Love

What is Love?

Is it This?.......Perhaps not

Rather I would say...

Love is not a thing but it is an idea.

Love is not any specific action but it is a condition or a state of being

Love is selfless

Love is the ability of one’s mind (thoughts), emotions, (feelings) and will (choice) to do all things in the best interest of the object of one’s love.

Love is very complex and has many faces. At its very heart love is selflessness. Love is not limited to any specific actions or thoughts but no loving thought or action would put me first. Love must look out for the better interest of the object loved not the lover. That being said I think there is a practical level of love and an ideal level of love.

Ideal love is when love has totally enraptured a person making their entire being loving. Ideal love is when a persons thoughts, feelings, actions have all been trained and disciplined to look out for the beloveds best interests instinctively. In ideal love there is no longer a conflict between loving someone or not, we will simply love them as Jesus did.

Practical love is what most people have, it is when someone is still divided between love and other things. Love may be in control of their desire so they may always want to help other people but their mind is still thinking only of themselves. Or perhaps they think they ought to help other people but they still hate the person and so they can not love them. Herein lies the complexity of love and all the different types of love. There are infinite possibilities for where love can be and how powerful its presence is in a person. And it becomes even more complicated when we have conflicting loves which is why loving God is the only thing worth doing because in loving God we will grow more like Him and in growing like Him we will automatically act in the best interest of all who we interact with. Our desires then shouldn’t be too love everyone rather it should be to love God if we can do that then loving others will be easy.

So that is love, an idea which can in its simplest form means to be looking out for the best interest of the beloved. It is neither tangible nor limited to any simple set of feelings thoughts or actions. It must be planted in us, nurtured and allowed to grow until it encompasses our being. It is not something we posses instinctively and it is not something which will just come about from being in the proper circumstances at the right time. It is hard and with all good things must be actively chosen until it becomes habitual.

Some of the things I've done today.

I thought you might find interesting some of my actives so far today. My daily sentence this morning was to dig up all the rocks surrounding this pipe, carry them halfway across the yard and spread them. I was tired afterwards.

So I decided to vent my frustration on a stump. Partly because stumps can't fight back and partly because this particular stump pokes its annoying head out the middle of our lawn and gets in the way of the mower. You would be wondering now, how uprooting a stump is a good cure for frustation, normally such a task is really hard work and not something someone does for pleasure. I went about it a different way. This way......I built a fire over the stump and burned its roots off. Sitting by the fire, waiting for it to burn down I had another idea. While in Vermont this past weekend I ran across some free books.. Some scientists have tired to prove that reading in and of itself is educational and helpful to the development of children. I strongly disagree and show my disagreement by burning books which do not deserve to be books. Jordan and I decided that before burning the books we ought to dishonor them.

Then we fed them to the flames.

No Gossip girl we do not love you.

Let all such vileness be purged from the land so that the land may flourish and produce great harvests.

Thoughts on "Love Wins"

I apologize for this post because it is not well planned and will probably be more critical then I want it to sound. I recently read Rob Bell's new book called Love Wins and the following are my thoughts after reading it.




I think Rob Bell failed greatly in his theology, in his understanding of God, love, heaven and @#!*% . He has tried and failed to poke holes in an essential doctrine which has been generally accepted as orthodox since the days of Gregory the Great.
Their are four primary points of the book.
First, Rob attempts to show that love wins.
"Love is what God is, love is why Jesus came and love is why he continues to come year after year to persons after persons. Love is why I've written this book,. and love is what I want to leave you with. May you experience this vast, expansive, infinite, indestructible love that has been yours all along. May you discover that this love is as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart no one else knows about. And may you know deep in your bones that love wins.

Second, that God's primary purpose is to see that all of his creation comes into a perfect relationship with Him and so live a life of joy, hope, mercy, peace and happiness.
This is not specifically stated because its humanism and Rob would lose his audience if he actually said it but its assumed throughout the book.

