. Many of you have asked me to do an episode on the subject. And quite frankly, while I am so thankful for the friendships that I do have, I have found that it has gotten harder and harder to find like-minded people who truly want

to help bear one another's burden. But I do think that we have to try. I think we have an obligation as Christians, especially today, to try. I think we have to pursue this kind of filia love when it's not happening organically, especially now. I think we have to be as hospitable and as intentional and as gracious and is welcoming as we can within the body of believers. We have to create a body within the body at our local church that isolated lonely people on the outside can look at and say, I want that. I want that kind of interdependence, that kind of love, that kind of loyalty and forgiveness and grace that they show one another. As someone who has been to and greatly benefited from counseling, I do wonder how much are dependence on therapy.

today could be replaced or at least supplemented by godly friendships. I am not suggesting, I want to make this clear, I am not suggesting that people who seek professional help should not do so when it's needed. I am not bashing professional help in any way. Biblical counselors have helped me, have helped many people I know. But it does seem today that it is becoming more and more normal to consider therapy as necessary to being happy, healthy, and whole. For some people, that may be true, but for many people, it might not be. What we may need is really just a friend or a mentor or a pastor, or better communication and marriage so that both husband and wife really know what's going on with one another. And I just wonder if the uptick and dependence on therapy has

anything to do with the fragmentation of society. How increasingly isolated we've become. How bad many of us are at deep friendships. Would more intimate friendships help us learn to cope better, to think through problems, to work through sin struggles, to understand our doubts? I think so. I think it would help.

And I just pray that God would help me play a better and a bigger part in this. I think this is a part of the church that needs to improve and needs to change in a lot of ways. Now, let's move on to Aeroslove. It may surprise you to hear me say that I think Satan also hates Aeros love. But if he had to choose, this would be the one that he would allow to dominate people's minds or replace all of society's understanding of what love is, but he still hates it. And the reason why Satan hates Aeroslob is because in its healthiest, holiest form. It is a natural good part of human nature that attracts us to a mate so that we will be bonded not just emotionally, but physically. And through that, enjoy the gift of sex that God

has given married couples and also if God's will to produce children through it. It is an intense, overwhelming feeling that you get when you first fall in love with someone. It can cause real joy, real happiness, real gratitude, real appreciative love, gift love, need love. It can make us rejoicing God and thank him for the recipient of our attraction and affection. But because it is a feeling and one that is largely based on external superficial factors, it's also very malleable. It can be very quickly perverted into lust, objectification, jealousy, possessiveness. It can justify things like pornography, which is the objectification and degradation of image bears, no matter how you spin it. It can lead to idolatry, making us believe the person we desire is our only ticket to happiness

and satisfaction. It can be very hard to control because it may feel like it overcomes us. But it's not inherently bad. God has given us the capacity for Eros because it's that magnet that attracts us to someone. It's an important form of love. It's a very gracious, Gracious gift is a form of love. It's not a lasting form of love, though, and it's not sustainable. We just can't have the can't eat, can't sleep, can't think about anything else feeling about our significant other forever and ever because we have to live our lives. We have to eat.

We have to sleep. We have to work. We have to be able to focus on other things. Eros will eventually give way and should eventually give way to a deeper, more enduring kind of love in a marriage. And it should. That doesn't mean that attraction and excitement just goes away forever, not at all, but it does mean that the force holding two people together is not just ravenous, raw, sexual attraction anymore, but rather commitment that's chosen continuously.

Eros can be very blinding. You've heard the term love is blinds that's talking about this kind of love. It can blind us to people's faults to the things that they do that annoy us or to very real character flaws. And again, that can be good at the beginning of a relationship because it encourages us to make these promises and commitments and to seek someone's happiness at all costs. But eventually, the rose color glasses are taken off. And we are forced to really know who people are. And when we truly get to know people on a deep level, the person that we fell in love with, we know their anxieties, we know their fears, we know their struggles, you know their sins,

we know their weaknesses, their flaws. Then we are made to choose over and over again to love them, to stay committed to them through anger, through annoyance, through disappointment, through distance, through hardship. And we are demonstrating a much better type of love in that, a love that is much closer to God's love for us, a love much more reflective of gospel love. And it's that love that Satan wants to stop at all costs,

as long as he can stop arrows from getting there, from evolving into agape love, then he can keep us where he wants us, as long as he can convince us. That, for example, sexual health just means having sex with as many people as we want. And that consent is the only qualification for what it means to have a healthy sex life. Not exclusivity, not chastity, not commitment, not merit, not emotional stability, not true love. as long as he can convince us that objectifying people and lusting after people and coveting other people's spouses is normal and fine, he can keep us in this perverted state of arrows that prevents us from agape. Satan doesn't have to tempt us to hate, to tempt us to sin. He just

has to pervert love, to redefine it, and to tell us that it's okay. And it's all in an effort to prevent us from giving and receiving that greatest type of love, which is agape love. Agape love is a choice that is empowered by the Holy Spirit to love others as we have been loved by God, to care for others as God calls us to care for them, to forgive others as God has forgiven us. It first requires a right view of God and then a right view of ourselves. We have to understand that we don't deserve the love and salvation given to us by God, that we are sinners. We are dead in our sin, as Ephesians 2 says. We're not just bad people.

