Unselfishness vs. Love - Part 2

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.

1. Do you have joy in God?
2. 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.

Unselfishness vs. Love - Part 1

Is there a difference between unselfishness and love, or are they one in the same thing? Let's take a deeper look at this question.

Unselfishness and Love Are the Same, or Not

We all know selfishness when we see it. Someone who is selfish is focused on him or herself. For example, we, in our society, would call a person selfish who is capable of working but spends his days lazily sitting in front of his television eating potato chips while receiving government assistance. We would probably also call a person selfish if he decided to withhold his usual $30 from the offering plate on Sunday mornings to buy a new fishing pole.

I think the vast majority of people in our society would agree that the behavior exhibited in these two examples is selfish. But not all cases are this easy to determine. Let’s say Bob is Joe’s client and Bob mentions to Joe that he’d really like to go perch fishing on Lake Erie sometime. Joe happens to own a boat and knows where and how to catch perch. Would it be selfish of Joe to offer to take Bob fishing on his boat with him? The action doesn’t seem to be enough information to determine whether Joe is being selfish. Instead, we need to determine the motive behind the action in order to determine whether it’s selfish. If Joe offers for Bob to go with him because he likes Bob and merely wants to do something nice for him, then we’d say it’s probably not selfish. But if Joe offers Bob a chance to go fishing with him because he expects to get more of Bob’s business, then we’d probably conclude that it is selfish.

In all of these examples, whether an action is selfish or unselfish seems to be derived from whether a benefit is expected as a return on the investment. If Joe offers Bob the opportunity to go fishing because he expects more business from him in return, then we would deem the action selfish since Joe is expecting to get something in return. But if Joe offers Bob the opportunity to go fishing simply because he wants to do something nice for Bob, then we would deem the action to be unselfish because he had no expectation of receiving anything in return.

Based on my observations, I would conclude that most people in our society would equate doing something without expecting anything in return with love. As a result, we could substitute the word “love” for the word “unselfishness.” We could then say that Joe is demonstrating love (not in a weird way) to Bob by offering him the opportunity to go fishing with him on his boat if he does it without expecting to receive anything in return.

At this point, we may think we have answered the question: unselfishness and love are the same. According to our society, the most loving act is the most unselfish act and the most unselfish act is the most loving act. But I don’t think we are quite done answering the question because unselfish love poses a rather large practical challenge which cannot be solved within this idealistic framework.

The Problem with Unselfish Love

Let’s say I wanted to be the most unselfish, and therefore the most loving, person to ever live on earth. In order to be completely unselfish and loving, I would have to do everything without expecting anything in return. I would have to invite people over for dinner without expecting them to return the favor. I would have to give money to homeless people without expecting them to repay me. I would have to cook dinner for my wife, Amy, and watch chick-flicks with her without expecting to receive anything in return. These three examples all make sense and sound doable.

But what would happen if I treated every aspect of my life that way? I would have to pour my money, time, and energy into my friends’ lives without expecting anything in return. I would have to go to work every day without expecting to receive a paycheck in return. I would have to invest my money without expecting anything in return. I don’t know anyone who would willingly give in these ways without expecting anything in return. In an ideal world, living out this type of unselfish love is the epitome of the life most of us desire to live. But it practically doesn’t make sense. It’s impractical to always give and never receive.

Do you have needs? I know I do. I have lots of needs. I have a need for food. I have a need for water. I have a need for sleep. I have a need for relational intimacy. If I were to live completely unselfishly/loving, then I would have to do what I do without expecting any of these needs to be met. If you’ve ever lived with one of these needs going unmet, then you realize how dysfunctional you become. For example, let’s say I didn’t eat for a few weeks because I decided I was only going to behave unselfishly. To dedicate time in my schedule to eating would be selfish because I would be doing it in expectation that I would receive benefit from it. As a result of not eating, I would probably starve to death, meaning that I wouldn’t be able to love anybody anymore because I’d be dead! How loving is that?

The conclusion we may draw at this point is that there are certain “selfish” actions which are acceptable and necessary because they allow us to be unselfish the rest of the time. But this raises another dilemma: Where is the line drawn? Which “selfish” actions are acceptable under which circumstances and which ones aren’t? I can see it right now: We could develop a list a mile long describing whether a given action is selfish or unselfish based on the situation. And then we could spend the rest of our lives trying to memorize the list so that we can make ourselves into unselfish people.

Thankfully, I’ve discovered a much better way to live than creating long lists of acceptable and unacceptable actions based on an infinite number of life situations. But unfortunately for you, you’re going to have to wait until next week to find out what it is.

Influence vs. Power

I was chatting with a friend one day who rather bluntly claimed, “You have power over other people.” In response, I said, “I don’t have power over anybody, but I do have influence on a few people.” In response, my friend asked, “What’s the difference? Aren’t they the same?”

What do you think? Is there a difference between influence and power, or are they simply synonyms–two words used to describe the same thing? After a thorough study of these two words, especially as they exist in the leadership world, I have concluded that although the outward behaviors resulting from a person having power versus influence may be similar, power and influence are actually very different from one another.

