What is true love according to the Bible?

Thus things are followed to their full result, as we have seen them traced to their hidden sources before God. How different was all with Christ! "Hereby perceive we the love" … To add "of God" spoils the sentence. There is no ground for interpolating any words. But One showed such love, and He was man as surely as God. "Hereby perceive we the love, because he laid down his life for us." If you want to know what love is, look here. This was love indeed. "And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." The same life of which we live was in Him: ought it not to be exercised in similar love? We may not often be called to lay down our life for our brethren; but are there not plain, simple, common ways by which it may be tested every day? My brother may have need: it is no use talking about readiness to die for my brother, if I at once shrink back from meeting his ordinary and perhaps urgent necessity? There is nothing great here; it is homely, but how practical! How it puts the heart to the test, and one that might be presented any day of the week!

Charity, because it is God's presence, and that we feel His presence, and look to Him in it, is intolerant of evil. In mere brotherly kindness, the brother being the object before my mind (and, if God's presence be not felt, we do not realise it, nature coming in so easily and here in its most unsuspected and kindly shapes), I put man before God, smother up evil, keep kindness going, at any rate so far exclude and shut out God. Charity is His active presence though it will be in love to man; but it gives to God all His rights. He it is that is love, but He is never inconsistent with Himself. His love to us was shewn in what was the most solemn proof of His intolerance of evil, the cross. There is no true love apart from righteousness. If God is indifferent to evil, is not righteous, then there is no love in grace to the sinner. If He abhors evil, cannot suffer it in His presence, then His dealings with us as sinners shew the most perfect love. If I have ten children, and they go wrong, and I say, 'Well, I am to shew love to them,' and I take no account of their evil ways; or if some of them go wrong and I treat them as if there was no difference to my mind in their well doing or evil doing; this is not love but carelessness as to evil. This is the kind of love looked for by unconverted man, namely, God's being as careless as to evil as they are; but this is not divine charity which abhors the evil, but rises over it, dealing with it either in putting it away or in needed chastenings. Now if God were indifferent to evil there is no holy being to be the object of my love - nothing sanctifying. God does not own as love what admits of sin.

Divine love is not to be mistaken for natural amiability, or sentimental gush. Divine love is begotten of the knowledge of God. It partakes of His nature, for “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love “is the bond of perfectness” (Col 3:14). “Love is of God; and every one that loves is born of God, and knows God” (1 John 4:7). This gives us the character of the love. There is no abatement of holiness and truth with God. These are upheld in all their integrity. The knowledge and power of this will preserve us from mistaking human sentiment for divine love.

They might speak with all tongues; they might have prophecy, the knowledge of mysteries, the faith which can remove mountains; they might give all their possessions to feed the poor, and their bodies to be tortured: if they had not love, it was nothing. Love was conformity to the nature of God, the living expression of what He was, the manifestation of having been made partakers of His nature: it was the acting and feeling according to His likeness. This love is developed in reference to others; but others are not the motive, although they are the object. It has its source within; its strength is independent of the objects with which it is occupied. Thus it can act where circumstances might produce irritation or jealousy in the human heart. It acts according to its own nature in the circumstances; and by judging them according to that nature, they do not act upon the man who is full of love, except so far as they supply occasion for its activity, and direct its form. Love is its own motive. In us participation in the divine nature is its only source. Communion with God Himself alone sustains it through all the difficulties it has to surmount in its path. This love is the opposite of selfishness and of self-seeking, and shuts it out, seeking the good of others, even (as to its principle) as God has sought us in grace (see Eph. 4:32; Eph. 5:1-2). What a power to avoid evil in oneself, to forget all in order to do good!

The only true love is love that will bear and do in behalf of its object. The chapter which our text concludes is one grand anthem on love. The grace which is enjoined, described, and almost sung throughout, is not a name, but a substance. Its two elements are action and suffering. The two sides of living love are meekly to bear evil, and energetically to do good, in behalf of every brother, according to his need and your opportunity. Christ's example is its rule — "Love one another as I have loved you."

