What is love? – Fruit of the Spirit, Love – Part 2

What is love?

Our culture has many ideas about love. Here’s a great medley of some famous love songs. How do these songs describe love?

So many love songs.  What is your favorite?

How does our culture describe the word “Love”? 

I LOVE Pizza!  Really? 

What does someone mean when they say they love pizza?  What they are doing is sharing their opinion.  They actually mean they LIKE pizza.  If they have too much pizza too fast, their opinion might change.  But that’s okay.  There’s nothing wrong with getting sick of pizza. 

My mom’s sister-in-law’s family owns a local fruit company, and I worked there as a part-time job in high school.  It was pretty amazing watching all those shiny apples come down the line.  They look so good, and we were allowed to eat them.  I love apples, and they were amazing.  But after a few weeks or months of picking apples nonstop off the line, packing apples, boxing bags of apples and cleaning the conveyor machines.  Guess what happened?  Yeah, I got sick of apples.  I never really loved apples after all.  I liked them, and my opinion changed.  

So when our culture refers to love, it actually often really means “like.”  Imagine how love songs would change, if we swapped the word “like” when the song originally uses the word “love”?

So what is love?

Love mentioned here in the fruit of the Spirit passage (Galatians 5:22-23) is the word agape. Maybe the best way we can distinguish agape from our culture’s description of love is to think for a minute about the time Jesus used the word agape when he said “Love your enemies.”  Was he talking about a feeling?  An opinion?  About liking them? 

Do you feel good about your enemies?  Do you like them?  No!  No one does.  That’s why they’re our enemies.  But when we live in line with the way of Jesus, though we have deep struggles with our enemies, we are to love them. 

We agape our enemies.  What is this word agape? 1 Corinthians 13 describes it best. In the next post, we’ll learn what how agape helps understand love.

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash