All We Need is Love
Part II—If It’s Really Love!
Has America become a place that creates monsters, like the student who killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, the father who murdered schoolgirls in Pennsylvania, the mother who drowned her own babies, or the 2 boys who killed their classmates in Littleton, Colorado? Some would blame guns, but earlier generations who openly carried and wore firearms never did things like this, in arguably more violent times. Vocal advocates have demanded less violent movies, TV, video games, and even cartoons, but these troubling shootings in schools, of all places, seem only to have gotten worse.
Something deeper inspires such evil. Violence in the commission of a crime is bad, but killing out of the crazed anger of a disturbed person demands an explanation. Is the formation of a sociopath mere accident, or do predictable factors encourage his or her creation? Even when evil or illness provokes a person to do something terrible, do other influences aggravate or worsen such actions? I believe the answer is yes, and I have written previously that the remedy is love. This prescription, however, will be effective only if love is the real thing.
What is love? Love is not just feeling good about or because of someone else. Love isn't sex either! Love has little to do with most of the romantic nonsense so popular today. Indeed, much of what is called love is precisely, regrettably, love's opposite. What is the opposite of real love? Love's opposite is selfishness, and much of this culture's conception of love, based more on Hollywood than the Church, is selfish, self-centered, and self-serving. Such "love" makes for poor marriages, poor parents, love-impoverished children, and adults twisted into despair and evil. Couples "in love" come together, looking to satisfy needs that their emotionally-starved parents left unmet; they separate when they discover that their needs are still unmet, never seeing that two selfish people can never force each other to meet their needs. Needy women, especially, look for love in romance and end up used by men who want only sex, or they have children become angry, neglectful, abusive mothers, when they find that babies are needy, self-centered little sinners equally thirsty for love. Even pets require patience, attention, and sacrifice, often unlikely from self-centered owners or parents who want the pleasure but not the responsibility of love. Self-centered students become teachers seeking money and respect, bureaucrats incapable of real "public service" leaders who covet power and influence, or even pastors who in their own pain and insecurity easily become autocratic, domineering, isolated, and lonely, unable to offer much comfort or encouragement to their needy, pain-filled parishioners. To whom may angry, struggling, suffering teenagers or haunted, guilt-racked adults go for encouragement, comfort, answers, hope, or simple, genuine love?
What is love? Love is “unconditional, sacrificial concern for the welfare of others,” especially those to whom they are bound by blood and promises . The example is Christ who gave his life for those he loved in spite of their rebellion and sin. Genuine love displaces selfishness and its best-known elements, apathy and hate. In truly loving couples, each allows their own needs to be second to the needs of their partner, in a divinely-blessed arrangement that satisfies both. Loving each other, their love produces children, and they willingly sacrifice almost anything in their love for their kids. Loving parents create secure, confident children, who even as teenagers can withstand the pressures and temptations of adolescence, the cruelty of their peers, and the evil in their own hearts. They can also stand firm against the amoral, nihilist brainwashing of a godless, self-centered culture, able instead to deny themselves and genuinely care for others.
I believe the erosion and distortion of love has been taking place over the last 40-50 years--over my entire lifetime, as it happens--and the gradual changes have been significant. The culmination of this process took center stage in the presidency and behavior of Bill Clinton, who epitomizes self-centeredness in a postmodern blend of tradition without meaning, values without discipline, and compassion that is all image and little substance.
The slippage started during the 1950's post-war boom, as well-meaning parents, who lived through the Depression, gave their children everything they themselves had lacked. They were the last generation of loving parents , produced in faith, adversity, and discipline. Their children were confident but already beginning to show the neglect of busy, prosperous parents. This generation of the 60's and 70's rejected faith and values, self-discipline, and authority, both individual and institutional, perhaps in response to the growing self-involvement of their parents, perhaps in a spoiled self-importance in their own hearts, and undoubtedly at the encouragement of elitist teachers who had already rejected traditional culture and America’s Christian heritage .
