HOW WE LOVE

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back. Let's think about love.

I went to church a long time before I heard about the three Greek words for love. I did not learn them in church. I learned them from Campus Crusade for Christ.

Campus Crusade for Christ was a mixed bag for me. They were very much like a cult. They asked for total commitment and spoke negatively of local churches. Even worse, they extolled authority and disdained any who questioned it.

When it came to doctrine, they were deceptive and dishonest. Staff members did not like their disciples asking too many questions.

That was the bad. The good lay where good is always  tucked away before it spills out into the world. It hides within hearts of good will. Most of the staff members were very good people with adorable personalities.

In fact, I never met a staff member who was not adorable in some way. This made them easy to love. It also created a counterargument against resenting the less desirable aspects of the more fanatical staff members who were often in charge.

These Campus Crusade for Christ staff members boarded Christianity like the Love Boat and invited everyone else to come aboard. They taught the faith as if it were exciting and new, as if it had landed on earth just a few days before they arrived into our city.

Much of their teaching changed my life. The Four Spiritual Laws, Spiritual Breathing, and the first book I ever read about systematic theology steered me on the course I have kept to this day.

More importantly than the three things I mentioned, they taught the three Greek words for love:  eros, phileo, and agape. Those three words translate into erotic love, brotherly love, and God’s love.

Eros was not in the Bible, and for good reason. Phileo was a proper way of loving that occurred naturally among men and women. But it was agape that was the truly special love.

Let me switch tenses here to speak about now. Agape is unconditional love. Paul's great passage expressing in impressive detail what agape looks like can be found in 1 Corinthians 13.

It is my favorite passage ever written by Paul. He is at his best writing those wonderful words. They are read at weddings. They are read at times of despair and times of great hope. 

Paul writes of a love that transcends doctrine, partisanship, denominationalism, nationalism, bigotry, inhumanity, and all love that is conditional.

When I read those words, so electric with eternity, I know that to live according to them changes everything for me personally and for the world universally. I have read that chapter a million times, yet I still feel emotion stay my voice as the possibility of salvation for humanity comes pouring out of their utterance.

Paul never walked with Jesus like Peter and the other original disciples did, but in that passage he expressed the meaning of the Lord’s good news like no other since then and for all time.   

That passage will be my guide next time, when I seek to explain what it looks like to love the way God loves us.

Blessings...