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NASB | 1 John 4:21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | 1 John 4:21 And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should also [unselfishly] love his brother and seek the best for him. |
Subject: Biblical Love is not Worldly Love |
Bible Note: Dear Steve, The "hundreds" is part of my point. But I'll help you in your evaluation. Use the "Advanced Search" link. Enter the date of 10-01-2005 (for example) and the word "love." Scan down the list of posts that you encounter, mentally excluding the ones where people use "love" in their salutations or signatures. You'll see in the first 250 entries: love of God, love of neighbor, love of all people, God's love of us, love of the brethren, God's love for creation, God's love of the sinner, love of darkness, love of light, love of a verse, love in the spirit (do they mean Spirit?), love the sumum bonnum, love of family, love of children, love relationships, speaking in love, sharing in love, making love, primacy of love, serving in love, love of spouses, purity of love, love of the lost, etc. etc. Now consider the quotes of A. W. Pink on the Biblical definition of love. What you will find is that people have a very superficial understanding of love, in spite of a penchant for using the word. We've adopted the world's definition of love, if we bother to give any sort of definition at all. Anticipating the problems of modern Christianity, J. Gresham Machen wrote, "This temper of mind is hostile to precise definitions. Indeed nothing makes a man more unpopular in the controversies of the present day than an insistence upon definition of terms... Men discourse very eloquently today upon such subjects as God, religion, Christianity, atonement, redemption, faith; but are greatly incensed when they are asked to tell in simple language what they mean by these terms." (That was a 100 years ago!) The love that A. W. Pink so precisely describes knows nothing of the tepid, put-on-a-happy-face, kind of love of the modern church. If we have trouble with the word love, think what difficulties we have in a proper understanding of God, and all the doctrines that necessarily flow from that understanding. Think what difficulties we have with many other definitions. In Him, Doc |