Life is about love and relationships, I know few people who would dispute that. It’s like the Beatles said, “All You Need is Love.” But here’s a question for you: if nearly all of us know this, why is there still so much strife in our relationships? Why do they still fall apart so often, if we all know how badly we need them? Why are we so quick to blame each other, instead of just loving?

I spent a lot of my youth in pastoral counseling. I was a committed Christian—however poor my execution—and I was a very social, dare I say caring person. I was the Love Guy in my social circle. And even so, after my wife kicked me out of the house and everything in my life was on the point of falling apart, I realized that I didn’t even know what love was.

All of us have felt love. All of us have expressed love. So we assume that we know what it is, and would probably be offended if anyone said we didn’t. But I’ve come to believe that most of us are operating under conflicting ideas of what it really means to love someone, which eventually causes stress and trouble throughout all of our relationships.

Practical Love

For a thing to be fully practical and fully applicable to our lives, it has to be in accordance with the truth, in the same way that a mathematical equation is not practical or useful unless it is correct in its representation of real physics. This is where many people trip up, because we have a tendency to believe that true love is whatever appeals naturally to our own instinctive understanding of it. But a quick inventory of our various other instincts, appetites, and natural biases should be enough to show that instinct is not a sufficient basis for something so critical to our lives. For an effective (if crude) example: I am committed in faithfulness to my wonderful wife, Hope, and I believe that this is an important part of what it means for me to love her as my wife. I can assure you, however, that having sex with only one woman, and only within the bounds of marriage, is not my natural instinct. Further evidence is the dramatic difference between how different people “naturally” interpret the same event, even to the point of ending a relationship. No, clearly our instincts do not see the whole picture clearly. Some higher authority is required.

For me, that higher authority is found in scripture, in what I believe to be the true word of God. There is not enough time in this post to walk through all my arguments for this and still say what I have planned to say. But try the tools, and see for yourself whether or not they are suited to reality.

Turning to scripture, we can see that they have a lot to say on the subject of love. Far too much to cover fully, but I will briefly go over the basics. 1 Corinthians 13 gives us an inventory of love: it is patient, kind, keeps no record of wrongs, hopes all things, endures all things, and (amazingly) never fails.

But Jesus Himself gives us the simplest and most powerful treatises on love: first, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and spirit, and love your neighbor as yourself. And elsewhere, the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Simple. Powerful. Formidable, even. But we have heard these things so often, and heard them alongside the often disappointing efforts of well-meaning but weak believers like myself, that the dramatic power of them has been lost to time.

Let’s see if we can find it again.

What Love Is Not

If we are going to get at the root of a concept as large and powerful as love, then we could do worse than to start by cutting away some of the chaff. We have already touched on how love cannot be as vague as simply going along with our instincts, but many of us have done this (or at least been around it) for so long that we have developed tendencies to accept certain things without even thinking.

For example, consider this: love does not equal niceness. This tends to be a point of contention in today’s world, when so many people are so ready to take offence at one another. There’s a growing idea that doing anything to cause offence must not be loving, and therefore love must mean a kind of live-and-let-live attitude that leaves people pretty much to their own business.

The trouble is, firstly, that this does not play well with our established concept of truth. If truth is to be valued and sought, then it is also to be shared, and truth cannot be shared without denouncing other things as untrue.True love does not value the comfort of the beloved over their participation in the truth.

Comfort, in fact, does not appear to be a particularly high priority. We need not even go so far as Jesus to witness this (although if anyone is curious, Jesus frequently rebuked those He loved). If you ask most people, religious or secular, what is the highest, most intense expression of human love, they would probably say marriage. Some people might instead say sex, or a committed relationship, but I would argue that these things are appealing to the same relational bedrock.

Those of you who have not experienced it for yourselves, I would encourage you to speak with a couple that has been together for many years, who still love and remain deeply committed to one another. Ask them how far they got on niceness, going along to get along, and prioritizing comfort.

One of the great ideas being expressed in 1 Corinthians is that this need for boldness and blunt honesty does not apply only to spouses, but that we should all love each other enough to be uncomfortable, for the sake of breaking down barriers, discovering truth, and restoring deep, honest relationships.

This is, often, incompatible with the ideals of niceness. But this is not a great loss, because habitual niceness can only create shallow, surface-level relationships. The kinds of relationships that offer real fulfillment and bring meaning to our lives, like marriage, require the courage to be uncomfortably authentic.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd