Clothesline 322 "Love Beyond Ourselves"

Jesus said: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”

Sounds like a tall order, doesn’t it? Loving God with all our being comes from the Old Testament. It was written on the tablets of the law that God gave to Moses. It’s our heritage; it’s what true Christians believe. And when Jesus came to live among us, he completed that command with the second part: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

There’s a lot going on here. We are to love God wholly, and love ourselves wholly, in order that we might love others wholly. Is that even possible?

Love. What a wonderful, powerful word that is! And it’s ironic that we use that same word to describe our attachment to food, clothes, cars, and anything else we claim to “love”…the same word we use when we profess our commitment to another person. Well, that one word…love…is all we have, but we might consider the Greeks interpretation of “love.”

The Greeks were able to separate their idea of love into four different words: storge, eros, phileo, and agape. Storge is used to mean a formal type of love, a love that was simply understood, where feelings were not often expressed. Eros is a self-serving, self-gratifying love, and our English word “erotic” comes from this word. Phileo is used over and over again in the New Testament to describe a reciprocal love, a "two-way street" kind of love. Our word ‘Philadelphia’—the city of brotherly love—comes from the Greek word phileo. And last but not least is agape. Agape love is the ultimate of all love…unselfish and unconditional and it only takes one person to exercise this kind of love. Agape love is a giving of oneself, a doing to meet the needs of another, with no expectations in return. Now, which Greek word for ‘love’ would you expect is used in these two commandments? Of course, agape love—that love that is unconditional, unselfish, expects nothing in return…that kind of love that no human being can possibly accomplish left to his or her own devices! So here we have two commandments given to us by Jesus himself, commandments to love God, to love each other, and to love ourselves in a manner that seems to be humanly impossible. Agape love.

Even God’s perfect love doesn’t take away the obvious fact that we are incapable of perfect love on our own, and our culture teaches us to put ourselves first, all with the worldly promise that we will feel better, look better, attract friends and influence people. But that’s not the world we were made for, is it.

We were created by a loving God, who wants us to love ourselves simply because we are His children. This same God wants our love in return, and only then will we be able to love others as he loves us. Sounds like a trinity of love: Love God, love ourselves, love others. Can you buy that? I hope so, because I can!