A Conversation on Love: Theology in Action

Levi: foreign welcome back to theology in action I'm Levi high tree here again with Pastor Tony Caffey and we are just passing up your one year anniversary here. 

Tony: That's right Levi. Yeah, I think we all kind of didn't realize that. 

Levi: Congratulations are in order then. That has been a blessing to have you here as a pastor getting to grow as a family and watch our church grow in what we're doing. Uh so we recently talked about um fear the Lord and how what that meant and how to properly fear and Revere the Lord. We in that came up often because it's it's kind of goes hand in hand is loving the Lord your God and what that should probably properly look like and we both kind of thought it would be a good idea to expound upon that, so that's what we're going to do here today. Let's talk about loving the Lord. 

Tony: Yeah, can you set out kind of a general definition? Yeah, I love uh important, right? So when we were talking about the subject, you know, our our colleague here Kyle sent us that what is love gift with the uh Roxbury crew, you know, dancing in the back seat of the car and so that's a pretty I guess little good snapshot of the way in which our um world misunderstands love in a silly way that's kind of the way it can be captured and a lot of cell a lot of love quite honestly is pretty much just self-indulgence in our modern day world. So we can talk about love more generally uh person to person but you kind of opened up with kind of the horizontal aspect of Love which uh I think is good because we learn love from God uh ultimately and so the greatest show of Love is the New Testament reiterates over and over again is this sacrificial Act of Jesus dying on the cross for our sins. So Jesus setting aside his Divine attributes for a time and the power that he has to, you know, destroy the people who were putting him to death and he loved them and he loved us enough to lay down his own life, die and then now because of that we get the remedy for our sin. So that kind of sacrificial Paradigm is really the way in which God expects us to love him back you might say, but also love one another and as it relates to the love for the Lord, I mean that's one of the things we try to emphasize with the fear of God earlier is that those things aren't mutually exclusive. We can fear and reverence God and have this respect for him but at the same time we can have this deep loving um even emotional, we'll talk about emotions here in a second, affectionate might be the better term for that, uh sense of of um, you know, desire for the Lord and that's good and um, you know, the characteristic person in the Old Testament was King David who had this heart for the Lord and was commended for that and sang songs to the Lord and played the harp and um there's something for us to imitate in that. 

Levi: Yeah, yeah. I do love uh going back to King David quite often uh in in my personal life just because there I getting to see his journey and his love for the Lord but even in his love for the Lord he's human and he's imperfect. 

Tony: Oh yeah. 

Levi: It's encouraging to someone who is also imperfect of seeing that he still loves the Lord and the still the Lord is still loves him and is still with him through that. 

Tony: Yeah and it's interesting to compare David with, you know, Solomon his son but also Saul his predecessor because they all had flaws, right? And yet David had something unique built inside of him that differentiated him definitely from Saul but even from Solomon who had a part of that and that was this this heart he was a man after God's Own Heart and so he made mistakes big big mistakes and suffered the consequences from him but he also had this Abiding Love for God. 

Levi: Yeah, so you talked about uh kind of that we were building that horizontal love to God first and vertical, vertical. Sorry, yeah. Yes, yes. But that should inform the horizontal, right? 

Tony: Exactly. 

Levi: That's kind of where I was going with this is it connects and that should feed into and help us to understand how to reach out, how to love others uh so I we talked about characteristics different in some characteristics or solely God that we cannot have, we cannot have any form of those attributes. Love I would say is obviously not to the same degree but is one that we do have, we do share that attribute that characteristic and you kind of build on that. 

Tony: Yeah, so the distinction is communicable and incommunicable. So there are certain things that God is that will never be, right? Uh those are his incommunicable attributes, he's Sovereign, but uh there's those characteristics that are communicable, uh Holiness, love, um and not perfectly but we can imitate those aspects of God's character and and love is one of them in the sense, you know, that the pattern that we get in the New Testament, I touched on this already, is, you know, as God has loved you, you love other people. It's got to sacrifice for you, you sacrifice for other people. And that it is quite different from the way in which the world um defines love and talks about love. Let me just so this this will be a little bit extended but I want to give you four counterfeit loves and just kind of walk you through what I think a lot of people consider or conceptualize when they think about love in our modern day world. So one counterfeit love is emotion-driven feelings. So emotions are important but uh, you know, when they're the locomotive in Your Love Train, it can do exactly, yeah. And uh and that's problematic. I think if you ask most people on the street today in America, you know, what is love, they would give you some kind of variation of that. Yeah, some emotional. 

Levi: And emotions are a problem because they change. They fade. They do. 

Tony: Yeah, it's like this feeling that it's remember that old BJ Thomas song, I'm hooked on a feeling, exactly. It's like that. I'm like, I'm not hooked on it but then yeah, it kind of runs out after a while and then I'm I'm going in somewhere else. Yeah, so emotions just they can't be the driving factor. 

Levi: No, they can't. 

