The languages that our Bibles were originally written in relied on a vocabulary that was more nuanced than the everyday English we use today.  As a result, some of the richness of meaning in many passages is obscured in translation.  In other cases, we may limit our understanding by simply defaulting to current common usage, without considering the full meaning of a word.  In either case, a more nuanced understanding of some of the key words used in our Bibles can dramatically impact how we understand and interact with God's Word.

 

Love                   Believe                   Glory/Glorify

Holy                   Repent                   Fallen

Fear                    Idolatry                 Redeemed

 

 

Love

Much is made of the word "love", both in scripture and in our culture. In scripture, its importance flows from two points which both originate in our God. The first is that Love describes God’s posture toward mankind collectively and each of us individually. The second is that Love describes what God expects of us as his children.

In both of these contexts, it is important to note that the “Love” being referenced is a verb (action) rather than a noun (feeling). By contrast, our everyday use of “love” is that of the noun, or feeling. How we understand this word when we read our Bibles is important, to our understanding of God, ourselves, and our daily walk with our Father.

The word “Love” as it is most often used in scripture is something we do, not the warm fuzzy feeling that greeting cards, romance novels, and movies portray. Love serves another while putting self-interest aside. The attention you give a demanding 6 year old. The time you give an elderly parent. The patience you show to your spouse. The helping hand that you lend a neighbor. The gifts you share with the needy.

Love is action; it requires effort. It has as its purpose the benefit of another.

Biblical Love is not about conjuring up affectionate feelings; it is a call to positive, other-centered action.

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Read through the preceding paragraphs and notice that this description of love as a verb, an action, is true of God’s love towards us. It has as its purpose the benefit of another – us. It reaches its pinnacle in His redemptive gift to us in Jesus, the Christ: 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.

And what does God expect of us? *To do the work of Love; to live lives devoted to love . Upon this one command, Jesus says, all of the law and the prophets depend. God is not asking us to hold warm fuzzy feelings for our neighbor; he is asking us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  "Do."

What does the work, the “do” of love, look like for us as followers of Christ?
Paul famously lines it out for us in 1 Corinthians 13… some highlights:

Love is Patient, Gentle, and Kind;
Love is not judgemental, nor proud,
but instead seeks to build up;
it seeks the other's good.
Love does not insist on the last word,
nor on having its own way.
Love is not easily angered,
and keeps no record of wrongs.
Love always protects, always trusts,
always hopes, always perseveres.

Elsewhere**, Paul encourages us to, as an act of love, bear with the failings of others. This "bearing with" is a big deal, because none of us is anywhere close to perfect, so we all need to patiently and graciously bear with one another.  This means we refrain from the correcting, judging, despising, coaching, fixing, insisting on being right, feeling superior or self-righteous that we are naturally inclined towards… this kind of forebearance is definitely a “do” and not a “feeling.”

And in the place of our instinctively unloving actions, we are to "put on" love in the form of humility, gentleness, kindness, patience, faithfulness, other-centeredness, goodness, and peace.

Love is not easy. In fact, as something that is hard for us to do, it requires the help of the Holy Spirit – notice how similarly the Fruit of the Spirit passage (Galatians 5:22) reads to these passages about the work of love.  And as the Fruit of the Spirit is more than a feeling, so it is with Love: it is something we are to do, an outward and other-focused expression of Grace, the rule of a life lived with God.

*(Matthew 7:12 & 22:34-40 & 25:31-46, Mark 12:28-31)   **(Ephesians 4:2)

 

Believe

...will open with James stmt of the obvious, then...   keep this short and pithy, may want to include the Idolatry bit.