More Love!

Doug Stone, America country music artist, released a song called “More Love” in 1993. The song, as country songs occasionally manage to do, had a meaningful message. After a relationship fails, the character in the song is trying to figure out what he did wrong. He realizes what she really wanted, and what he should have given her, was “More Love” and less material things. Only too late does he realize it, and she’s gone! My interest is not in that song so much but in the words that are repeated again and again in the song. What she needed from him was “more love.” Who can argue that our world had enough love this morning? And I’m not talking about the romantic kind the world so often portrays when it writes and sings and makes movies and videos about “love.” Sadly, far too often, what the world means when it talks about “love” is in reality not much more that “lust” and, to dust off a Bible word “lewdness.” A good Bible passage that illustrates the point is Romans 13:13-14 where the apostle Paul wrote these words to Christians living in a culture where lust was on the loose: “Let us walk properly, as in the day, not in revelry and drunkenness, not in lewdness and lust, not in strife and envy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to fulfill its lusts” (New King James Version). The King James translates the words for “lewdness and lust” as “chambering and wantonness,” and the New American Standard Bible (1995) renders them “sexual promiscuity and sensuality.” A point I want to make here is that sexual lust / immorality driven more by hormones and emotions and physical excitement have long been mis-labeled by the world with what the Bible often means when it tells us “love one another.” Just before Paul wrote the words above, he had instructed Christians in  Romans 13:8-10 — “Owe no one anything except to love one another, for he who loves another has fulfilled the law. For the commandments, ‘You shall not commit adultery ... not murder ... not steal ... not bear false witness ... not covet,’ and if there is any other commandment, are all summed up in this saying, namely, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.” These verses make one thing clear. The world could use a lot more of this kind of love. The shocking frequency of sexual immorality, lust, lewdness, sensuality and what is called “sexploitation”, along with the rest of the harmful, hateful things humans do to each other that dominate daily headlines — surely all this should convince us we need more genuine love.       

Christians know God-like love is not just words, and certainly not just always doing what “feels so right.” The cross of Christ proves that (John 3:16 * Ephesians 5:1-2 * 1 John 3:16-18). God wants His church to love more. The Holy Spirit still speaks through what the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Thess 4:9-10 – “But concerning brotherly love you have no need that I should write to you, for you yourselves are taught by God to love one another; and indeed you do so toward all the brethren who are in all Macedonia. But we  urge you, brethren, that you increase more and more.” There’s always a need for more love!  Love more!

by: Dan Gulley