Search Results: love your nieghbor
What “God Loves You” Actually Means
Category: General
Tags: Jesus, Love, Salvation, Trinity
From the beginning, God chose to have a people who would be the object of his eternal love, just as Christ is the object of his eternal love. God sought to acquire a “bride” for Christ who would receive and reflect the love of the triune community (Eph 5:25-32). And…
God’s Church is Not “Pretty”
Category: General
Tags: Authenticity, Church, Community, Honesty, Love, Truth
Topics: The Church
…even when the truth is ugly. God’s love is neither superficial nor duplicitous. To the contrary, God’s love always tells the truth. Think about this. Jesus’ death on Calvary is the ultimate expression of God’s love, and it’s the single most honest statement in all of history. It’s the ultimate…
Must We Deny Biblical Infallibility to “Disarm” Scripture? A Review of Derek Flood’s Disarming Scripture: Part 1
Category: General
Tags: Bible, Biblical Authority, Book Reviews, Derek Flood, Disarming Scripture
…to violence in Scripture is based on what he calls the “hermeneutic of love” that he contends was employed by Jesus. This simply means that Jesus interpreted the Old Testament through the lens of his understanding of God as love and his experience of God using him to manifest this…
Why Did God Allow Evil?
Category: Q&A
Tags: Evil, Free Will, Love, Problem of Evil, Satan and the Problem of Evil
Topics: Providence, Predestination and Free Will, The Problem of Evil
…and say loving things to them. But no one can force another person to actually love them. But God created us, someone might respond, so he need not coerce us to love him. He could simply create us with an unquenchable desire to love him. In this case we would…
Church: A Place of Love, Not Judgment
Category: General
…fact is that we Christians are not generally known for our love. This is catastrophic! Love is the all-or-nothing of God’s kingdom. Above all we are to love (Col 1:14). Everything we do is to be done in love (1 Cor 16:14). We are to imitate God by living in…
The Risk of Love & the Source of Evil
Category: General
Tags: Free Will, Love, Problem of Evil
…equivalent to nothingness, so it’s no limitation on God to say he can’t create them. So too, the reason God can’t create a “preprogrammed lover” is because the very idea of an agent who is capable of love but not capable of choosing against love is meaningless. So, if God’s…
Cross-like Love and Non-Violence
Category: General
Tags: Cruciform Theology, Discipleship, Enemy Love, Kingdom Living, Love, Non-Violence, Pacifism
Topics: Ethical, Cultural and Political Issues
…love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Eph. 5:1-2). Notice that for this author, to imitate God simply means one imitates and reflects the self-sacrificial love displayed on Calvary. According to Paul, the command to reflect this kind of love is to be placed “above”…
The Perfect Love of God
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Cruciform Theology, God is Love, Jesus, Triune Love
Topics: Attributes and Character
The Father, Son and Spirit exist as the infinite intensity and unsurpassable perfection of eternal love. We know this about the triune God not by speculation but because Jesus demonstrated that love (Rom 5:8) in his willingness to go to the furthest extreme possible to save us. When the all-holy…
How Do You “See” God? God’s Self-Portrait, Part 1
Category: Essays
Tags: Essay, God, Picture of God, ReKnew Manifesto, Seeing is Believing
Topics: Apologetics, Christology
…crank out apparently loving behaviors, they can’t succeed in helping you actually love God. Quite the opposite: in making you fear God, these messages ensure that you can’t love God, for as John says, There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to…
Reviewing the Reviews: Tom Belt (Part 2)
Category: General
Tags: Crucifixion of the Warrior God, Cruciform Theology, Tom Belt
Topics: Biblical Interpretation
…the loving character of God’s actions”? The answer is, of course not. If God’s triune essence is love, God must experience God’s triune self as perfectly loving. Having said this, I suspect that on this point Tom has in fact sniffed out one significant way my perspective has changed since…
A Brief Theology of the Trinity
Category: General
Tags: God, God is Love, Jesus, The Holy Spirit, Trinity
Topics: Trinity
…Church as the bride of Christ is a contingent expression of the Father’s perfect love for the Son that is mediated by the Spirit, and inasmuch as the bride, abiding in the Son, shares in the Son’s reception of the Father’s perfect love and participates in the Son’s perfect love…
How To Fix The Church: The Kingdom of God (Part 4)
Category: General
Tags: Church, Jesus, Kingdom, Kingdom Living
Topics: Following Jesus
God has leveraged everything on the Church loving like Jesus loved, as outlined in our previous posts in this series. “By this the world will know you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “by your love” (Jn 13:35). By God’s own design, Christ-like love is supposed to be the proof that…
How Important Is the Cross?
Category: General
“God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). Pretty much every Christian accepts this. The problem, though, is that our understanding about what, exactly, love is remains obscure. Discussions on the nature of love can easily devolve into abstraction. But the crucifixion cuts through all ambiguity by defining love in one supreme,…
Love and Free Will
Category: General
Tags: Free Will, Love, Open Theism
Topics: Free Will and the Future
…choosing to love. But these preprogrammed agents would not genuinely be loving. Love can only be genuine if it’s freely chosen. Which means, unless a personal agent has the capacity to choose against love, they don’t really have the capacity to choose for it. In fact, the concept of a…
A Brief Theology of God’s Love
Category: General
Tags: God is Love, Love, Trinity
…Nowhere else does Scripture express God’s essence in this way. Scripture says God is just and merciful, but it does not say that God is justice itself or mercy itself. It does say that God is love, not just a lover. Love is God’s very essence. Everything else is a…
What’s Your Worth?
Category: General
Tags: God's Love, Unsurpassable Worth
…actually does. The cross is what the love of the Trinity looks like when it encompasses us. God loves us in the here and now with the very same love that God eternally is. To put it another way, God loves us with the same love he has for himself…
The All-or-Nothing of Kingdom Living
Category: General
Tags: Kingdom Living, Love
Verse: 1 Corinthians 13
…their true beliefs are worthless because they are not accompanied with works that reflect God’s love. Love is the all-or-nothing of kingdom living. The “only thing that counts,” Paul says, is faith expressing itself through love.” We are to “do everything in love,” he says. Love is the primary expression…
3 Traits of a Jesus Kind of Church
Category: General
Tags: Church, Judgment, Love, Mercy
Topics: The Church
…love to lead them to a place closer to where God wants them to be. We are to love like this because this is how we ourselves are loved. Finally, God’s love is accommodating; so must ours be. Unlike ethical principles, which are always abstract, universal, and idealistic, God’s love…
The Call To Nonviolent Discipleship
Category: General
Tags: Enemy Love, Peace
Topics: Enemy-Loving Non-Violence
…the example given to us by God, in Christ, by walking “in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us” (Eph 5:1-2, emphasis added). To imitate God simply means one imitates and reflects the self-sacrificial love displayed on Calvary. According to Paul, the…
Rob Bell is NOT a Universalist (and I actually read “Love Wins”)
Category: General
…topics next to Rob’s main focus: namely, the incomprehensible and unlimited love of God expressed on Calvary as Jesus prays with his last breath, “Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.” Finally, despite my earlier claim that Love Wins can’t be neatly filed into any pre-established theological category,…