Can Love be Wrong?
Leadership in Context with Keith Tucci
Episode 149
Is love the wrong justification to do something?
Is it possible to love the wrong person?
Is it possible to love in the wrong situation?
Is it possible to love the wrong thing?
I think the answer to all of those is yes. God warned us about loving Him above all else. We should love Him with all our hearts, with all our soul, with all our mind, and with all our strength. As human beings and believers, we have the capacity to love in a way that glorifies God and blesses our lives or to love in a way that does not glorify God and does not bless our lives.
PHILEO LOVE: Timothy tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil. The word love there, phileo, means brotherly love. It’s the kind of comradery you have when you connect with someone. If phileo is taken out of context, it becomes a soul tie or a bondage where you are connected to someone in a way that is not healthy. Phileo love is a kinship. It’s a love that says I want to help you, I want to serve you, I want to bless your life. There is gratification in it as well. There is something you receive from this kind of love.
AGAPE LOVE: In 1 Corinthians 13, God gives us several descriptions of what love is. The love described here is agape. It is defined as the God kind of love. It is love that is non-possessive. It’s love that has the other person’s betterment in mind.
When I served as a pastor, when someone would be in sexual sin, I often heard the response, “But we love each other.” That is not justification. It’s also not true. The type of love they were talking about was self-fulling love. If they loved God first, and loved each other in accordance with that, then they would not be outside of God’s law on how they expressed their love.
We see this in homosexual behavior. “They just love each other and are not hurting anyone,” has become a common response, even by Christians. This is wrong on two fronts. They are hurting each other because they are contributing to sin that will separate them from God, it is unhealthy sexual behavior. They really don’t love each other. That is what lust is. Maybe they have a phileo love, but that doesn’t give them the license to sin and then call it love.
We need to have biblical definitions of things. In our culture, we hear the excuse or justification that they just love each other. We need to understand that to love someone or love something, in the broadest possible terms, does not make it right. You can love the wrong person. You can love the wrong thing.
In a Christian relationship, if you really do love someone, you will not entice them to participate in any type of sin, let alone sexual sin, and masquerade that as love. Sex is not love. Sex in the Bible is the result of a lifelong commitment called marriage and the expression of that love.
God didn’t love us because we were cute. God didn’t love us because we could gratify Him. God loved us because of Who He was, and He decided to redeem us. That is agape love. When we love people like that and can sacrifice ourselves for those people, that is love.
As believers, we have to put things in context of the Scripture and call those things out. Love is not always justified. You can love the wrong things and the wrong people.
Join us next week as Keith Tucci continues to put leadership truth in the context of the local church. And as always, please like, share, rate/review, and invite others to listen. See you next week!
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