Going door-to-door this last week — I’ve started that in earnest again with the change in weather — I went to a door that was wide open at an upstairs apartment.  I could see the two twenty-something men, who were inside, and as I started to talk to them, one of them said, “No thank you, we’re not a religious family.”  He also gave the obvious body language that the conversation was over.  I offered a gospel tract and he said, “No.”  I then knocked on the next door, then after that the two bottom doors in a fourplex.

As I stood waiting for people at the other three doors in that fourplex, I could hear these two men talking to one another, and as I walked to the next set of apartments, they both told each other they loved each other.  I thought about the concept of “love” in the world and how people use that term in a normal way.  Many homes where I live have the leftist value sign that says, “Love is love, and kindness is everything.”  It crossed my mind at this point to write about the love of an unsaved or unconverted person, and the eagerness to use the term in our culture.

As I finally sat down to write today, I checked the few online sites I visit, and at one there was a link to article online at the Christian Post, “Former Desiring God writer Paul Maxwell announces he’s no longer Christian.”  This is happening a lot now, even as Gallup recently mentioned that for the first time, less than 50% (47%) of Americans are members of a church of whatever kind.  A few paragraphs in the article about Maxwell read:

“What I really miss is connection with people,” Maxwell said on his Instagram feed. “What I’ve discovered is that I’m ready to connect again. And I’m kind of ready not to be angry anymore. I love you guys, and I love all the friendships and support I’ve built here. And I think it’s important to say that I’m just not a Christian anymore, and it feels really good. I’m really happy.”

“I can’t wait to discover what kind of connection I can have with all of you beautiful people as I try to figure out what’s next,” he added. “I love you guys. I’m in a really good spot. Probably the best spot of my life. I’m so full of joy for the first time. I love my life.” . . . . “I just say, ‘I know that you love me.’ I know, and I receive it as love. I know you care about the eternal state of my soul and you pushed through the social awkwardness of telling me this because you don’t want me to suffer. And that is a good thing. That’s a loving thing to do. And I hear where you’re coming from, and I respect your perspective.”

He renounces Christianity, but he says, “I love you guys, and I love all the friendships and support I’ve built here. . . . I love you guys (again).”  He refers to what his former colleagues have done in the way of preaching to him as their loving him.  He also says that he is “so full of joy for the first time.”   According to him, he also has “joy” as a consequence of ejecting from Christianity.

Reading this article dovetailed with my thoughts at that door last week, when I heard the two men express “love” to each other.  My thought is, what do they think love is?  I know what love is.  It is of God.  It is fruit of the Spirit.  Love is a biblical concept, that originates from scripture.  It entered the English language from the Bible.  What comes to my mind related to these thoughts is 1 John 4:7 and 16:

[E]very one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. . . . God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

Scripture teaches that an unbeliever or an unconverted person cannot love.  Love is of God.  If he is not dwelling in God and God in him, he can’t love.  To love, someone must be born of God and know God.  Even if those two men and Maxwell are all using the term, just like most people in the world use the term, it doesn’t mean that they love.  They don’t.  They can’t.  It really is the same thing with joy.  Maxwell says he has joy now that he never had before, since he gave up Christianity.  I can interpret him as feeling perhaps less vexed now, because he’s living how he wants without the restraints of Christianity.  This is the pleasure of sin, not joy.

I don’t like hearing the word “love” outside of its actual meaning and the original context of its definition.  My dislike isn’t going to stop people from using it in a false way.  However, I think it needs to be pointed out.  If these people are going to reject Christianity or renounce it, they don’t get to hijack it or borrow from it, as they do with love.  They are not of God and they do not love.  The practice some kind of transactional relationship, where they express feelings they call love, but it isn’t love.  Love stays with the Bible and with Christianity and not with them, even if they claim otherwise.

If what unbelievers have and use isn’t love, then what is it?  Love isn’t a feeling or an emotion.  I’m not saying it is bereft or disengaged from emotion.  True love is not an emotion, but it is emotional.  It isn’t first emotional, but the emotions will come, just like repentance brings with it sorrow.  Emotion is a necessary component of biblical love, but it isn’t an emotion.

Unbelievers are using the term love in a naturalistic way, when it is a supernaturalistic term or concept.  Very often what they call love is really lust or just an expression of human care.  It’s like a greeting, have a good day!  It means I’ve got some kind of commitment to you.  It isn’t love, but it is sharing a human camaraderie.  It can’t be love though, because it isn’t going to provide or supply the greatest or the most essential needs the person has.  It’s to say that I will provide you some well being as we both head towards a temporal life of pleasure that will end in eternal torment.  The highest value will be human.  It won’t be divine, so it will be vain or superficial.

This “love,” that isn’t love, is what men think they want.  It is Esau trading his birthright for a mess of pottage.  It sacrifices the permanent on the altar of the immediate.  It anesthetizes someone against the vexation of the harmful effects of the curse, helping deaden the pain of the rejection of God.