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What is love? It’s such a simple seeming question, and yet the answer is more complex than we might guess. In this episode, Gary Wilkerson and Joshua West discuss how believers should define love and how that understanding redefines our entire lives. Love that has its source in God will radically transform our hearts and minds and will inevitably spill out into all of our choices and interactions with other people. The love and loving truth of Christ is the example that God wants his children to reflect in a dark world.
Key Points from the Podcast
• Popular culture today defines love as tolerance and acceptance of everything, but God is love, so if we want to have an accurate understanding of what love is, we must learn more about God and experience him.
• Love cannot ever be separated from the truth, and the state of someone’s life and heart will determine whether the truth and true love will rebuke, correct or encourage. Sometimes love means telling someone a hard truth or withholding something. Love does whatever work our heart needs, whether we want it or not at the moment.
• Intersectionality is, in a peculiar way, a manipulation of the church’s love. It focuses on those who have been wounded and oppressed, which the church should do, but then it also claims that certain groups of people are more worthy of love and care than others, which is a perversion of genuine love.
• When someone doesn’t have the love of God in them, they will endlessly want others to give them whatever they need, and that becomes crushing for others. The love within us multiplies life around us and feeds others’ hearts.
• True revival will come from repentance from isolationism and self-sufficient pride because then people within the church will experience the healing of community, and the world will take notice.
• Loving others has far more to do with our internal posture toward other people that comes from spending genuine time with God. Actions are good, but trying to be more loving by doing certain things is a type of acts-based salvation.
Bible Verses Referenced in this Podcast
2 Timothy 3:2-9, 1 Corinthians 13:4-7, Matthew 16:13-23, Galatians 2:20, Ephesians 5:1-2, Romans 5:8, Corinthians 13:1-3, John 13:35
Resources Mentioned in the Podcast
About Joshua West
Joshua West serves as the Pastors Network Director at World Challenge helping equip and empower pastors all over the world. Joshua’s desire is to raise up ministers who will correctly and boldly preach the word with passion and integrity. The point of all his work and writings is to preach the gospel, glorify God and to teach sound doctrine.