Their counter-culture values were subsequently institutionalized as "hippies," by subversion, took over what they could not take with sit-ins. They now dominate education, business, government, and even the churches they once despised; an authority they rejected, they now infuse with intent to indoctrinate with their system of selfish values. In an even greater prosperity, their selfishness drives them to even greater excesses--one income is no longer enough. Even with two incomes, self-indulgence overspends bountiful incomes, abusing consumer credit, so that they need deny no wish or impulse. They gratify every desire for sensation, passion, money, possessions and power. Appearance replaces substance, and personality supplants character. Self-indulgence feels better than self-discipline. Since feeling good has become paramount, delayed gratification or sacrifice is now labeled repressive and unhealthy. Real values are feared because they might interfere with satisfying their "needs," which now include virtually any desire or pleasure.
I believe subtle, and not so subtle, forms of secular society's selfish, self-centered values have infiltrated Christian thought, far more than Christians or Christian leaders acknowledge. Filled with a desire to feel, people flock to churches that dwell on experience but quietly neglect absolute standards of right and wrong. People seek God's will in an attempt to assure their own happiness rather than show respect for God's sovereignty. They subjectively validate decisions to avoid God's revealed guidelines and instead gratify their selfish wishes, and then they proceed to imagine and justify it to be God's will. Many Christians, comfortably prosperous, find poverty and racism, right outside their church walls, easy problems to ignore as they live securely in their upscale suburban neighborhoods. Indeed, they often spend millions of dollars to relocate in order to escape struggling urban neighborhoods rather than invest in and reach out to those neighborhoods. The great debates on doctrine and theology have disappeared; in their place are trivial but often bitter quarrels over minor matters, with many scorning thought and reason as opposed to true faith. Churches, once effective in outreach, generous in missions, and powerful in influence, now struggle to survive, with little to interest the unchurched or even their own children. Here, too, form has replaced substance in superficiality, personality, the health and success gospel, and self-indulgence.
My calling and ministry is peacemaking. I encourage Christ-like love as an alternative to war-making. I train people to create, preserve, and restore healthy relationships, with love and reconciliation my objectives in problem solving, mediation, or arbitration where relationships been stretched or broken. In smaller, non-religious disputes, I often appeal to an "enlightened self-interest" to get parties to mediate instead of going to court. In the larger issues of relational trouble and significant upheaval, selfish stubbornness and greed lead Christians and churches to fight. Even in matters of faith and practice, Christians behave willfully and arrogantly, claiming God as their ally and flagrantly disobeying the "Great Commandment" that makes love in our spiritual "family" relationships paramount, even over seemingly important religious differences. Truth without love easily becomes intolerant, dishonest, and untrue. Love, without the truth already discussed here, often becomes love's opposite, satisfying individual interests rather than God's will. Ministry, tradition, and church life without love are empty, pointless, and valueless (I Corinthians 13:1-3), "full of fury signifying nothing!"
What becomes of children in this self-centered environment? Praise God for committed, loving families who still nurture obedient, disciplined, and confident children, who know that their parents love them and who themselves are capable of self-discipline and love. Sadly, some church families differ little from their unchurched peers; their kids suffer the same lonely pain, feel unimportant and unaccepted, and become depressed and angry, as their parents pursue an American dream-lie instead of the hope of Christ. Self-centered Christians, with no example or model for lovingly working through conflict, have marriages that fail at a rate comparable to non-Christian couples. Upset by the discomfort of a changing world, concerned Christians have "taken up the fight" for values, often sacrificing love and respect and, thus, their ability to share the gospel in love (a failure Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson have addressed in their new book, Blinded by Might, and a problem the late Bob Briner called Deadly Detours, in his book by that name).
One of those value issues, ironically, is life. Regardless of most rhetoric, selfishness and profit, not health or freedom, drive the "pro-choice" position and abortion industry. At the other extreme, selfishness inspires both "assisted suicide,” because self-centered people rarely learn to bear suffering so they prefer to escape it above all else, and euthanasia, as self-serving folks seek ways to avoid paying for "worthless" elderly or handicapped persons, whom they see as having little "quality of life." Infanticide is growing as parents and medical professionals agree that babies with severe disabilities might be better off starving or "being allowed to die," reflecting more a selfish preference of the parents rather than any honest speaking on behalf of children. Why do we have trouble understanding a young mother who, perhaps for no other reason than convenience, drives her car into a lake and drowns her children? Why are we surprised at the ambivalence regarding "assisted suicide" and a Kevorkian who kept pushing the envelope? Why do children who kill themselves or others for their own twisted emotional reasons baffle us? People who are self-centered shouldn’t find any of these matters puzzling; they are the natural outcome of caring only for oneself. If we find these behaviors troubling, then what can be done?
