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Aug 21, 2023 · Answer. The Bible contains numerous verses on love, including 1 Peter 4:8, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.”. The instruction to prioritize love first appears in 1 Peter 1:22 and is emphasized again in the fourth chapter. Peter’s use of the phrase above all underscores the importance of ...
- Not Play-Doh
- Love Originates in God
- Love Descends to Earth
- Love Extends to Others
- Love Obeys The King
- Love Looks to Heaven
- Puddles and Oceans
Of course, crude definitions like this are of the zeitgeist, where virtues such as authenticity and self-actualization reign. If it’s indeed true that “love is love,” then it’s also true that we’ve become love’s arbiter and our intuitions about it are above reproach, beyond the prying tentacles of laws and institutions and others’ arcane opinions. ...
The first and most important thing we must recognize about love is that it’s all about God. Love both originates in and is exhausted by our triune Maker—Father, Son, and Spirit. Jesus lets us peer into this reality in John 17. Here, in what’s sometimes called the “High Priestly Prayer,” Jesus prays for Christians both present and future. He asks fo...
While God’s love for himself is the white-hot nucleus of love, there’s more to see. God’s love for God “boomerangs” out and affects everything else. Consider the Bible’s most famous verse: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). How did God sho...
The thrust of Scripture is vertical, meaning it primarily deals with the relationship between God and man, Creator and creation. Often, however, God clarifies the vertical via the horizontal, using horizontal imperatives—“Do this”—as a test for the presence of vertical realities. So it is with love. Just as God’s love for us in Christ was sacrifici...
It’s also important to note that “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” is immediately followed by “You are my friends if you do what I command.” Jesus’s clarification introduces an element of authority into the definition of love, a clarification that grates against both our culture at large and our desire fo...
Finally, love looks toward heaven. It doesn’t just have the “now” in mind. This manifests itself in at least two ways. First, Christians love by reminding one another of their unchangeable status in Christ and by pointing one another to the cross, the empty tomb, and Jesus’s promised return. Second, because conversion is real and Christians are “ne...
The world and former president of the United States are right: love islove. But the God of the Bible—not us—tells us what this self-referential sentence actually means. He tells us of love’s origin—that love is essentially riveted outside ourselves, to the nature and character of the triune God. Second, he shows us his love in the sacrifice of his ...
- Alex Duke
Nov 22, 2023 · Answer. Christians often talk about the need to “speak the truth in love,” a command found in Ephesians 4:15. Many times what they mean is the need to share difficult truths in a gentle, kind, inoffensive manner. From a practical standpoint, we know that difficult things are best heard when our defenses are not up.
Jun 16, 2021 · That all will change in the consummation of the kingdom, when we will be in God’s presence forever and will no longer need spiritual empowerment for ministry in a fallen world (v. 12). Love is the greatest Christian virtue (v. 13). Faith and hope, which focus on what we cannot see in the present, will pass away when we see God directly, but ...
Aug 8, 2022 · In other words, joy overflows in love. Christian love is the overflow of joy in God that meets the needs of others, and that joy is a blood-bought joy from the death of Jesus. So, the first difference between secular love and Christian love is that our love is rooted in and is the overflow of the work of Christ and its effects in our lives.
Sep 24, 2021 · Presupposition 1: Biblical love presupposes the existence of a real, objective goodness. Biblical love presupposes there is a true and real goodness that is not dependent upon what I think or what I feel but has an existence that is completely independent of me. Obviously, that goodness is an expression of the real God.
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Should Love be a Christian's highest concern?
Is Love the greatest Christian virtue?
What does the Bible say about love?
Why is love 'greatest' in the Bible?
What does Peter say about love?
What does Biblical love presuppose?
The question is present in the New Testament itself, where the Johannine epistles expound the twofold love-command to mean that the ‘brother’ (here governed by the story of Cain and Abel, meaning the fellow-human) is the visible focus for love of the invisible God, and that in loving ‘one another’ we ‘know’ God by participating in his love for us (1 John 3:11–18; 4:7–21).
