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Love Again

                 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12:30)

                He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Luke 10:27)

Sometimes, I think I come back to these verses too often, but they were mentioned in a video I watched. In it, John Ortberg mentioned that the five commands in these verses involve the same “parts” of a person that Dallas Willard describes in Renovation of the Heart: spirit (heart/will), soul, body, mind (thought/feeling), and social relationships.

That simple, tiny adjustment in perspective isn’t quite mind-blowing, but it removes one of those things that has bugged me for years. What is the greatest commandment? Jesus’ answer is love God and love your neighbor. But there’s God, and there’s my neighbor. I’m not objecting to loving God or my neighbor, but that’s not “is.” That’s “are.” I know, that’s worse than trivial, and I have never actually mentioned it to anyone, but it’s been there.

And the connection that John Ortberg made (which is probably in Renovation of the Heart, but I’ve never seen it) makes all the difference in the world, because what with it, the greatest commandment makes more sense. The command is nothing more than for every part of us to function properly, as it was created to do. It neglects no part of us. And what that proper function that we were created to do looks like is loving.

Yes, I know, for most people, this is probably obvious. It’s a “Well, duh” moment. For me, it’s a piece of the puzzle finally fitting. So the next issue is dealing with the loving part. Since we are fallen, our parts don’t work properly. We don’t know how to love properly, or if we know, we aren’t consistent.

A popular saying in recent years is “love is love.” Somehow, I don’t think that my love for pizza is the same as my love for my parents. Undoubtedly, someone will tell me that I’m being stupid. What they mean is that my loving a man, or loving a woman, or someone of another race, or any other individual is the same as someone else’s love for the person they love. But does that mean that we love our parents, our children, our significant others and our neighbors in the same way? Most of us would admit that there are – and should be – some distinctions. That means that “love” is not love. At least some loves aren’t love.

Why do you love the people you say you love? I’ve heard that a person loves her loved one because he makes her laugh, or because she makes him feel good. If you pay attention to the media, love is sexual attraction. If you could never have sex with that person again, would you still love them in the same way? All of this is part of how our love is broken, because all of these have to do with what we get out of the relationship, not with what we do or give to the other. It’s not about wanting what is in the best interest of the other (unless we declare ourselves to be that best interest.) It’s about what is in our best interest.

What I think Jesus is saying is that love is love. Love is wanting what is in the best interest of the other – what will bring good to the other. It may result in certain behaviors when done to one person, and different behaviors when done to a different person. The problem is that much of what we mean when we say “love” isn’t healthy love. It’s toxic love, designed to please, feed, and enable us, regardless of what it does to the other. Love is so much more, and requires so much more than we want to believe. 

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