We're not just a little bit off. We didn't just miss the mark. We are dead in our sin and we have to be made alive through grace by faith in Christ. We deserve nothing. That's what Ephesians 2 also tells us that our salvation is given to us by a gift, that we can't boast about it because it was given to us as a gracious gift by God. There is nothing that we can do to earn it. God has every right and reason to cancel us forever because we have sinned against him.

but because he is so exceedingly gracious, he chose instead to send his son to pay for our sins that we can be reconciled to him, forgiven, and live with him forever in glory and peace and joy. So if God, who has the right and the ability to cancel us eternally, has chosen not to, if in love he has predestined us for adoption as sons, as Ephesians 1-5 tells us, if he has said that we are not too dirty, that we're not too inconvenient, that we're not

too much of a burden or too simple or too needy for him, if even after we squandered all that he gave us and wallowed in the mud with pigs as the prodigal son did, and he still came running after us when he saw us in the distance, and surely we have no right not to be gracious towards other people. It is an understanding of ourselves and of the gospel that empowers us to show mercy, because we have been shown mercy. I saw, a lot of you probably saw this too. Another display of vicious cancel culture this week, a baby wrap company apparently was going to patent

to kind of baby wrap that had allegedly originated in black and brown communities. She was raked over the coals publicly by the same bullies who did so to taking care of babies for voting for Trump. And the poor owner of the company has apologized profusely multiple times, only to continue receiving anger and criticism from people who you think judging by their comments have never done anything wrong in their lives. I guarantee you they all consider themselves very non-judgmental and tolerant people. No, it's not just accountability. Remember,

accountability requires authority, as we've talked about before, to hold someone accountable. You have to have the authority to do so. And we do not have the authority to, quote, hold a accountable, random people on the internet, and it is not accountability to gin up outrage about a small business owner or individual publicly because you don't like something that they did or something that they said. If these people really cared, which that's fine for them to do, they would send a message. They would set up a phone call. They'd have a private conversation. But instead, just like totalitarians have done throughout history, they went for public shame because it's not about accountability or gentle correction. It is about self-righteous superiority. It's not even about the people that these

bullies are claiming to defend. It's about pride. This is the exact opposite of agape love, and Satan loves it. He loves self-righteous faux piety disguising itself as accountability. He loves using the mallets of political correctness and social justice to bludgeon race and charity out of people's hearts. He loves feeling people with a sense of baseless pride and arrogance that empowers them to cast stone to other people. He loves it. He loves the bullies. He loves to see people bullied, and he loves when people count out to bullies rather than appeal to the authority and the forgiveness of God. It brings him happiness because it pushes out the possibility of agape as a defining feature in our hearts and in society. Satan has not just replaced agape love with this kind of

self-righteous indignation, this hypocrisy, this non-forgiveness and cruelty that we see, unfortunately, in our political and social sphere today, but also with a more subtle but equally damaging alternative, which I've written a book about and have talked about many times on this podcast, and that is self-love. We've heard the phrases over and over again. You can't love other people until you love yourself or Jesus tells us to love our neighbors. We love ourselves. So we must read that as a command to love ourselves and loving our neighbor is predicated on our ability to first love ourselves. But that kind of minting. those phrases are actually a misunderstanding of what love really is as God defines it.

