What Does It Mean to Love God?

Christians talk a lot about loving God (which is good, since Jesus said that the most important commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and that the second is like it--to love your neighbor as yourself). But, how often do we ask ourselves what this looks like? What does it mean to love God?

The Greeks had three words that we translate, love--agape, phileo, and eros. Phileo refers more to a "friendship" love, eros to an erotic love, and agape to a sacrificial, unconditional love.

When we talk of loving God, often we mistakenly think of our love for God in terms of phileo love (or worse yet, eros love). We have nice feelings for God. We like Him. But, agape love is the love with which God loves us, and it is the love with which we have been called to love God and others.

What does it look like to love God with agape love? First John 4:7–12 (NET) says:

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

Wolfhart Pannenberg asks some provocative questions about Christian love for God:

If Christian love is essentially a participation in God's love for the world, then we have to ask whether we can distinguish at all between love of God and love of neighbor. Does not true love consist of sharing in God's love for the world? And in the depth of turning to the cohuman Thou, do we not also love God? (Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 187.)

Pannenberg argues that, while love for God and love for neighbor are inseparable, they do not collapse into one another. Jesus seemed to prioritize love for God over love for others, implying at least a subtle distinction. Pannenberg describes love for God:

We love God by letting him be God to us as Jesus let the Father be God to him, by letting him be our God, our Father, and thus by putting our trust and confidence in him. (Systematic Theology, vol. 3, 193.)

Love for God is expressed in faith.

"Family Happiness" by Leo Tolstoy

I am reading The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Short Stories by Leo Tolstoy. The first short story in the book is "Family Happiness"--wow! What a profound and yet depressing story. I think in its day it was supposed to be some kind of social commentary about the role of women in society, but to me it was an eerily accurate portrayal of the way "love" blossoms in a woman (and to a lesser degree in a man, too).

"Family Happiness" is a short story from the perspective of a 17-year-old Russian girl (Marya Alexandrovna, aka Masha) who falls in love with an older friend of the family (Sergei) shortly after the death of her mother (her father having previously died, as well). The story traces their courtship and early days of their marriage until they have a young child. The depressing part of the story is the first-person narrative of Masha's thoughts on love.

At the beginning of the story, Masha is young, naive, and hopelessly romantic. She has dreams of her future husband sweeping her off her feet and carrying her off to eternal bliss ("wild delight," as she refers to it). She marries Sergei (the older friend of the family) and they move off to the country. The two of them live a happy, quaint, newliwed life, but she gets restless and wants to move to the big city. When they move, Masha gets active in the urban social scene, but Sergei prefers to stay at home and stick to his business. Over time, the two of them drift apart and Masha realizes that her childhood dreams of "wild delight" aren't going to happen. (The urban social scene brings her to the brink of an affair.)

At the end of the story, Masha and Sergei get into an argument over what went wrong with their relationship and where their newliwed bliss went. Sergei, the voice of wisdom, blames it on time. He says that love changes over time, and it's no use lamenting over the past--what's gone is gone. Masha has a hard time believing this, but as the two part, she sees her infant son and realizes that this is where she will find the love she wants. The story ends, "With that day ended my love-story with my husband, the old feeling became a precious memory never to return; but the new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of another life, happy in quite a different way, which I am still living up to the present moment." (Note how she no longer loved Sergei as her "husband" but as "the father of my children.")

Now, I am not a woman, and neither is Leo Tolstoy, but there is something sadly true about the theme of this story. I think both men and women are looking for "wild delight," though we might define it differently. Does anyone ever find it? Should we stop looking? Has God created us with this desire so that we will long for the kingdom of God--a place where we are perfectly loved? I don't know.

This is the first story I have ever read by Tolstoy. Maybe I'm way off base, but I feel that his narration from a female perspective was very believable. I think he's got some good insights into the human condition and I am looking forward to reading the next story, 'The Death of Ivan Ilych."