Articles From Our Bulletins
Love Wins
If it is true that “love wins,” and love is based on subjective feeling, then anything we have feelings of “love” for should be allowed, right? Why not? But what if these feelings lead us to harm others? What if we love something that is harmful? No, that’s not allowed, and who will argue otherwise? But if that’s not allowed, then subjective “love” doesn’t always win, does it? Other rules and principles can, in fact, actually define how we ought to express love, and we are expected to act on proper principle that are more objective than just what we feel.
“If you harm another, that can’t be love,” one might say. With this, we should all agree, for “love does no wrong to a neighbor” (Rom. 13:10). Do we see what this does, though? This takes the concept of love out of the subjective realm (how we feel) and points to a standard that can tell us what love really is, apart from how we might feel. Real love does not harm others, but that’s not because we feel it to be so, but because there is a standard of love to which we ought to submit.
Yet if there is a standard of love to which we ought to submit, then we cannot be the ones who define what true love is or does. This is why we need God, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8). His love is demonstrated in the death of Jesus: “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:9-11).
A subjective version of love that runs counter to God’s demonstration of love can never win for anyone involved. That is, when we use “love” for our own purposes that include sinful activities — the very sins for which Christ died — then we have simply stolen a godly concept and perverted it for our own ends. To put such perversions under a flag that says, “love wins,” minimizes and mocks the demonstration of God’s love in Christ.
The only way that “love wins” is for that love to be under the banner of the cross, not under a banner of our own selfish ambitions. Let love win by taking our place under the shadow of the cross of Jesus. Let the deceptive sin that keeps us out of that shadow of love be banished so that the real love of God will fill our hearts (Rom. 5:5). We’ll then know the victorious love that saves souls, not the deceptive, subjective versions of love that steal away our fellowship with our Creator.
We don’t get to tell God what love is; He has already shown us.