Third, he attempts to show that @#!*% as a physical location of eternal torment does not exist.
" @#!*% is what we create ourselves when we reject God, it is not a literal place where we go after we die."

Fourth, he tries to show that heaven is not somewhere else but is here on earth inside of us by the power and grace of Jesus Christ.
"So how do I answer questions about heaven? How would I summarize all that Jesus teaches? There's heaven now somewhere else. There's heaven here sometime else. And then there's Jesus invitation to heaven here and now in this moment in this place."

Those four things are the main points of his book.

As far as showing that love wins Rob does not define love. I looked for a definition of love in his book and these are the closest things I could find:

"its right to point out that love by it's very nature is freedom. For there to be love there has to be the option both now and then to not love." and he says later "God is love, And love is a relationship. This relationship is one of joy and it can't be contained."

Both these definitions are faulty, unbiblical and unhelpful. For if you are in love you are hardly free to simply not love the object of your love. It is also untrue that love is necessarily a relationship. I can love a girl who has no knowledge of my love and so their would be no relationship. I did not find anywhere else in the book a definition of love.


Second point is just as easily refuted. This is Rob's logic.
God most important desire is to see all men saved
If all men are not saved God is a failure
God is not a failure
Therefore all men must somehow be saved
The fallacy is in the first premise. Rob never proves that the purpose of God's existence is to see all men saved. God has other plans and purposes of his own beyond the salvation of every human. Even if Rob is right and God exists simply for the benefit of his creation (humanism and heresy) he never is willing to say this outright because he knows nobody would believe him.

The third and fourth points can be handled together. They both touch on the same issue of what happens after we die. The book closes with these lines and I think they summarize Rob's views of heaven and @#!*% .

"The only thing left to do is trust. Everybody is already at the party. Heaven and @#!*% , Here, Now, Around us, Upon us, Within us."


Rob says that the world is one big "party" we can have either heaven or @#!*% based on how we choose to live our life and whether we will accept Jesus. By having heaven he means those who accept God's grace and live in his commandments will experience God's fullness and be the kind loving merciful people we all want to be. The same is true for @#!*% according to Rob Bell. We can have @#!*% here because @#!*% is simply the absence of God so those who refuse to live by God's rules are already living in @#!*% .

The problems with this idea are many. First, Rob never says what happens after a human dies. A reader of his book would have to assume that when we die we somehow come back to earth again in some form of Christianized reincarnation but Rob can never say this because their is no basis for it in either church tradition or the Bible. Second if @#!*% is just something that exists within ourselves then somehow someone must explain away all the passages in which biblical authors talk about @#!*% . Third Most of The Revelation along with the many smaller passages throughout the Bible which talk about Jesus returning amidst destruction and plagues to purge the world by fire and sword must be explained away. Fourth. All of the Christians who spent their lives waiting for the day of glory when Christ would return and all sin would be destroyed and Christ would begin the heavenly reign which would include Peter and Paul had a false belief about heaven.

So those are the four points that I thought Rob had to say in his new book. I did not agree with any of them and was sad that a man with such wisdom could sink to such a low level of intellectualism. The book is riddled with either or fallacies such as this one, ""is history tragic?
Have billions of people been created only to spend eternity in conscious punishment and torment, suffering infinitely for the finite sins they committed in the few years they spent on earth?
Is our future uncertain? Or will God take care of us?" or this one, "Are we safe? Are we secure? Or are we on our own?" The idea being that God is either a tyrant who hates us all and created us to send us to torment or he is a loving God who could not bear to see his creation suffer. Their is of course a third option but the fallacy tries to hide it. Their is also lots of assumptive language and taking the bible out of context.

I have not written this post because I do not like Rob Bell. I've written it because the ideas presented in Love Wins have much deeper consequences then what would appear on the surface. Anytime someone tries to poke holes in a 2000 year old belief you ought to be very very careful and the person doing the question has a responsibility to take a clear stance, define his terms, list his evidence and to analyze all of the results which would happen if someone took the new belief to heart. Rob Bell does not do this and so even if his ideas were correct I still wouldn't trust him because he does not prove them. If you are reading this and in the back of your mind happily saying, "yes, I knew Rob was wrong", well you should still read the book. The questions he raises are very important and everyone should be able to have answers at their finger tips because just believing something that is right is not helpful unless you know why you are right.

