Tag: Love

Love Always Looks Up

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For the last few weeks, we have been talking about marriage from the standpoint of the Scriptures. We have talked about the main problem in marriage (sin), what God created it for (to make us more like Him), as well as some practical things we can do to make it better (practice submission and aim for holiness). Today we are finishing up this series by talking about the thing that has been rather noticeably missing in our conversation thus far: love. The Beatles were wrong that love is all you need, but it’s really important all the same. Let’s talk about how we can get that right to the benefit of our marriages and all the other relationships in our life.

Love Always Looks Up

When I do premarital counseling with a couple, one of the things we always talk about toward the end of the journey is where their expectations for the marriage are versus what the reality of marriage will likely be. It’s not necessarily an encouraging conversation (although I try not to make it too much of a bummer), but it is often a helpful one. What we do is that I give them a list of statements describing various aspects of marriage and how they think it will be. The couples are then supposed to mark which of the statements they think are true, and which are false. 

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Person in hoodie sitting on rock facing ocean sunset

Digging in Deeper: Colossians 3:12-14

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“Therefore, as God’s chosen ones, holy and dearly loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience, bearing with one another and forgiving one another if anyone has a grievance against another. Just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you are also to forgive. Above all, put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In my Bible app (I use the YouVersion Bible App which is absolutely worth using if you don’t already have one you like), one of the features is that it allows you to make and save notes about individual verses. Once you have done that, it puts a little blue box around the verse number. This probably won’t surprise you, but I don’t remember every verse I’ve ever written on over the years. I’ve made hundreds of notes in the app and written about many more verses directly on here. Much of my writing, though, comes out of notes I have made on the app. It’s always at least a little interesting when in looking for a verse that captures the heart of something I’m going to write about, I find that it has already served that purpose in the past. That happened this morning as I sat down to write. And appropriately enough, the theme I was writing about a year and a half ago is about the same theme we’re going to talk about today which happens to be conflict resolution. Then it was through the lens of Despicable Me 4. Today it’s through the lens of a great new movie called Green and Gold and yet another episode of Abbott Elementary.

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Digging in Deeper: John 17:22

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“I have given them the glory you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’ve argued before that all of our best stories are always ultimately rooted in the Gospel. The connections aren’t always obvious, but if you look and think a bit, you’ll find them. They’re all over the place. I recently watched the latest offering from the Predator Universe, Predator: Badlands, and was pretty impressed with just how many Gospel touch points there were. Let’s talk about what made this a much better film than I expected it to be. And just to be fair, I’ll go ahead and issue a spoiler alert.

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Digging in Deeper: Philippians 1:9-11

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“And I pray this: that your love will keep on growing in knowledge and every kind of discernment, so that you may approve the things that are superior and may be pure and blameless in the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ to the glory and praise of God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the slogans that came out of the Sexual Revolution was, “Love is love.” That notion is ridiculous on its face and was never about anything more than trying to give moral cover to a variety of sexual practices that had been rightly judged aberrant by pretty much every human culture up to that point in history. A significant part of the problem is the imprecision of the English language itself. We throw the word love around for all kinds of different situations where the emotion or feeling (and we are almost always referring to one or the other) that is actually appropriate to the setting ranges rather widely such that conflating one kind of love for another is foolish at best. The authors of the New Testament took a word in Greek that meant love, agape, and redefined it in a whole new way based on the character of Jesus. The result is that when we are talking about biblical love, if we get love right, we get a whole lot of other things right as well. Let’s take a look at this with Paul in these three verses.

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Digging in Deeper: Romans 14:13-15

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“Therefore, let us no longer judge one another. Instead decide never to put a stumbling block or pitfall in the way of your brother or sister. I know and am persuaded in the Lord Jesus that nothing is unclean in itself. Still, to someone who considers a thing to be unclean, to that one it is unclean. For if your brother or sister is hurt by what you eat, you are no longer walking according to love. Do not destroy, by what you eat, someone for whom Christ died.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In the early 20th century, some philosophers and literary critics, tired of what they saw as the restrictiveness of modernity, began to explore beyond its limits. Starting from the jumping off point that the meaning of a particular text isn’t fixed, they gradually began to apply this relativistic thinking to all of life. Thus cultural relativism was born. While possessing perhaps a grain of truth, relativism’s impact on culture broadly has mostly been poisonous that at least many Christian philosophers have been working to counter ever since. So then, why does Paul seem to propose a kind of relativism here? Let’s explore what he is saying and how we can create peaceful, welcoming churches.

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