Love?
What is love?
This is a question that has been plaguing my thoughts for months especially when I look at the world around me.
This question became more personal the more I thought about it and how the world around me defined it. There have been moments in my life where I genuinely believed I was loving someone well, and they didn’t experience it as love at all. There have also been seasons in my marriage where I love my husband, love our family, love the life we’ve built but I don’t always feel that intense emotional or romantic high that society, movies and books often describe as “being in love.”
Culture would tell me that means something is wrong. That if the feeling fades, the love is gone. That if you aren’t constantly emotionally fulfilled, then it’s time to leave and find someone who gives you butterflies again. But the more I set with the question “what is love”, the more I realized that our definition of love can’t be stable because feelings change constantly. And if love is built primarily on feelings, what happens when the feelings fluctuate? Because they will.
So I started looking into the difference between biblical love and the worldly definition of love.
We use the word “love” constantly, but I don’t think everyone agrees on with it truly means.
Modern society tends to define love primarily through feelings, affirmation, attraction, personal happiness, or self fulfillment. If it feels loving, it’s love. If it feels good, it must be good. If something makes me happy, then who are you to question it?
In English, we the same word for almost everything. “I love tacos.” “I love my husband.” “I love God.” All one word. Even though we should know the way we “love tacos” is not the same way we “love our spouse” or the same way we “love God.”
The Greek language used in scripture had multiple words describing different kinds of love. Eros referred to romantic or sexual desire. Philia described friendship and brotherly affection. Storge described familial love. And agape described something so much deeper. It’s self sacrificial love rooted in truth, goodness, and commitment rather than emotion alone.
Biblical love is not primarily defined by feelings. Feelings can and are absolutely part of love, but they were never meant to be the foundation of love, truth or morality. Feelings change constantly. We can feel anger, lust, envy, loneliness, excitement, bitterness, attraction, or emotional distance all within the same week, sometimes within the same hour. If love is rooted primarily in emotion, then love itself becomes unstable.
Scripture repeatedly warns us not to trust our feelings as ultimate authority.
“The heart is deceitful above all things…” Jeremiah 17:9
“There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death.” Proverbs 14:12
That doesn’t mean emotions are evil. God created emotions. Jesus Himself experienced grief, compassion, sorrow, anger, happiness and joy. But emotions make terrible gods. They were never meant to lead us. They were meant to be submitted to truth. Covenant love says “I’m still here.” even when feelings and emotions shift for a season.
I think that’s one of the biggest differences I’ve found between biblical love and what the world sells us as love.
Worldly love often asks, “What am I currently feeling?”
Biblical love asks, “What is true? What is good? What is faithful? What honors God?” Biblical love is not simply affirming whatever someone desires. Biblical love seeks the genuine good of another person. But if our culture and scripture define “good” differently, then naturally we will define love differently too.
Modern culture increasingly teaches that truth is subjective, morality is personal, and authenticity is the highest virtue. Everyone has “their truth.” Everything has become fluid. Truth, identity, morality, meaning, and love. But if all those things have become completely fluid especially love, then how can it ever be trustworthy? Something that constantly changes shape depending on feelings, seasons, desires, attraction, convenience, or personal truth becomes difficult to anchor your life to and eventually love stops meaning anything objective at all. Feelings, human desire and even attraction can be fluid. But I’m not convinced that real love is meant to be.
So then my question became “well who decides what is good and moral?”
That’s where I hit a massive fork in the road.
The world teaches us that good is subjective, morality is personal, and truth is internal.
But scripture teaches us that God defines good, truth exists outside ourselves, the human heart is fallen and wisdom comes from submission to God, not self expression.
This lead me to reading C.S. Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man. I think it feels more relevant now than when he wrote it. Lewis warned of a society that abandons objective moral truth, not biblical morality specifically, but the broader idea that certain truths and moral principles are objectively real and recognizable across human civilization. Things like justice, honesty, courage, sacrifice, loyalty, and the understanding that some things are genuinely good while others are genuinely evil. The idea that there are real moral truths humans can recognize outside of our own personal feeling or preference and replaces it with emotion, preference, and personal instinct. Ironically, he argued that this would not create freedom for humans, it would create humans ruled by appetite, impulse, manipulation, and emotion. Hmm sounds familiar huh? We now live in a culture where a disagreement is viewed as hatred, where any call to repentance is considered unloving, and where love is reduced to unconditional affirmation.
If truth becomes completely personal, then love eventually becomes whatever we want it to mean. And I don’t think that works. Because real love, the kind that lasts, has to be anchored in something deeper than emotion.
In my marriage, love is not just a feeling. It’s commitment. It’s sacrifice. It’s forgiveness. It’s choosing each other repeatedly. It’s enduring hard seasons. It’s a covenant. We stood before God and both said, “Until death do us part.” And we both meant it. Not “Until our feelings fluctuate.” Not “Until life gets hard.” Not “Until someone else makes me feel more alive emotionally.”
Feelings are real, but they are not what we build our foundation on. And maybe that’s why biblical love is so powerful. It isn’t built solely on the fluctuation of human emotion. It’s built on truth, faithfulness, sacrifice, and ultimately the character of God Himself.
God’s love is patient and merciful, but it is also holy. God corrects. God disciplines. God warns. God calls people to repentance. Not because He hates us, but BECAUSE He loves us.
A parent who never corrects their child is not loving them well. A doctor who refuses to diagnose a disease is not loving well. A God who never confronts sin would not be loving. We often confuse love with unconditional approval.
Jesus loved people deeply, but people like to forget he also called them to transformation “Go and sin no more.” “Repent.” “Deny yourself, pick up your cross daily and Follow Me.”
His love was not, “Stay exactly as you are forever.” Like some like to preach His love was, “Come and be made new.”
The more I study this, the more I realize that our culture often assumes truth and love are enemies, that speaking truth is unloving and that real love means endless affirmation. But I don’t see how that can be true.
Truth without love becomes harshness. Love without truth becomes empty affirmation. But biblical love holds both together.
I think that’s why real love feels so rare now days, because real love is not just based on our emotion. It is sacrifice. It is obedience. It is honesty. It is covenant. It is choosing someone’s ultimate good even when it costs you something.
That kind of love does not flow naturally from us. That kind of love can only come from God. And that then makes me wonder, apart from God can we truly love at all?
💜🤟✝️