Is there a difference between unselfishness and love, or are
they one in the same thing? Last week, I began a discussion on this topic by
presenting our common cultural beliefs on what makes an action selfish or
unselfish. This week, I will wrap up this discussion with a discussion on our common
cultural beliefs on love and compare them to the biblical beliefs on love.
The hardest part of defining love is that the word love is
used in so many different ways.
“I love pizza.”
“I love my friends.”
“I love my wife.”
All three of these uses of the word “love” are different.
The type of love I’m attempting to define in this article is the type that is
used in the context of saying, “I love my friends.”
How Do You Know Another Person Loves You?
Do you know someone loves you because he tells you he loves
you? Do you know someone loves you because she behaves a certain way when she’s
around you? Do you know someone loves you because he wants to spend time with
you? Do you know someone loves you because she texts you randomly to see how
you’re doing?
Based on my evaluation of our culture, most of us seem to
think that “love” is something (a choice or feeling or both) we have in our
hearts for someone else which we then express through our actions. However, I
could probably get agreement from most of you that our actions alone are an
insufficient indicator of whether we love someone. The better indicators of a
person’s love for us are the intentions behind a person’s actions.
When we think that someone does what he does because his
foremost concern is our goodwill, then we believe he loves us. Conversely, when
we think someone does what he does because his foremost concern is his own
goodwill, then we question whether he really loves us. Therefore, our way of
determining whether someone loves us is by weighing the amount of goodwill the
giver intended for us to receive against the amount of goodwill the giver intended
to personally receive. If the goodwill intended for us outweighs the goodwill
intended for the giver, then we would classify the act as loving.
How do we measure the intended goodwill of a person
performing an action? By and large, the way it seems our culture has chosen to
measure goodwill is to measure the benefit received from the action. If a
person performs an action with the intent of the recipient gaining more benefit
than that of the giver, then the action can be classified as loving. Conversely,
if the giver intends to receive more benefit from an action than the receiver,
then the action cannot be classified as loving.
Based on the way I defined unselfishness in my article last
week, it seems that love and unselfishness are synonymous terms with the purest
form of unselfishness/love being that someone does something for someone else
with the intention of receiving absolutely no benefit. However, I presented a
large problem with taking that approach to life which makes this way of living
unsustainable. Therefore, I will now present a different definition of love
which on the surface could look similar to the type of love I’ve described so
far, but at its core, it is very different.
Defining God’s Love
In order to understand God’s love, we have to first lay
aside our current paradigms about love because the way of thinking about God’s love
is actually quite different than the way our culture thinks about love.
We need to start by answering the question: Who does God
love the most? Does God love the world most? Does he
love people most? Does he love animals most? The answer to this question is that God loves himself more
than he loves anyone or anything else. If he didn’t love himself first and
foremost, then he would be contradicting himself when he told us to love him
first and foremost[1]
and he’d be worshiping an idol, which he also commanded us not to do.[2]
If God loves himself most, then how can he intend to do
something beneficial for himself yet not intend for himself to receive any of
the benefit from it? If you think this sentence doesn’t make any sense, it’s
because it doesn’t. It’s an irreconcilable paradox. God can’t both intend to do
something beneficial for himself and intend to not receive any benefit from it.
This means God must not define love as the intended benefit given and received
from an action.
So why does God do what God does? According to the Psalmist,
“Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”[3] And
according to Paul the apostle, “For it is God who works in you, both to will and
to work for his good pleasure.”[4]
The reason God does what he does is for his own pleasure. “The chief end of God
is to glorify God and enjoy Himself forever.”[5]
Hold on a minute! That’s not what we learned in Sunday school.
We were taught that God’s ultimate goal was to save lost people. A God who, first and foremost, seeks his own pleasure sounds pretty
selfish and, quite frankly, narcissistic. How can we really call this God
loving if he intends to receive great benefit from his actions? This is
precisely why we need to set our cultural paradigms about love on the shelf and
instead let the Bible, God’s Word, redefine love for us.
What is love according to the Bible? Since there isn’t a
verse in the Bible which says, “Love is defined as…”, I’ll turn to a definition
which well-respected contemporary theologian John Piper wrote in his book Desiring God: “Love is the overflow of
joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others.”[6] Since
this definition of love is so vastly different from our culture’s definition, I’m
going to briefly break it down.
If love is the overflow of joy in God, then joy (in God) and
love are directly connected to one another, with joy coming first and love
coming second. The more joy we have in God, the more love we have. Conversely,
the less joy we have in God, the less love we have.
This portion of the definition, however, is insufficient to defining
God’s love since God’s love doesn’t stop at joy in God. God’s love is the
overflow of joy in God which gladly meets the needs of others. The joy we find
in God overflows such that it not only willingly, but joyfully meets the needs
of other people. The idea of doing something because of duty’s sake or because
it’s the right thing to do has no room in this thought process since it is done
with disinterest rather than out of gladness.
This is the type of love God has. His love comes out of his
joy in himself, which leads him to gladly meet the needs of others, something
he does for us every single day. In the same way, this is what God’s love looks
like when it’s working in our lives; the love we experience from the overflow
of joy in God will gladly meet the needs of others.
Therefore, God’s love isn’t concerned with whether a person’s
intention was to receive benefit from an action, but rather, it is concerned
with whether the action is done joyfully as an overflow of a person’s joy in
God.
A Final Test
Before I wrap up, I want to test this definition with a
verse from the famous love chapter of the Bible in 1 Corinthians 13. In this
chapter, Paul wrote:
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. – 1 Corinthians 13:3
It’s reasonable to conclude that someone’s willingness to give
up everything he has and die are indicators of “good” motives. Yet, Paul claimed
that someone could perform these two actions, out of “good” motives, while not having
love. Moreover, he claimed there was gain to be received if the actions were
performed out of love, but no gain if the actions weren’t performed out of love.
On all these accounts, I’d say the aforementioned definition of love agrees
with this verse: If I give away all I have and deliver up my body to be burned,
but don’t have joy in God that gladly meets the needs of others, then I gain nothing. Rather than saying "No pain, no gain," we can say, "No joy, no gain."
This type of love is far superior and much more sustainable
than the type of “love” we experience when we do something for someone else
with the intention of not receiving benefit in return for our actions. We receive
a satisfying experience when we receive grace from God and we receive a
satisfying experience when this joy overflows in the act of sharing this grace with others.[7]
Conclusion
In the last two articles, I have attempted to demonstrate
that although unselfishness and our culture’s definition of love are
synonymous, unselfishness and God’s love are not synonymous. Unselfishness is
defined as doing an action with the intention of the receiver receiving more
benefit than the giver. Love, on the other hand, is the overflow of joy in God
that gladly meets the needs of others.
How do you know whether you have God’s love? Thoughtfully
and honestly answer these two questions.
- Do you have joy in God?
- Does the overflow of your joy in God cause you to gladly meet the needs of others?
–
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading these two articles. Feel free
to leave me some feedback on what you liked or didn’t like with the content of this
article. I’m more than happy to hear your thoughts and/or engage in a deeper discussion with
you on this topic. Additionally, if you have any requests for other topics you’d
like me to discuss in my blog, I’d love to hear from you.
[1]
See Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 6:5, and Matthew 22:37.
[2]
See Exodus 20:4-6.
[3]
Psalm 115:3.
[4]
Philippians 2:13.
[5] For
a much more in depth explanation of this point, see chapter 1 of John Piper, Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian
Hedonist, rev. ed. (Colorado Springs: Multnomah, 2011), kindle.
[6] Piper, Desiring God, 1973, kindle.
[7]
Ibid., 1981.
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