Tony: No and and and that's problematic because it lacks kind of the decisiveness and the conviction that's part of biblical love. Here's another counterfeit love, uh love is self-indulgent lust. Yeah, so the example of this in the Old Testament is uh Tamar's brother who has this infatuation with his sister and then he violates her sexually and as soon as he does that he hates her. Yeah and what's interesting about that story is that the word that's used in the LXX is actually agapao for this love that he had for her. So a lot of people think agape and yeah agapao only means this kind of, you know, sacrifice. Yeah, no, it depends on the context and in that context it's describing something less than what God would want for us and and so and that's quite common in our day as well is you you have beyond the emotional side of things a lust for something that's uh can can be passing or or in some instances unfortunately can be even violent and dis dysfunctional and destructive. So here's a couple more. So love is truthless tolerance is really big in our modern day world. So I think um today people like to pit love against truth like, well, am I going to be loving or am I going to be truthful? I can't do both, Pastor Tony. No, actually, you're those two things are not mutually incompatible. In other words, so the great verse on this, which I've quoted a lot, is First Corinthians 13. and you have this amazing description of love and um the need for it within the Christian Community but one of the things that Paul says there is that love doesn't rejoice at wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. 

Levi: Exactly. 

Tony: So love likes truth. Yeah, you know, love and truth they hang out, they're friends, they have coffee together. They they like to be in concert. So when you create this false dichotomy between oh I can be loving or I can be truthful like but I can't do both, that's not consistent with Biblical love. 

Levi: An example I used recently there was I had a friend asking about their wanting to attend and get involved in a church that is a pretty well-known church and not not a healthy church I suppose is the easiest way to say and they ask me my take on it and I gave them like, you know, in all honesty here's where I think they're going wrong. I don't think it's a healthy place for you. And their response is really defensive and, well, you're God is love, you're supposed to love everyone. I'm like, what? I am. That's what and that was the what you're talking about there is is kind of the was the roadblock between us was don't give me truth. 

Tony: Exactly. Exactly. Why are those things headed against each other? You're basically asking let me put the fork in the in the socket. Yeah, yeah. So and and good segue. So I'll if in terms of a fourth counterfeit love, so sometimes you can swing the pendulum too far to the other side where I'll call this love uh as truth without Grace. So it's just, you know, brutal honesty and uh, you know, First Corinthians 13 speaks to this as well, love is patience, love is kind, love does not envy or boast, it is not arrogant or rude. So you know if your conception of Truth or being a truth teller is you know unpatient, unkind, envious, arrogant, rude, I mean you you need to go back to First Corinthians 13. You need to go back, you know, Jesus would even create this this scenario where Grace and Truth uh the balance of those the the the seeking after those things are in concert and um, you know, I've heard that describe that passage about Grace and Truth as, you know, well, you need 50 Grace, 50 truth or something like that. A better way to understand it is go all in on both, you know, 100 Grace, 100 truth and you can you can have that. I mean, you can, you know, love without um Grace, how does it does a Warren Wiersbe quote. So love without Grace is hypocrisy, I think. And Grace without truth is brutality. Yeah, or I might have got that backwards but um, you know, the balance of those two things and as we pursue as well truth um is all part of this this biblical concept of Love. Okay, so I'll give you a definition of biblical love. 

Levi: Perfect. 

Tony: So um so those are counterfeits, counterfeit ideas. Um biblical love is this, it's the joyful and willing sacrifice of self an imitation of Christ for the benefit of others and the glory of God. It's probably I'm probably taking some stuff from John Piper there and that I usually do. Okay, because he's good with definitional things. But a few, I'll give you some verses. Well, Ephesians 5:1 and 2, "Be imitators of God as beloved children, walk in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us." First John 3:16, "By this we know love that he speaking of Christ laid down his life for us and we ought to lay it down our lives for the brothers." So biblical love, this joyful willing sacrifice of self an imitation of Christ for the benefit of others and the glory of God. 

Levi: Yeah, it's perfect. I concise. Nails it on the head. So that that gives us an understanding of what love is and what is not and what is, well, I'll take I'll turn it on the hand. I won't present a question. We'll go Mark 12:30. Okay, "And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength." Uh, you know, there's context obviously before and after and I even go Romans 13:10 there and that's talking about if you're in low, if you're loving God and loving your neighbor that you're fulfilling the law and I think the law of Kyle who referenced who's behind the camera here and we have all talked about uh the aspect that the law is is kind of a can be a characteristics not maybe not the right word a showing of this is how you go about loving the God and obeying God and following what he says not saying that now we need to that can be a whole different video but uh the let's take this from the definitions and understanding of what is it to how do we do it, how do we apply it and why it's important? That's kind of why I hit those those scriptures there. 