A Lesson from the Aztecs and Apaches

In their book The Starfish and the Spider, Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom shared a historical story about some encounters the Spanish Conquistadors had with a few native groups in Central America. Here’s a summary version of the story.

When the Conquistadors, led by Hernando Cortés, first landed in Central America in 1519, they stumbled upon the Aztec capital city of Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs were far from a primitive, nomadic civilization, boasting a population of 15 million people, their own language, an advanced calendar, and a central government, led by their fearless leader, Montezuma II. Upon arriving in Tenochtitlan, Cortés met with Montezuma II, took all of his gold, and killed him. Within two years, Cortés and his men had managed to cause the collapse of an empire which traced its roots to centuries before the time of Christ. Similarly, when an army of Spaniards let by Francisco Pizarro landed in South America in 1532, they took all the gold, killed Atahualpa, the leader of the Inca Empire, and brought the empire to ruins in two years.

As the Spaniards pressed north, they encountered another tribe, the Apaches. From the outside, the Apaches seemed primitive and nomadic compared with the Aztecs and Incas. They didn’t have large cities, roads, or even a central government. Their weapons were far less superior to that of the conquistadors. Yet, the Apaches managed to resist the Spaniards for hundreds of years. It was only when the United States became involved that the Apaches were brought under governmental control. How did the Apaches manage to resist far-superior armies for so long?

Centralized vs. Decentralized Systems

Brafman and Beckstrom’s answer to this question was that the Apaches persevered against the Spaniards because of the way they were organized. Unlike the Aztecs, Incas, and even the Spaniards, all of whom were centralized, the Apaches were decentralized. In a centralized system, there is a hierarchy of command, making it very clear who is in charge. Power, in a centralized system, is held by a few people who demand obedience from people lower in the chain. We are all very familiar with this type of system because it’s the system used by most large corporations. The CEO is in charge (outside of the Board of Directors) and has the most power within the company. If he tells you to do something, you’d better do it. When the Spaniards eliminated the people with the power, the common people were easily conquerable.

Contrast this system with a decentralized system which has no hierarchal structure and therefore, no clear leader. According to Brafman and Beckstrom, “If and when a leader does emerge, that person has little power over others. The best that person can do to influence people is to lead by example.”[1] Rather than being held by a few people, power, in a decentralized system, is equally distributed among all the people. Now, this is not to be confused with anarchy. Unlike anarchy, rules certainly exist within decentralized systems. But instead of needing a group of police to enforce the rules, everyone has the power to ensure the rules are enforced. Wikipedia, although centralized to some degree, is a good example of a mostly-decentralized system since anyone, not just a few select people, can write and edit Wikipedia articles. Because Wikipedia is open-source, it gets a reputation for not being a source of reliable information, but a study conducted by Nature magazine found that Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia are almost equally accurate.[2]

If there’s no leader, how are decisions made within a decentralized system? Specifically, how did the Apaches make decisions? Within each tribe, there were people known as Nant’ans who were spiritual and cultural leaders. They didn’t have power to tell the rest of the tribe what to do; instead, they had great influence on the people. The rest of the tribe followed the Nant’ans, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Even when an opposing army, such as that of the Spaniards, showed up, the Nant’ans didn’t possess the power to command the tribe to fight. Rather, they would just start fighting and the others would join in too.

All the centralized civilizations the Spaniards encountered were quickly disposed. But since the Apaches were decentralized, the Spaniards couldn’t dispose of them. They didn’t have a central headquarters, central leader, or property that the Spanish could eliminate and thereby bring their civilization to ruin.[3]

Influence vs. Power

At this point, hopefully you see the connection between this story and my discussion on influence versus power. A centralized system operates by distributing power to a few people at the top of the chain. If I have power, people follow me because I’m higher up in the hierarchical chain of command. When I command them to do something, they must obey me. If they decide not to obey me, I have the authority to punish them for their disobedience.

A decentralized system, on the other hand, operates by the influence of many people within the system. If I have influence, people follow me because they respect and trust me, not because they are forced to obey me. They can choose to do something completely different than what I’m doing, and they won’t suffer any consequences for their actions because I have no authority to punish them.

This contrast demonstrates that influence and power are far from being synonyms for one another; actually, they are two very different things and work in two very different ways.

Conclusion

Is it better to have influence or power? I don’t think one is a silver bullet in every situation. There are times when influence seems to be what’s needed and there are times when power seems to be what’s needed. But personally, I would much rather have influence than power. Power is very fragile because it only exists when a system exists to support it. Once the system collapses, the power held by a few people in the system collapses with it. Influence, on the other hand, lasts beyond (sometimes far beyond) the life of a system. People like Aristotle, Jesus, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Luther King, Jr., even though they’ve been dead for many years, all continue to have influence on people around the world.

---

[1] Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 19.

[2] Ibid., 74.

[3] The preceding information is from Brafman and Beckstrom, The Starfish and the Spider, 10-26.