The answer is straightforward. Love IS the answer, if love is unconditional acceptance and sacrificial compassion. For a believer, forgiven all sin, assured of eternity, and confident in the sacrificial love of Christ, obedience, virtue , faithfulness, and self-control are motivated by love for God as well as love for others. God's love and loving Him transforms us. Loving others shows them God's love and transforms them. Why else is love for God and others the Great Commandment? How else can love encapsulate all other commands (Galatians 5:14) to be called the "Royal Law" (James 2:8)?
Isn't this what Jesus meant in Matthew 26:10-14, when he said, "Because of an increase of wickedness (selfish self-centeredness?), the love of most will grow cold?" These may not yet be the days to which Jesus referred, but our times are surely moving in that direction. Will the American people recognize it? Will believing citizens face their own "wickedness" rather than look for some other scapegoat? My fear is that, in guilty denial, Americans will keep looking elsewhere and blaming anything, everything, and everyone else as the problem itself continues to worsen, all the more reason that Christians must commit themselves aggressively to the right course, the loving course, the one consistent and essential to their calling .
Next time, in Part III of “All We Need Is Love,” I will discuss the application of real love to the problems we face. However, I need to make one last observation: Without Christ, without the love of God in Christ, real love is nearly impossible. The self-centeredness I have described is bound up with the sin that is every human’s problem, a problem no one but Christ has escaped. Faith in Jesus Christ begins the process of replacing selfishness, apathy, and hatred with genuine love. Glimmers of love, enough to stimulate a hunger for it, can be found in moments of giving and sacrifice, but self-absorption and self-centeredness put out most of those sparks before they ignite. God’s love, profoundly demonstrated in the death of Jesus on a cross for that very sin of self-centeredness, replaces and satisfies the disappointed desire for love that is also universal. If we know that God loves us, then we can begin to risk really loving other in the ways I discuss, next time.
Has America become a place that creates monsters, like the student who killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, the father who murdered schoolgirls in Pennsylvania, the mother who drowned her own babies, or the 2 boys who killed their classmates in Littleton, Colorado? Some would blame guns, but earlier generations who openly carried and wore firearms never did things like this, in arguably more violent times. Vocal advocates have demanded less violent movies, TV, video games, and even cartoons, but these troubling shootings in schools, of all places, seem only to have gotten worse.
Something deeper inspires such evil. Violence in the commission of a crime is bad, but killing out of the crazed anger of a disturbed person demands an explanation. Is the formation of a sociopath mere accident, or do predictable factors encourage his or her creation? Even when evil or illness provokes a person to do something terrible, do other influences aggravate or worsen such actions? I believe the answer is yes, and I have written previously that the remedy is love. This prescription, however, will be effective only if love is the real thing.
What is love? Love is not just feeling good about or because of someone else. Love isn't sex either! Love has little to do with most of the romantic nonsense so popular today. Indeed, much of what is called love is precisely, regrettably, love's opposite. What is the opposite of real love? Love's opposite is selfishness, and much of this culture's conception of love, based more on Hollywood than the Church, is selfish, self-centered, and self-serving. Such "love" makes for poor marriages, poor parents, love-impoverished children, and adults twisted into despair and evil. Couples "in love" come together, looking to satisfy needs that their emotionally-starved parents left unmet; they separate when they discover that their needs are still unmet, never seeing that two selfish people can never force each other to meet their needs. Needy women, especially, look for love in romance and end up used by men who want only sex, or they have children become angry, neglectful, abusive mothers, when they find that babies are needy, self-centered little sinners equally thirsty for love. Even pets require patience, attention, and sacrifice, often unlikely from self-centered owners or parents who want the pleasure but not the responsibility of love. Self-centered students become teachers seeking money and respect, bureaucrats incapable of real "public service" leaders who covet power and influence, or even pastors who in their own pain and insecurity easily become autocratic, domineering, isolated, and lonely, unable to offer much comfort or encouragement to their needy, pain-filled parishioners. To whom may angry, struggling, suffering teenagers or haunted, guilt-racked adults go for encouragement, comfort, answers, hope, or simple, genuine love?
What is love? Love is “unconditional, sacrificial concern for the welfare of others,” especially those to whom they are bound by blood and promises . The example is Christ who gave his life for those he loved in spite of their rebellion and sin. Genuine love displaces selfishness and its best-known elements, apathy and hate. In truly loving couples, each allows their own needs to be second to the needs of their partner, in a divinely-blessed arrangement that satisfies both. Loving each other, their love produces children, and they willingly sacrifice almost anything in their love for their kids. Loving parents create secure, confident children, who even as teenagers can withstand the pressures and temptations of adolescence, the cruelty of their peers, and the evil in their own hearts. They can also stand firm against the amoral, nihilist brainwashing of a godless, self-centered culture, able instead to deny themselves and genuinely care for others.
I believe the erosion and distortion of love has been taking place over the last 40-50 years--over my entire lifetime, as it happens--and the gradual changes have been significant. The culmination of this process took center stage in the presidency and behavior of Bill Clinton, who epitomizes self-centeredness in a postmodern blend of tradition without meaning, values without discipline, and compassion that is all image and little substance.
The slippage started during the 1950's post-war boom, as well-meaning parents, who lived through the Depression, gave their children everything they themselves had lacked. They were the last generation of loving parents , produced in faith, adversity, and discipline. Their children were confident but already beginning to show the neglect of busy, prosperous parents. This generation of the 60's and 70's rejected faith and values, self-discipline, and authority, both individual and institutional, perhaps in response to the growing self-involvement of their parents, perhaps in a spoiled self-importance in their own hearts, and undoubtedly at the encouragement of elitist teachers who had already rejected traditional culture and America’s Christian heritage .
Their counter-culture values were subsequently institutionalized as "hippies," by subversion, took over what they could not take with sit-ins. They now dominate education, business, government, and even the churches they once despised; an authority they rejected, they now infuse with intent to indoctrinate with their system of selfish values. In an even greater prosperity, their selfishness drives them to even greater excesses--one income is no longer enough. Even with two incomes, self-indulgence overspends bountiful incomes, abusing consumer credit, so that they need deny no wish or impulse. They gratify every desire for sensation, passion, money, possessions and power. Appearance replaces substance, and personality supplants character. Self-indulgence feels better than self-discipline. Since feeling good has become paramount, delayed gratification or sacrifice is now labeled repressive and unhealthy. Real values are feared because they might interfere with satisfying their "needs," which now include virtually any desire or pleasure.
I believe subtle, and not so subtle, forms of secular society's selfish, self-centered values have infiltrated Christian thought, far more than Christians or Christian leaders acknowledge. Filled with a desire to feel, people flock to churches that dwell on experience but quietly neglect absolute standards of right and wrong. People seek God's will in an attempt to assure their own happiness rather than show respect for God's sovereignty. They subjectively validate decisions to avoid God's revealed guidelines and instead gratify their selfish wishes, and then they proceed to imagine and justify it to be God's will. Many Christians, comfortably prosperous, find poverty and racism, right outside their church walls, easy problems to ignore as they live securely in their upscale suburban neighborhoods. Indeed, they often spend millions of dollars to relocate in order to escape struggling urban neighborhoods rather than invest in and reach out to those neighborhoods. The great debates on doctrine and theology have disappeared; in their place are trivial but often bitter quarrels over minor matters, with many scorning thought and reason as opposed to true faith. Churches, once effective in outreach, generous in missions, and powerful in influence, now struggle to survive, with little to interest the unchurched or even their own children. Here, too, form has replaced substance in superficiality, personality, the health and success gospel, and self-indulgence.