Tony: Yeah, good. So you went back to the vertical yeah conception with uh loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength which is good because I mean that's wrapped up in um Deuteronomy in the Old Testament and what we're supposed to teach our children. That's something that Jesus reiterated in his ministry. And, you know, I think maybe in a modern day world we would kind of, you know, piece those apart is like, oh, your mind is where you do your thinking so you do it with your mind. Your heart is where you do your feelings so you love the Lord with your feelings. Uh really in the Hebrew concept heart, soul, mind and strength what they're what capturing there is basically the essence of all that you are as a being. So I that's really more of a Greek concept where you kind of differentiate, you know, heart, soul, mind and strength. What's he saying with everything that you are as that constitutes Levi, it constitutes Tony love the Lord, love the Lord with your actions and and I'm not afraid to say with your with your mind, with your thinking, with your feelings, with your with your will, even the the things that you do. Let let that be the driving force in your life and and maybe maybe we're still kind of in the conceptual world and not practical enough, but if you want to kind of work out the the practical side of it you'd say, okay, is what I'm doing here an expression of my love for the Lord? Is this, you know, am I living my life in in such a way that that my love for God is visible, is evident? Am I loving him at work as I'm uh not just working hard unto the Lord but also representing him in the workplace? Am I doing it with my family and the way that I'm honoring him and and loving others as an expression of his love for me? So I mean if you if you kind of parcel out your entire life and examine it that way, you really have something to pursue for the next 50 years or however long you live, you know. Whenever Sonia and I do marriage counseling I'll turn to the man and I'll say or pre-marital typically, you know, love your wife as Christ loves the church. You will never do that perfectly, never. Yeah, you'll spend 50 years trying to approximate that um and that's the Great Adventure of marriage and that's actually what makes it fun and, you know, go for that, let that be the standard and yeah, not to beat yourself up when you fall short, but, you know, everybody needs a goal in life and that's that's a good goal to shoot for. 

Levi: Absolutely, absolutely. And I do and we did go back I did take it back a little bit vertical but and as we've kind of talked about I I think that that kind of funnels out into if you if you're getting that accurate that that's going to funnel out into the relationships obviously part of loving God and obeying is he's asking us to love our neighbor. Yes, love our neighbor in that way. And I I for me there have been uh just kind of some of my backstory and testimony is I haven't always had the best examples of that and in relational aspect and I've had quite a bit of examples of not love and being taken advantage of so there's been times that it's been confusing and hard of, well, how how do I love these people and figuring out how to get this right between me and God and loving here has changed that example of how do I show that to others so yeah. 

Tony: Good. Yeah, I um that's encouraging Levi that you were able to to move that direction. That's and I don't think you're alone in that. I mean, we grow up in environments a lot of people where there's selfishness on display and even our father figures and our our mothers cannot always be the great examples that we need and and so we project on the Lord sometimes the the failures of our parents and others but uh sounds like the Lord has remedied that and yeah. 

Levi: Maybe sometimes still healing, you know, there's there's always that little bit of back in the past people can poke that scar a little bit. Uh but let's dig into that and talk about it a little bit on the other side of in this world that there's so many so much selfishness so much flesh so much uh sin in the world how what are some maybe we're moving to the practicality of this a little bit and what are some ways to contend against that and to try to keep our mind focused on even through that not becoming jaded or cynical or hard-hearted and it's continuing to love others. 

Tony: Yeah, no, I agree with you that the world is heading that way but but that's a great opportunity for the Christian witness because that's a stark or contrast when we do show sacrification. So when you do have a marriage that's really exemplifying uh sacrifice for one another that that's in Stark relief to the rest of the world or when you do have these uh, you know, love is kind, love is not rude, love is patient. When you do have these moments where uh somebody's in need of uh kindness and you you show that maybe as other people show in patience or show uh irritability that's an opportunity right there to speak for Christ in our world, in front of your children, in front of the church body. And so I mean to the extent that yes, our world has failed. I mean, to be honest, our world has been failing for thousands of years, right? Uh but let's say we do have an uptick in our world of, you know, unkindness and rudeness, you know, go on social media for a little while, just just take in all the rudeness that allows us to uh as Christians to create something different and to allow for uh even even influence. There's there's a better way than that and it's not truthlessness, don't fall into that ditch. 

Levi: Exactly. 

Tony: But it's it's a truth that is also at the same time patient and kind and not rude. So to be honest, there's opportunities pretty much everywhere all the time, at the grocery store, you know, in the social media communities, at school, at work. Um, you know, pray and and seek the Lord and ask for those opportunities to to really demonstrate that and you'd be surprised how how yeah, that'll show up. You know, the interesting thing there and we've talked about and we'll discussing what the gospel is and thinking of that but the interesting thing is, you know, that a lot of Christians want to be able to share the gospel and look for opportunities and, well, how do I share the gospel? Lord, present me an opportunity. Sometimes the answer is probably all the time the answer at some level is respond in love to people and that will open a door to sharing the gospel somehow. I we did a video that was probably will likely be posted before this uh with one of our elders Forrest talking about evangelism. 

Tony: Yeah, his example of hey, exactly. Exactly. Praying for the waiter. That's that's showing love, that's a great example of opening a door potentially to share the gospel. Very good. Thanks, Levi. Levi: Yeah, that is all the time we have here today. Tony, thank you again. 

Tony: Thanks, Levi. 

Levi: Once again, congratulations. It's been a blessing to have you at our church for a year. A good companion piece we have to this video, we referenced it a couple times today is our video on fearing the Lord and what that actually looks like. So check that out if you're interested in any more content. We have to offer messiahbible.org is where you can go to check out our live streams. We live stream on Wednesdays and Sundays. Until next time. God bless.