So if you haven't read the book, read it, learn from it and learn to defend what is right true.

That is all, Happy 4th of July.

A Life Spent in Dualism

Christians are caught today in a life of dualism, a life spent divided between the sacred and the secular. We compartmentalize and divorce the one from the other. To the sacred we assign such actions as, prayer, reading the bible, preaching the gospel, spiritual conversation, church attendance ect.. Secular tasks are all those other things which are necessary such as eating, drinking, sleeping, education, career/job, most books, entertainment, the majority of friendships, the majority of conversations ect. People who do more of the sacred things are generally considered more pious. Once we have separated life into two camps, the secular and sacred we then consciously by our own choosing or subconsciously by the will of our culture and environment assign certain actives to each camp. We do secular tasks either because they feel good and aren't strictly forbidden (entertainment, video games, movies, smoking, drinking alcohol, knitting, reading, void conversations and void friendships) or because such secular tasks are necessary (eating, drinking, sleeping, education, conversations with no intent.)


Living life in this state of continual choice between secular and sacred is horrible, constantly having to ask yourself, "how much time do I have for God today?", "can I afford to read my bible all day and perhaps not get a good grade?" "can I trust God with my friendships and spend the day praying to him rather then texting and emailing?" Questions like these constantly plague the lives of people who want to please God but are stuck in a lifestyle in which they have to choose between secular and sacred. When they choose to do a secular think they are often beset by guilt because they know they could be using their time better. When they choose to do a spiritual thing they find it boring and tedious because the secular things are so much more enjoyable and satisfying,.

So, what would happen if Christians started viewing everything as sacred. Paul says, "So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God." He takes us automaticly to the lowest level of secular activity, eating and drinking and says even that can be done for God's glory. Now if eating and drinking can be glorifying to God can not also other things which we often fear to do because of guilt or shame? Things such as playing Frisbee, knitting, reading. Please understand, I AM NOT saying this so as to allow you all to engage in all manner of vain devilry and so waste your life away in a sham show which claims to glorify God. But the real point of this post is to say that it is not the action which one does which is either secular or sacred, rather it is the intent with which you go into that action. A godly man playing Frisbee glorifies God more then an atheist reading his bible. Because its not about the action which occurs but the man who goes into the action and the worship which goes on in the man who is doing in the action.

Practically what does all this mean? I think it means that we need to stop allowing ourselves to do things simply because they aren't wrong. Just because we can morally justify a course of action does not mean it's the thing we ought to do. I think we need to start asking ourselves honestly whether we believe we can glorify God in whatever task we are wanting to do. If someone can consciously worship God while dancing at a club then dance the night away. If they have to forget God while they dance and give themselves over to fleshly pleasure to have a good time then they have forgotten God and so shame themselves and Him who they represent.

The greatest pleasure, motivation and joy come from dwelling on God and so to participate in any activity and experience the best results one ought to be constantly thinking about God. When we play a sport we should dwell on God because he gave us our bodies to play and so gain power to play harder When we paint we should dwell on God because he gave our minds power to imagine beauty and so gain insight to paint better. When we study we should study with all our being because God gave us a mind to learn and we have a duty to learn as much as God will allow us. There is never a time, place or activity which God does not desire to engage in with us and so make that time, place and activity better. We limit God to certain areas of our life which we call sacred. Anytime we limit God we hurt ourselves and anytime we don't limit God He will change us. And this is the challenge from this post, if we dwell on God constantly and free God to interact with us in all that we do then He will most certainly show what things are a waste of our time and either with a kind word and a leading hand or a surgeons knife and a blacksmiths fire He will remove those things from our life. So the question is are we willing to do this, to make a sacrifice of our things we are used to and allow God to engage with us always?