Genuine Love

Lately there has been a Television commercial airing quite frequently for Pepsi, picturing a number of people who are in a zombie like state until they get energized by the drink. Throughout the commercial the song, “What is Love?” by Haddaway is playing. Definitions for love these days usually only gets processed as a emotional feeling often accompanied with the particularly erotic feelings. English, unfortunately, only has one word for love. In Greek there are three main words for love: eros, philia, and agape. Eros is etroic, sexual, physical body attraction love. Philia is friendship or family love wherein there is distinct commonality. Agape love is distinctly sacrificial and committed through and through.

The first words of last Sunday’s sermon text were, “Let love be genuine.” The Greek word behind this love is agape, the sacrificial and committed kind. And here the Bible commands us to have that love be genuine. Today there is a lot of talk about being real, being authentic, or being honest. Sadly, that claim often really ends up being an excuse for people to be and behave as their sinful selves without having anybody say anything to them about it because if they did they would be disrespecting or violating their “honesty” or “realness” or “authenticity.”

We learned on Sunday that this word genuine literally means without hypocrisy and that hypocrisy is playacting, like lovers in a movie who are not really in love in real life. Their love on the screen is a hypocrite love. One way the sin of hypocrisy (non-genuine love) comes out a lot in our lives is when we gossip.

1 Timothy 5:13 says “…idlers, (go) about from house to house, and (they are) not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not.”

Gossip is essentially a sinful use of the tongue (James 3:5-8) to tear down and not build up people (Eph 4:29). To use a modern phrase, it’s “talking about people behind their back” and is usually done to turn another’s opinion against another person or situation. The motivations are usually a mix of pride, bitterness, hostility, anger, resentment, venting, low self-esteem, jealousy, and/or acceptance. And usually gossip lead to rebellion, disunity, dissention, and discord.

A good example of hypocrisy came up last week in our community group. One person was sharing their past experiences of community groups and confessed they were a bit nervous about joining our new group because they had witnessed a friend’s parents when they were younger who would go to their church community group and then come home and talk bad about all the people they just saw. That is hypocrisy, gossip, and not real love.

Have you talked about another person negatively to someone else? What were your motivations? If you had a genuine grievance did you go to that person first and talk to them about it as Jesus tells us to do (Matt 18:15-18)?

Haddaway’s song defines love as not hurting another person. That’s actually not too bad of a definition. Yet, the truth is because of remaining sin in each of us and in those around us we are going to hurt one another. Bible Jesus-like love goes even a step further than just not hurting, it’s loving another person even when they do hurt you. Agape sacrifices our own sense of pride and goes to that person with a heart of forgiveness, avoids gossiping to other about them, and expresses genuine, authentic, real Christ-like love.

Beloved friends and family, let us love one another.
- Pastor Duane