Love and Morality

I may give away everything I have, and I may even give my body as an offering to be burned. But I gain nothing if I do not have love. 1 Corinthians 13:3.

A couple days ago I wrote about loving those who may not think like us in the political arena. That is a challenge I struggle with a lot. Another area that is hard to love others is the issue of morality. We get our morals from the Bible, plain and simple. So we can say that the Bible is a list of rules, and that’s it, or we can say that the Bible tells us a story about love. When we look at the Bible as merely a list of rules, we not only make sure we follow the rules, but we tend to make sure our neighbors and others are following them as well. When we see the Bible as simply a love story, we get emotional about God’s love for us and try to sprinkle that love dust around with our little fairy wands. What would be a more God-pleasing approach to understanding the Bible? Well, as I mentioned Monday, what would God be like if He didn’t love us? It would be bad; we wouldn’t be here, because our ancestors would have been zapped into flubber in the Garden of Eden. What would God be like if He was all love and unconcerned with our actions? Definitely a long haired, smoking the reefer, tie dye shirt Jesus comes to mind. “Dude, I am love, I love you, dude. We don’t need morals, we have love, anarchy is okay, if it works for you man. Sure sleep with your neighbors wife, it is all about love.” The list could go on. Thankfully, we do exist, have no worry of being flubberized and I haven’t seen any flannel graphs with a tie dye Jesus. The God of the Universe is a God of love. God is love, but He did give us commandments. So we have to have a balance of love and morals. Which one is first? Which one is more important? Neither. When you elevate love above morals, you overlook what Christ did for us on the cross. If you elevate morals over love, you start to be judgmental towards others. But when you become a Christian, because of who we are in Christ as a new creation, our morality comes from love. We obey the commandments of God because of our love for Him. If we obey God’s commandments simply because it is a rule, we are not doing it out of love, but out of duty. Just like if I were to buy my wife some flowers on Valentine’s Day simply because of my duty as a husband. The reason to buy flowers for my wife is to express the love I have for her. When we elevate morality above love, we worry about our actions so much that we overlook God’s grace. Another negative effect of putting morality higher is that we expect others to believe and do the same thing we do and believe. If they don’t, we are quick to judge them. When we elevate love over morality, we let things in our lives slide, and we can potentially lead others into believing that the way they live doesn’t matter or that living a good life will get you to Heaven. We have to be careful to not elevate one about the other. We need to strive to live like Christ not because we ought to, but because of what He did for us.