“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”
— 1 John 4:10–11
We say “love” easily these days. We love our friends. We love our families. We love our food and our pets. In progressive culture, love often means blind affirmation. To love is to validate, to never question, to bless every self-expression—even if that self-expression leads to self-mutilation or the harm of others.
But love has not always meant this.
Even in the 19th and much of the 20th century, love was still duty, affection, and care.
In the Reformation, love was covenantal: bound to God’s law, disciplined, tied to sanctification.
In the medieval church, love (caritas) was defined as willing the good of the other according to God.
In the classical world, love was bound up with duty to family (storgē), loyalty to friends (philía), or a whim of passion (érōs). The New Testament lifted up another word— agápē—sacrificial love that seeks the good of another even at cost to self.
And in ancient times, love was covenantal faithfulness (chesed), broad affection (ahavah), and tender mercy (rachamim)—God binding Himself to His people in steadfast love.
Only recently has “love” been thinned to mean unconditional affirmation. The command “love your neighbor” has been reimagined as “never challenge your neighbor.”
But even outside of progressive circles, “love” in English has become a relatively shallow and vague term more akin to storgē, philía, érōs, or even just a vague sense of liking something or someone.
In the Old Testament, God’s love was affectionate (ahavah), steadfast (chesed), and compassionate (rachamim). This three-chorded love was covenantal: He chose Israel, bound Himself to them, and showed mercy again and again, even when they wandered.
In the New Testament, that same covenant love is revealed in its fullness through Christ. The Word became flesh. God’s ahavah, chesed, and rachamim take on skin and bone, arms and blood. Agápē—sacrificial love—isn’t just declared but demonstrated when Christ laid down His life for His people. It’s revealed in Christ as the fullest expression of God’s covenant love.
But the word agápē itself isn’t inherently holy. What matters is its object. Paul laments that Demas “[loved] [agapēsas] this present world” (2 Tim. 4:10). John says the Pharisees “loved [ēgapēsan] the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:43). And again: “people loved [ēgapēsan] darkness rather than the light” (John 3:19).
Herein lies the danger: agápē can bind us even to what destroys us. To love the world self-sacrificingly isn’t salvation. It’s self-ruin. To love the praise of men with deepest devotion is to be unmade by the very affection that belongs to God.
The question is never whether we will love sacrificially—only what, or whom, we will love at our own expense. Misordered love corrupts; rightly ordered love redeems.
This is why Paul can say, “Love does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). The love revealed in Christ isn’t permissive but purifying. It doesn’t simply affirm us as we are. In fact, it rebukes us as we are—transforming us into what God intends us to be.
To love as a Christian today means more than small acts of kindness or gentle reassurance. It means truth joined with mercy. It means seeking another’s good even when that good isn’t what they want. It means refusing to call harm a blessing, or to baptize sin as virtue.
Love comforts the broken, but it also confronts the wayward. It lays down its own rights, but it will never lay down the truth.
So we love not by blind affirmation, but by faithfulness. To love is to seek the good of another as God defines it—in ways that polish the image of God in each of us, no matter how tarnished with sin, no matter how futile the effort may seem.
To love each other means speaking truth with patience. It means sacrificing comfort to protect the vulnerable. It means walking with the lost, but not walking them further into the dark.
But sometimes love meets a world too fractured to be whole. Two duties, both real, pull in opposite directions. To love one may mean loss for another. Here we learn what Paul meant when he said “the whole creation groans” (Rom. 8:22). In a fallen world, love becomes both costly and unclear.
To love a neighbor is not to indulge their every desire, nor to leave evil unchecked. The Samaritan bound wounds, but he didn’t bless the robbers who caused them. To love a thief doesn’t mean letting him steal again; to love a murderer doesn’t require us to leave his crimes unpunished. Love seeks a sinner’s repentance, not their ruin, while protecting the innocent as fiercely as it shows mercy to the guilty.
As such, we must entrust what we cannot heal to Christ, whose cross bore the weight of every torn love. And so we love as best we can, knowing that even our most faithful acts fall short.
Reflections
In my flesh, I’ve been wronged. I’ve seen others wronged. I’ve done the wronging myself.
How does a mere man balance mercy and justice? How can we possibly love rightly in a world so divided against itself? What, then, does it mean to love my neighbor?
It’s easier to speak of love in the abstract, harder to love the person across the street, harder still to love the one who wrongs me. And nearly impossible to love the one who causes harm to the innocent.
Yet the command is the same: love as God has loved us. Not blindly affirming, not carelessly indulging, but seeking the good that God Himself has defined.
This means my love will sometimes wound, because truth confronts. It will sometimes cost, because mercy sacrifices. And it will always fall short, because my own heart is still divided.
Yet Christ has already borne the weight of every failed attempt. To follow Him isn’t to love perfectly, but to love faithfully, trusting His Spirit to supply what I lack.
In this thought, I’m filled with both profound sadness from my own sinfulness and yet steadfast hope in His promise that our souls may yet be renewed through the very same Breath that gifted us life.
Prayer
Lord, You have loved us with an everlasting love.
Teach us to love as You have loved—
not in flattery, not in indulgence,
but in truth and mercy joined.
Forgive us for the times our love has failed,
for the times we have wounded unjustly
or withheld mercy out of pride.
Renew us by Your Spirit,
that we may love faithfully in a broken world.
And when our strength is spent,
bear our faltering love in Your perfect love,
until the day when all things are made new.
Amen.
Further Reading — Heidelberg Catechism Q&A
Question 107. But is it enough that we do not kill any man in the manner mentioned above?
Answer. No: for when god forbids envy, hatred, and anger, he commands us to [Mat. 22:39; Mat. 7:12] love our neighbor as ourselves; to show [Rom. 12:10] patience, peace, [Eph. 4:2; Gal. 6:1-2; Mat. 5:5; Rom. 12:18] meekness, [Ex. 23:5] mercy, and all kindness, towards him, [Mat. 5:45] and prevent his hurt as much as in us lies' and that we [Rom. 12:20] do good, even to our enemies.
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