Now, what does it mean to love the Lord? Does it simply mean to speak or sing about our love to Him and to praise Him? Is it a confession we make in prayer? All this is of course not excluded but it is not the main point. To love someone does not first of all mean to tell about it but much more to show it. To really love someone means to love to experience fellowship with him and to be at his disposal whenever needed, to offer one’s service. When God loved us He proved His love by giving us His beloved Son. In His divine love He did not spare Him. When the Lord Jesus loved us He gave Himself for us. If we really love our Lord this will be seen in what we do. The Apostle John puts it this way: ‘Children, let us not love with word, nor with tongue, but in deed and in truth’ (1 John 3:18). To love the Lord Jesus has to do with our service to Him. He Himself is the perfect example. When down on earth He declared: ‘but that the world may know that I love the Father, and as the Father has commanded me, thus I do’ (John 14:31). True love is proved by obedience. And that brings us back to our first point. Christian obedience in its true character is motivated by love. That is the highest level of obedience.

He loved sinners; He sent His Son when we were dead in sin that we might live through Him. "Herein is love, not that we loved God [that is what law required], but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." In a word, "God commendeth his love to us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Legal love is based, as law must be, on this — that there is a claim. Divine love, as revealed to us, has its essence in this — that there was none, yea, the very opposite to one. The only possible analogy to such love (and that it becomes us not to introduce in what we are speaking of here) is "the Father loveth the Son," or "therefore doth my Father love me;" but this is infinitely above all our place and thoughts; and if we are in any sense admitted into it, as (blessed be God) we are, it is only by sovereign grace, which has given us a place in Him and with Him.

Let us begin, then, and see from the different epistles how it is the summum bonum - the supreme good. In Romans, where we have the gospel of God presented, God's love is made known in order to produce love in us; and accordingly, when we come to chapter 13:8, we read, "Owe no man anything, but to love one another." It is here put in a very striking way, as what we owe to every man. Are we daily discharging this debt? In 1 Corinthians 13 we get a fuller unfolding of love. Much has been said upon this wonderful chapter, and no attempt is made to expound it here. The passage in Romans is more individual and general, but here it is shown to be the one thing that is needed to make things work smoothly amongst the children of God. Love is our measure, and without it we are nothing. There is one very peculiar and striking thing about it. The description is not so much of what love does, as what it does not do, showing that the very essence of love is self-abnegation and self-effacement. How easy comparatively it is to engage in active and even arduous service rather than to suffer, and yet the very first thing mentioned is, "Love suffereth long, and is kind." How little we like to suffer at the hands of others, and how prone we are to retaliate. Oh, how this humbles us, "Love suffereth long, and is kind!" Measured by this standard, how small our love is, and, consequently, how small we are!

The semblance of love which does not maintain the truth but accommodates itself to that which is not truth, is not love according to God. The true test of love is maintenance of truth. The Holy Spirit, who sheds God's love abroad in our hearts, is the Spirit of truth. Truth and obedience are essential factors in the expression of true love.

But love, as goodness itself, is blessed in itself and free in its actings, unless want or misery draw it out; but it has not a motive which characterises it by its object. This is always the case in desire, even when it is in no way evil, but has the character of affection. In ordinary desires it forms so far the character; money, power, pleasure, give their character to the man who seeks them; but though love be used as to them, it is evidently in a lower sense, and, where desires are, the desired object so far rules over us. Where love exists in a divinely-formed relationship, it is, or may be a just affection. I say, "may be," because it may run into a mere desire and be idolatry, and the relationship falsified. But when rightly in exercise, save as man in certain aspects represents God, it looks up, and characterises the person in the affection. It is conjugal, filial, and the like. A husband and a father in certain respects represent God in those relationships, and so far it partakes of what He is. But in the closest relationship where it is not this, it has the character I speak of: "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."