My calling and ministry is peacemaking. I encourage Christ-like love as an alternative to war-making. I train people to create, preserve, and restore healthy relationships, with love and reconciliation my objectives in problem solving, mediation, or arbitration where relationships been stretched or broken. In smaller, non-religious disputes, I often appeal to an "enlightened self-interest" to get parties to mediate instead of going to court. In the larger issues of relational trouble and significant upheaval, selfish stubbornness and greed lead Christians and churches to fight. Even in matters of faith and practice, Christians behave willfully and arrogantly, claiming God as their ally and flagrantly disobeying the "Great Commandment" that makes love in our spiritual "family" relationships paramount, even over seemingly important religious differences. Truth without love easily becomes intolerant, dishonest, and untrue. Love, without the truth already discussed here, often becomes love's opposite, satisfying individual interests rather than God's will. Ministry, tradition, and church life without love are empty, pointless, and valueless (I Corinthians 13:1-3), "full of fury signifying nothing!"
What becomes of children in this self-centered environment? Praise God for committed, loving families who still nurture obedient, disciplined, and confident children, who know that their parents love them and who themselves are capable of self-discipline and love. Sadly, some church families differ little from their unchurched peers; their kids suffer the same lonely pain, feel unimportant and unaccepted, and become depressed and angry, as their parents pursue an American dream-lie instead of the hope of Christ. Self-centered Christians, with no example or model for lovingly working through conflict, have marriages that fail at a rate comparable to non-Christian couples. Upset by the discomfort of a changing world, concerned Christians have "taken up the fight" for values, often sacrificing love and respect and, thus, their ability to share the gospel in love (a failure Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson have addressed in their new book, Blinded by Might, and a problem the late Bob Briner called Deadly Detours, in his book by that name).
One of those value issues, ironically, is life. Regardless of most rhetoric, selfishness and profit, not health or freedom, drive the "pro-choice" position and abortion industry. At the other extreme, selfishness inspires both "assisted suicide,” because self-centered people rarely learn to bear suffering so they prefer to escape it above all else, and euthanasia, as self-serving folks seek ways to avoid paying for "worthless" elderly or handicapped persons, whom they see as having little "quality of life." Infanticide is growing as parents and medical professionals agree that babies with severe disabilities might be better off starving or "being allowed to die," reflecting more a selfish preference of the parents rather than any honest speaking on behalf of children. Why do we have trouble understanding a young mother who, perhaps for no other reason than convenience, drives her car into a lake and drowns her children? Why are we surprised at the ambivalence regarding "assisted suicide" and a Kevorkian who kept pushing the envelope? Why do children who kill themselves or others for their own twisted emotional reasons baffle us? People who are self-centered shouldn’t find any of these matters puzzling; they are the natural outcome of caring only for oneself. If we find these behaviors troubling, then what can be done?
The answer is straightforward. Love IS the answer, if love is unconditional acceptance and sacrificial compassion. For a believer, forgiven all sin, assured of eternity, and confident in the sacrificial love of Christ, obedience, virtue , faithfulness, and self-control are motivated by love for God as well as love for others. God's love and loving Him transforms us. Loving others shows them God's love and transforms them. Why else is love for God and others the Great Commandment? How else can love encapsulate all other commands (Galatians 5:14) to be called the "Royal Law" (James 2:8)?
Isn't this what Jesus meant in Matthew 26:10-14, when he said, "Because of an increase of wickedness (selfish self-centeredness?), the love of most will grow cold?" These may not yet be the days to which Jesus referred, but our times are surely moving in that direction. Will the American people recognize it? Will believing citizens face their own "wickedness" rather than look for some other scapegoat? My fear is that, in guilty denial, Americans will keep looking elsewhere and blaming anything, everything, and everyone else as the problem itself continues to worsen, all the more reason that Christians must commit themselves aggressively to the right course, the loving course, the one consistent and essential to their calling .
Next time, in Part III of “All We Need Is Love,” I will discuss the application of real love to the problems we face. However, I need to make one last observation: Without Christ, without the love of God in Christ, real love is nearly impossible. The self-centeredness I have described is bound up with the sin that is every human’s problem, a problem no one but Christ has escaped. Faith in Jesus Christ begins the process of replacing selfishness, apathy, and hatred with genuine love. Glimmers of love, enough to stimulate a hunger for it, can be found in moments of giving and sacrifice, but self-absorption and self-centeredness put out most of those sparks before they ignite. God’s love, profoundly demonstrated in the death of Jesus on a cross for that very sin of self-centeredness, replaces and satisfies the disappointed desire for love that is also universal. If we know that God loves us, then we can begin to risk really loving other in the ways I discuss, next time.
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