Love Is Not a Feeling – it's a Commitment
In this series (here’s part one), we’re taking a look at the theology that is all around us. We’re zeroing in on “slogans,” short sayings, that people lean upon to give their lives meaning and structure and coherence. In these short articles, we’re deconstructing these slogans in order to “dismantle strongholds” (2 Cor. 10:4). We hope that Slogans That Don’t Save will, ironically, help save and strengthen people who are tasting the bitter fruit of unbiblical thinking.
It’s not a new song, but it basically tells us our culture’s doctrine of love.
I..., I'm hooked on a feeling
I'm high on believing
That you're in love with me
The group that released “Hooked on a Feeling” in 1973, Blue Swede, likely did not intend to signal a major worldview shift on the subject of love. Nonetheless, this aged song sums up succinctly how many people today think about love, including the romantic kind. Love is not a commitment; love is a feeling.
This explains so much about our contemporary romantic context. People think that love is an impulse, and they act accordingly. In a surge of positive emotion, they “fall in love”; in a surge of negative emotion, they fall out of it. I think of the model popularized by The Bachelor and related shows. You go on some dates (or more) with an attractive person of the opposite sex, everything’s fun and fresh and exciting, you commit to them in some form, but then real life crashes into your state of bliss and the relationship terminates. You’re hooked on a feeling until you’re not.
There is a high-flown Hollywoodized form of this that is easy to mock; there is also, sadly, a much more down-to-earth form. Boyfriends and girlfriends have a child (or children) together, maybe get engaged, maybe even get married, but it all blows up. The excitement fades; the attraction withers; real flaws and failings and sins show themselves, and the dream dies. Aside from fleeting youth, it is not uncommon today for the unions of middle-aged couples to crumble; the shared project of raising the children ends, and so does the covenant.
How sad and calamitous this is. It reveals that the marriage was never built upon a solid foundation. Many marriages end in part because of a totally wrong understanding of love; outside of marriage, many people get burned by this kind of thinking in diverse ways. We need to be clear here: romantic or not, love is not a feeling. Love surely involves feelings, feelings that are God-given and not at all insignificant. Nonetheless, love in biblical terms is an iron-clad commitment. More than that: love at its apex in our world is covenantal. The Father electing us in the Son by the Spirit’s power means that love reaches us according to the eternal covenant, the overflow of Trinitarian love, love that sweeps us into eternal life itself (Ephesians 1; Hebrews 13).
This biblical teaching means that the church has a completely different understanding of love than a cultural one emphasizing the temporal, ephemeral nature of the same. It is not that unbelievers fail to experience love; it is that they cannot and do not know love in its purest form, the love of God. This love pours out of heaven into our lives through the ministry of the gospel, freeing us from sin, Satan, death, and hell. It transforms every part of our life. Love activates love, you could say. God loving us means we now love others as we should, but not perfectly in this life, alas.
This last sentence bears noting. Love is not an unbroken stream of unending affirmation of everything a loved one does. Love in a fallen world means confession, repentance, apologies, change, growth, hatred of sin, rugged commitment to fight sin, and so on. Biblical love means fighting the flesh (we are “holy and beloved” in Christ per Col. 3:12). We fight sin in desire, thought, feeling, and action out of love for God, knowing that we express love by following the one we love. We fight our sin in a vastly secondary way because we love others, and we do not want to wrong, hurt, and hinder them. Love means much more, in other words than knowing our spouse’s “love language.” If you’re a Christian, part of your “love language”—a much more important part than what color flowers you like and what movies you watch on date night—is mortification of sin.
Love, then, does not mean never having to say you’re sorry. In a fallen world, love means regularly having to say you’re sorry. Love is not the aspect of your life experienced only when you’re floating above the clouds with delight; love is also found in the times when you say you’re sorry. It’s found in many quiet and anonymous moments as well: when for God’s glory you care for your mother with Alzheimer’s, visit the desperately sick, clean the church bathroom, encourage a struggling friend, cover a shift for a tired coworker, preach the gospel to a stubbornly unrepentant friend. Love is actional.
None of this means that you should seek to vaporize joyful affection for others in your heart. It is a beautiful thing to have feelings of love for a spouse, for your family, for dear friends, for fellow church members, for unbelievers ruined by sin, and above all for God (one thinks of the surging passion of Psalm 119, for example). Covenant and feeling are not at odds; they hang together. The former drives the latter, in fact. Nonetheless, we must avoid the cultural mistake of equating love with impulses and sensations. This is a mistake and a tragically common one.
Make a different move today. Make a radical one. Instead of grounding love in feelings, ground feelings in love. In other words, recognize that love has a metaphysical foundation. Love is grounded in the Trinity, a mutual personal enjoyment of divine love. Because of the Father’s predestining affection, love flows to us through the work of Christ, work whose effects are applied to us by the Spirit (Eph. 1:4-5). For believers, this is where love comes from; this is how we know true love at all. This theistic grounding changes the way we love our spouse, our children, our friends, fellow church members, and the lost. It makes a real and potentially massive difference.
People all around us are pro-love. At least they think they are. They think they understand true love, whether romantic or not, but outside of God’s grace, they cannot. Our world trains us to want the feeling without the foundation; it encourages us to sample the sensation without the substance. In such a climate, a major part of faithful witness in 2020 is this: telling the truth about love. We do not only have a different doctrine of God than the world, it turns out; we have a different doctrine of love. This doctrine itself deserves to be loved; this doctrine deserves to be preached, and shared, and lived out.
