Love: The Word We Lost
Our language has changed due to so many different influences in our world. Some words that were ours have been stolen right out from under us. A word that once carried weight, clarity, and power. A word that once pointed us toward the heart of God Himself. That word is love.
I would suggest that we started out as a country with a definition of love that was very well aligned with Scripture. Not perfectly. We have never been a perfect people. But the moral imagination of this nation was shaped, in large measure, by the Bible. Love meant something. It meant seeking the good of another according to God’s standard of good. It meant truth-telling. It meant sacrifice. It meant calling sin what it is so that the sinner might be rescued. Over time we have drifted. And the drift has not been accidental. We have forfeited control overmuch of our language, and “love” is just one more word in the lexicon that proves it.
Today the world defines love as endorsement. Not just tolerance. Endorsement. If you do not celebrate my choices, my identity, my lifestyle, my behavioral patterns—whatever they may be—then you do not love me. Couple that mutated definition of love with the victim mentality we cultivate in today’s culture, and you take away any personal responsibility for behavioral addiction. It becomes easier to excuse your own behavior and to point at somebody else’s commentary on that behavior and call it “unloving.” The person who speaks truth is now the problem. The one who refuses to endorse is the hater. The one who calls for repentance is the bigot.
That is not the love of Scripture. That is a counterfeit. And counterfeits only work when people have forgotten what the real thing looks like.
The World’s Current Definition
Let’s clarify what the culture means when it says “love.” Love equals full affirmation. Love equals enthusiastic celebration of whatever a person claims about himself or herself. Love equals silence in the face of destructive patterns because any confrontation is framed as violence. Tolerance used to mean, “I disagree with you, but I will not coerce you.” Now even tolerance is insufficient. The demand is endorsement. Anything less is hatred.
This shift did not happen overnight. Language is always upstream of culture. When we lose control of our words, we lose control of our thoughts. When “love” no longer means what it once meant, then every moral category begins to collapse. Good and evil trade places. Isaiah warned us: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” Isaiah 5:20. We are living in the middle of that woe.
Notice how this works with behavioral addiction. Whether the addiction is sexual, chemical, relational, digital, or identity-based, the new definition of love removes the category of responsibility. If my identity is bound up in my behavior, then any call to change that behavior is an attack on my person. If love means endorsement, then the friend who says, “This is destroying you,” is no longer a friend. He is an enemy. The church that refuses to bless what God calls sin is no longer a hospital for sinners. It is redefined as a hate group. The parent who will not affirm every impulse of a child is no longer loving. He is abusive.
Victim-hood becomes the highest moral status. And once victim-hood is the highest status, personal agency disappears. Why fight an addiction if the real problem is always someone else failure to love properly? Why repent if the only unforgivable sin is telling the truth? The mirror is never held up. The call of Scripture to “examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith” 2 Corinthians 13:5 is replaced with the demand that others examine their privilege, their bias, their lack of affirmation. The self is never the problem. The culture that refuses to celebrate the self is always the problem.
How We Got Here
I would suggest that the American experiment began with far more biblical understanding. The founders were in large part Christians, and the moral air they breathed was thick with a Christian worldview. Love of neighbor meant seeking his temporal and eternal good. It meant the rule of law. It meant self-government under a higher Law. It meant that freedom was ordered liberty, not the liberty to destroy yourself and demand that others applaud the destruction. Documents and sermons of that era regularly appealed to the moral law written on the heart and confirmed in Scripture. Charity, duty, and neighborly-love were understood as concrete obligations, not feelings of affirmation.
Over generations the definition shifted. Romanticism elevated feeling over truth and made sincerity the measure of virtue. Then the therapeutic age made the self the highest authority and emotional well-being the highest good. Then the sexual revolution made desire sacred and any restraint suspect. Then the identity revolution made self-definition absolute and any external standard an act of oppression. Each step required a redefinition of love. Love had to be stripped of any objective content so that it could serve the autonomous self. The result is the present moment: love as endorsement, and endorsement as the price of belonging.
We forfeited the language. We allowed the culture to redefine the terms, and then we were shocked when the new terms were used against us. “Love” became a weapon. Anyone who still held the old definition was told he no longer loved. And many believers, afraid of being called unloving, surrendered the word rather than fight for it. This is not merely a semantic problem. It is a spiritual one. When words lose their meaning, truth itself becomes negotiable. The story of Tower of Babel stands as a permanent warning: when language is confused, people scatter and human projects collapse into confusion and pride. Genesis 11. We are watching a similar confusion unfold around the most important word in the Christian vocabulary.
Love According to Scripture
Scripture does not leave us guessing. The Bible’s definition of love is thick, objective, and rooted in the character of God.
First, love originates in God. “Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8). God’s love is not a vague affirmation of whatever we happen to be. God’s love is holy. It is pure. It is consistent with His nature. He cannot love what is contrary to His own righteousness. Later in the same chapter John writes, “In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Love is defined by the cross, not by our preferences.
