The English language, while we might call it the "modern language of the world," is in actuality the abused offspring's offspring's offspring of some other language's real beginnings. This is because nothing is consistent in it for very long. Single words become homonyms, long words get chopped up into slang, and we even used to use f's instead of s's. That'f juft nutf. Because of this, the word "love" has, as is pointed out in the blog topic, been stretched over pretty much the whole spectrum of positivity. Love, as a modern definition, literally has four or five definitions ranging from merely 'liking' something to 'romance.' Wikipedia makes amends for the common Christian phrase "Love is an action," and goes on, in strange detail, to analyze the various physiological characteristics of various forms of 'love.' So what is it in the Bible? Are we supposed to merely like other people? Does God feel romantic love for people? Lucky for us, The Greek language has four separate words for four different kinds of love, and the Greek format of the Bible makes use of all of them. Those words are 'storge,' for mere familiarity to something, 'philia' for friendship, 'eros' for romance, and 'agape' for "divine" love. All of these words find their place in Scripture, but one densely overpopulates the rest. Agape, which almost always is attributed to God himself, means more than just liking something or even the normal bounds of 'loving' something. It specifically refers to the act of self-sacrifice, or at least the willingness to do so. God certainly is capable of such a love; Jesus died for us, but what about in John's books when the famous analogy is made that "since God loves you, you gotta love him and other people too." Well, I'm sorry folks; it's agape-love. The text could literally say, "Since God was willing and did intentionally get murdered for you guys, you gotta turn around and be willing to do it back for God and for everyone else, too." God means business. The same love he showed you should be redirected to everybody. That means giving up time to serve people, to talk to them, and even be willing to die for them. How can we be expected to do that? Well, it's actually not as bad as you might think. Our goal is to love that much, but truly the only way to get close is to rely on God for our capacity to love. You see - God not only loves us enough to die for us, but he helps us out from time to time, too. He's willing to work to change our lives around to better love others, all we have to do is start acting on the little impulses to do good. A common phrase spray-painted on walls and weird hipster blogs is "Where is the love?" Well, look out, because it's in us, the lovers of Christ.
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