Christians are called to agape love at all times in all ways, which is not compelled by self-love, which waxes and wanes and changes based on what our feelings are, what our emotions are that day, what people have said about us, what we think about ourselves, but is by nature and by definition a supernatural love that is compelled by God's love. Our ability as Christians to show agape love, is not dependent at all on what we feel about ourselves or what we think about ourselves. Thank goodness, but is entirely dependent on God's love for us, which is overflowing and eternal. And it's unchanging. It is through God's agape love that we in turn can give agape love to other people. The love that we have for ourselves is natural, not in the sense that we always like ourselves

or appreciate who we are, but that we are always looking out for our own interests, protection, preservation, to satisfy our own hunger and thirst, we are born that way. Even those who tragically die by suicide are in pursuit of what they unfortunately view as a form of their own relief. So what we are called to, when we are called to love our neighbor, is not affection. It's not necessarily liking them, just as we don't always feel affection towards ourselves, but agape, a sincere and selfless pursuit of the well-being of other people, an insistence upon giving grace and eagerness to forgive a constant decision to see the best in and to think the best of those around us. Satan would love for you to think that you have to love the

reflection in the mirror before you can go out and serve the vulnerable, before you can go out and love your neighbor. He would love for you to keep reading these self-love and self-help books and to endlessly be in the pursuit of self-fulfillment and self-actualization before you take a step outside of yourself to love other people. He would love to put you down the path of trending narcissism to convince yourself in some kind of righteous sounding way that you don't need to go out and serve other people because you haven't quite mastered self-love yet. He would love to distract you in that way. And he would love to distract you from what it really means to view ourselves rightly in God's eyes, which is that we are made in the image of God,

all of our physical and emotional capabilities that we have, all the talents that we have are good gifts from God that we should thank him for and are to be used. not for our own glory, but for God's glory. We are called to love our neighbor with the grace that we have been shown by God with the agape that we have been shown by God that does not preclude us from making righteous judgments as we are told to do. In John 724, that doesn't mean that we condemn everyone or that we cast stones at them, but we are still able in our love to judge right for wrong. It does not mean that we cannot say what good and bad is, far from it. Remember, if God is love, then everything he says and does is love. That means him calling certain things

sin is love. That means him defining right and wrong is love. That means his commandments to Christians are love. He defines what love is. He embodies what love is. So no matter what people tell you about love, meaning accepting and celebrating all behavior and lifestyles no matter what and pretend that everything is equally good, that is not love. Charity without approval is possible and preferable for the Christian, according to God. Hospitality without agreement is possible and good. Kindness and generosity without condoning sin is possible and good. And people will tell you that you cannot love people and condemn certain behavior or certain lifestyles, but God tells us a different story. Jesus' life shows us a different way. He shows us how much he cares about sin by

dying in undeserving death to cover it. He tells people, even people in dire situations, to go and sin no more. And if God says something is good and right and true or God says something is wrong and dark and bad or false, then we are absolutely being loving by agreeing with him and sharing that agreement with other people. Still we will be told that that is hate. And when we are slandered in that way, rather than reacting in anger, we will. bless the slanders, we pray for them, we share the gospel with them, that's Agape love. That's what Christ compels us to do. That's what He enables us to do. That's what I so often, we so often fail to do. Nevertheless, it's what we are called to do. Agape is impartial.

It doesn't try to love some kinds of people more or less or better than others when it comes to this kind of sacrificial service. It considers everyone more significant than ourselves, as Philippians 2-3 tells us the exact opposite message that we are hearing from the world today. And it's incredibly freeing, incredibly freeing that we do not have to meet the world's demands of righteousness and love and goodness and compassion

because clearly, as we can see from the behavior of so many people, especially when it comes to the cancellation of those that we simply disagree with, that they don't know what love is, that they don't actually know what empathy and compassion is, all of these things that they say that they embody unless they know God and agree with what he says is good and right and true, what he says is love and hate and right and wrong.

They don't know it. And it's our responsibility to continue to show and to steward what love actually is without abandoning God's standards of right and wrong because he is our example, not just in love, but also in morality and in truth. He can empower us to bring all of those things together. The great news is also that no matter what stage of life that you're in, you can experience, you can experience a God by love.

If that is the greatest type of love, if you are unmarried, if you don't have kids, if you are single, that does not exclude you from being able to experience the most joyous, fulfilling types of love that God has given us the capacity to feel and experience that God has shown to us through his son. So I know Valentine's Day can be really hard for people who really want to be married or they really want to be in a relationship and it's just not that season in their life yet, or they don't know if that's ever going to happen for them. Understand that that's, that Aeros love is not the only kind of love that exists and it's not the only or even most

fulfilling kind of love. The friendship love that God has given us, the familial love that God has given us, and most importantly, the agape love that God has given us can be experienced by all people. And I pray that we would get better, that I would get better at showing those types of love to people that need it, because that's what we need. We need a lot of love right now. Yes, we need truth. Yes, we need biblical unity. Yes, we need clarity and confusion and all of those things, but we need a whole lot of love right now. And I pray that we would do that rightly. We would do that obediently. We do that in a holy way that reflects God and his gospel. All right, that's all I up for today. Happy Thursday, happy Valentine's Day. We will be back here on Monday.