Second, God’s love is demonstrated in the cross. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Notice the order. While we were still sinners. Not while we were affirming ourselves. Not while we were celebrating our brokenness. While we were still in rebellion, Christ died. That is love. Love does not wait for the sinner to clean himself up, but neither does love leave the sinner in his sin.
The cross is both the supreme affirmation of our value and the supreme confrontation of our guilt.
God does not endorse our rebellion; He bears its penalty so that we might be freed from it.
A--1 Corinthians 13:4–8
Third, biblical love is described in concrete terms. First Corinthians 13 is not a poem for weddings alone. It is a description of the love that must mark the people of God. “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends”.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing. Love rejoices in the truth. That single sentence destroys the modern equation of love with endorsement. If the behavior is wrongdoing, love cannot rejoice in it.
Love cannot celebrate it.
Love cannot pretend it is good.
Love may be patient with the person.
Love may be kind to the person.
Love may bear with the person.
But love will not call darkness light.
Jesus Himself embodies this. He ate with tax collectors and sinners. He was accused of being a friend of sinners. And He was. But He never left them in their sin. To the woman caught in adultery He said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and from now on sin no more” John 8:11. Grace and truth together. Not grace without truth. Not truth without grace. Both. He told the rich young ruler the hard truth about his idol Mark 10:21. He rebuked Peter sharply when Peter tried to turn Him from the cross Matthew 16:23. He cleansed the temple with a whip John 2:15. None of these actions fit the modern definition of love. All of them flowed from the love of God.
The apostle Paul tells us to “speak the truth in love” Ephesians 4:15. Truth without love becomes harshness. Love without truth becomes sentimentality. Biblical love holds them together. Proverbs says, “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy” Proverbs 27:6. The friend who wounds you for your good loves you more than the enemy who flatters you into destruction.
B--Leviticus 19:17–18: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart, but you shall reason frankly with your neighbor, lest you incur sin because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD.” Reasoning frankly is part of loving. Silence in the face of sin is not love. It is a form of hatred.
The Greatest Commandment further clarifies the order. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself” Matthew 22:37–39. Love for God comes first and defines love for neighbor. We do not love our neighbor by affirming what God forbids. We love our neighbor by pointing him toward the God who alone can satisfy and save.
The Cost of the Counterfeit
When a culture redefines love as endorsement, several disasters follow.
First-- people are left in their bondage. Behavioral addictions thrive in an atmosphere where no one is allowed to name them. The alcoholic who is only ever affirmed in his drinking is not loved. He is abandoned. The person enslaved to sexual sin or pornography who is told that any call to repentance is hate speech is not being loved. He is being lied to. The individual whose sense of self has become tangled in confusion and who is steered toward irreversible decisions without patient, truthful counsel is not being loved. Love that will not tell the truth is not love. It is cowardice dressed up as compassion. Scripture is clear that sin enslaves John 8:34 and that the truth sets free John 8:32. A love that withholds the truth, withholds freedom.
Second-- the church loses its prophetic voice. If the church adopts the world’s definition, then the church can no longer call anyone to repentance. The gospel itself becomes offensive, because the gospel begins with the bad news that we are sinners under the judgment of a holy God. If love means never saying that, then the cross itself becomes unloving. And that is precisely the charge many now level against historic Christianity.
C--2 Timothy 4:3–4
Paul saw this coming: “For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths”. We are there. The myth of the present hour is that love equals endorsement and that any refusal to endorse is hatred.
Third result-- personal responsibility evaporates. The victim mentality flourishes. Every destructive pattern is explained as the result of someone else failure to love properly. The mirror is never held up. Scripture repeatedly calls people to personal repentance and responsibility. “Each of us will give an account of himself to God” Romans 14:12. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” 1 John 1:8. When love is redefined as affirmation, the category of sin itself is erased, and with it the possibility of real change.
Fourth result--, relationships themselves become fragile. The world’s love lasts only as long as you affirm the right things. Step outside the approved narrative and the love evaporates. It turns to contempt overnight. Friendships, families, and even churches fracture under the demand for total affirmation. Biblical love is different. It endures. It bears all things. It hopes all things. It is not conditioned on perfect agreement.
Recovering Biblical Love
What then shall we do? We must recover the word. We must refuse to let the culture define love for us. We must speak the truth in love, even when it costs us.
That means several concrete things:
It means we will not celebrate what God calls sin. We will not use our words, our platforms, or our churches to give the impression that destructive patterns are good. We will be kind. We will be patient. We will be long-suffering. But we will not rejoice in wrongdoing. We will remember that “the kindness of God is meant to lead people to repentance” Romans 2:4, not to leave them comfortable in rebellion.
It means we will distinguish between persons and patterns. Every human being is made in the image of God and is therefore worthy of dignity and respect. Every human being is also a sinner in need of a Savior. Love addresses both realities. We do not reduce people to their sins, but neither do we pretend their sins are virtues. We can welcome people without affirming every desire. Hospitality and holiness are not enemies.
It means we will accept the world’s accusation. They will call us unloving. Let them. Jesus was called a glutton and a drunkard and a friend of sinners, and He was also called a blasphemer. The charge of being unloving is the contemporary form of the same hostility. We should not be surprised. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” John 15:18. “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” 2 Timothy 3:12. The goal is not to be liked by the world. The goal is to be faithful to the One who loved us and gave Himself for us.
It means we will keep the cross at the center. The cross is the place where God’s love and God’s justice meet. At the cross, God does not endorse our sin. He condemns it in the flesh of His Son so that we might be free from it. Any love that skips the cross is not the love of God. The gospel offers both forgiveness and transformation. “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come” 2 Corinthians 5:17. Real love holds out that hope.
It means we will practice church discipline and personal accountability as acts of love. Galatians 6:1 says, “Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.” Restoration is the goal. Gentleness is the manner. But the transgression is named. That is love. Parents will love their children enough to say no and to explain why. Friends will love their friends enough to risk the relationship for the sake of the truth. Pastors will love their people enough to preach the whole counsel of God, including the parts that confront the idols of the age.
It also means we will examine our own hearts. It is easy to critique the culture while nursing our own preferred sins. Biblical love begins at home. We must be people who welcome correction, who confess quickly, who fight our own behavioral patterns with the same seriousness we urge on others.
Hypocrisy discredits the message. Humility adorns it.
Living This Out
In practical terms, recovering biblical love will look different in different settings, but the principles remain the same.
In the home, parents must refuse the cultural pressure to affirm every self-diagnosis and every desire of their children. Love provides guidance, boundaries, and the long view of a child’s eternal good. Children need to know they are loved unconditionally as image-bearers, and they also need to know that not every feeling or impulse is true or good.
In friendships, we must recover the courage of Nathan confronting David 2 Samuel 12. Nathan risked everything to speak the truth. David’s repentance shows that hard truth, when spoken in the context of covenant loyalty, can lead to restoration rather than rupture.
In the church, we must resist the pressure to soft-pedal the hard edges of Scripture in order to appear compassionate. The most compassionate thing we can do is to hold out the full gospel: the bad news of sin and the good news of a Savior who both forgives and transforms. Membership, discipline, and discipleship must all be ordered by that standard.
In the public square, we must speak with both clarity and charity. We do not need to be harsh to be clear. We do not need to be unclear to be kind. We can reject the false choice between affirmation and hatred. The way to do that is to speak the truth in a loving manner, as defined in scripture.
The Love That Never Ends
The world’s love is fragile. It lasts only as long as you affirm the right things. Step outside the approved narrative and the love evaporates. It turns to contempt overnight.
The love of God is different. “Love never ends” 1 Corinthians 13:8. It is not based on our performance. It is based on His character. It pursues us when we run. It disciplines us when we stray. It restores us when we repent. It holds us when we have nothing left to offer.
Lamentations 3:22–23.
“The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness”
That is the love we are called to extend. Not the thin, therapeutic affirmation of the age. The thick, costly, truth-telling, cross-shaped love of the God who is love.
We have drifted. The word has been taken from us. But it can be recovered. Not by clever marketing. Not by cultural accommodation. By returning to the Scriptures. By refusing to redefine what God has already defined. By speaking the truth in love and trusting that the same Spirit who inspired the Word will use it to convict, to convert, and to conform people to the image of Christ.
Do not surrender the word. Love is not endorsement. Love is the relentless pursuit of another’s good according to the standard of God’s Word. Sometimes that pursuit looks like a warm embrace. Sometimes it looks like a hard conversation. Sometimes it looks like the refusal to pretend that darkness is light. In every case, if it is ordered by Scripture and motivated by the cross, it is love.
One of the names of Jesus is “The Word of God” Don’t allow yourself to surrender Christ himself at the alter of public pressure. His name means many things, and they are all important characteristics of a Holy God. The world is trying desperately to redefine Him. We cannot allow that.
Practical Summation:
Altered Language is just one example of a root problem. That problem manifests itself when Gods people surrender on cultural issues. These battles are not won or lost quickly. They are the very picture of deception operations. You did not see the rabid side of the radical LGBTQ crowd until they already had most of the society decide that the misuse and redefinition of the word ‘Love’ was harmless or not important enough to address.
The progression is:
1st you decide the issue is harmless or not worth addressing.
2nd you see people get attacked for disagreeing and you start weighing whether you should stand up.
3rd you start to equivocate on the language. Maybe they are right? That is the height of cowardice
The enemy has been successful this far because we as a group surrendered to the cultural degradation. Evil does not win victories over night, it does so with slow progressive moves until it knows it has a strangle hold on culture.
Boiling Frogs example.
We have to take back the language. We have a chance to do so now. Normal people are worn out with the rhetoric from the other side. People have been called racist, fascist, or homophobe for so long and in so many different situations that their word have lost their meaning. That’s the other edge of the sword for them. They can call me whatever they want to, it does not matter. I am not looking for acceptance from them. I am looking only to please my savior. I am certain many others are to the same point.
Because of this dynamic in our culture, there is an opening. The time to Boldly take the language is now.
We need to be very clear that we will be answering to God for the things we have surrendered at the alter of convenience or fear of what others think.