There is no disguise which can for long conceal love where it exists or stimulate it where it does not.
François de la Rochefoucauld1
God does not need praise by men, but he knows apriori, that when men cease to praise him, they begin to praise one another excessively.
Isaac Bashevis Singer2
As I sit to write this chapter on love, I feel most unloving. Things have gone wrong all day. The weather doesn’t help—it’s muggy, the air heavy and oppressive, sapping my energy as the August rain drips outside. Perhaps the dreariness affected my associate. This afternoon he did something totally out of character, and I responded in kind. I got home late for supper, and my wife, not knowing when I would arrive, had nothing prepared. She offered to put slices of tomato and cheese on top of a piece of bread and grill it for me. Ugh. My stomach cringes, and all I can think about is that I have to go back to the office and write this chapter on love. Feeling as I do, how can I write about the love of God as a motivation for prayer?
None of today’s incidents have made me feel unloving toward God. They make me feel unloving toward myself and toward the inconvenient incidents of life, but not toward God. My reasoning is too mundane. The muggy weather did not make me question God’s providence—I know too much about meteorology for that. I did not mishandle my associate because I lacked the love of God in my heart—it was because I used an inadequate management technique. If I had phoned my wife and worked out plans for supper based on my late arrival, my stomach would not be queasy now from my pseudo-supper. I blame everything but God for my lack of love.
That’s precisely the problem. We have so trivialized love that God is not even involved. True, the incidents of my day are simple and mundane; still, how discouraging to realize they haven’t made me think of God or his love for me. Am I so indifferent? Apparently I am.
Christian leaders find several factors contribute to shove God into the background even on so central an issue as love. One is our natural inclination to be problem solvers. As anyone who has ever taken a management course realizes, the first step to solving a problem is to break it down into its constituent parts and then begin to attack each part. The problem of love, we assume, is no different.
A second, related, problem is our tendency to deal with people in the same way. Remarkable strides have been made in counseling technique the past generation. Overall, our increased expertise in becoming people helpers has been a boon to the church. But the danger (new technology always carries a danger) is the reduction of people to a conglomerate of observable behaviors.
Thus, we find ourselves not only dealing with our own love of God in a fragmented, behavioristic manner, but we tend to reinforce that approach in counseling with others. Somewhere in the process, the true nature of humanness—of love for God—gets obscured, and one of the things that suffers is our motivation to pray.
The Psychologizing of Love
We might call it the psychologizing of love. Love has come to be defined as the conglomerate of several different behaviors. This “ingredient” view of love reminds me of the report cards we received in grade school. Half of the card reported on something called citizenship. I was rated in areas like deportment, industriousness, participation, helpfulness, and cleanliness. If I scored well in all these areas, I was a good citizen of that class.
Too often we have attempted to do the same thing with love. We’ve taken a listing of loving behaviors, such as the one found in 1 Corinthians 13, put check marks by the ones we have observed in ourselves, and resolved to work on the ones we find missing. The problem is, love is both larger and more simple than such a list.
First, it is larger. Perhaps all the behaviors in such a list truly are the fruits of love. Still, in the case of love, the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. There is a reality to love deeper than such analysis can provide.
Second, love is also simpler. Reduced to its essence, love is a total orientation of one’s being to the object of desire. Whether that object is a person, god, race, or ideal, love demands we prioritize the rest of life to meet whatever demands that object requires. Behaviors are important and can be improved or developed. But if they are divorced from a central object of desire, they lose their meaning. Christian behavior is only important if related to faith in Christ.
No group of people is more susceptible to the negative effects of reducing love to a set of behaviors more clearly than Christian leaders who deal with Christians daily, often at the crisis points of their lives. For pastors, the desire to help people is particularly strong. And what better place to start than with their overt behavior? The subtle temptation is to begin to reduce problems to observable behavior, which can be effective—until it begins to obscure the whole person’s stance before God.
Judy Morford, an associate pastor at Cedar Mill Bible Church in Cedar Mill, Oregon, finds this a particular danger for those who do a lot of counseling. Judy, who does counseling at Cedar Mill, says that dealing with people problemso much has convinced her people need to be dealt with as more than the sum of their behaviors:
“We have tended to psychologize everything. For example, if someone has some schizophrenic behaviors, they may be labeled schizophrenic. Psychological tests designed to spot abnormalities may indicate schizophrenia. But as I talk to the people, I discover they are functioning in the mainstream of society, apparently not needing to be institutionalized. They do have some abnormal behavior patterns, but something prevents those patterns from dominating their lifes. Often, after probing, I’ll find it’s their faith that’s holding them together—praying Christians able to function in spite of their problems.
“When a high school youth gets in trouble for drinking, the tendency is to brand that youth a drinker and troublemaker, when his behavior may be prompted by a very specific thing—an argument with a close friend, for example. Psychological categorizing has made us go to two extremes: identifying people as behaviors on the one hand, and making people unresponsible for their behaviors on the other. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. Or to put it another way, without recognizing the reality of sin and God’s dealing with it, you can’t properly understand human beings.
“Pop psychology has affected the way we treat one another. People use terms nowadays that only psychologists used five years ago. Self-esteem, neurotic, anxiety, and many other words are all used now by the general population. The danger for Christians is that what we once viewed as spiritual problems are now being categorized as psychological problems, and that can lead to a cheapening of our relationship with God.”
Psychologists need to define schizophrenia by lists of observable behaviors. And perhaps a psychological definition of love needs to be established the same way. But a biblical definition of love does not lend itself to such dissection, and for precisely that reason spiritual categories can never be subsumed under the psychological. Reduced to the simplest terms, psychology looks manward and spirituality looks Godward. Psychology is a good and valuable resource, but when it replaces our spirituality, we have confused our priorities.
One pastor has a sign on his desk that says simply, “Pray first.” Too often we ignore that sound advice and instead analyze first.
This method of dealing with other people also affects the way we deal with ourselves. Often we think more about how we stand with other men than with God. It’s something our success-oriented culture encourages. A study done not too long ago identified the eleven most common patterns of irrational thinking modern men and women exhibit. Perfectionistic self-love was at the core of most of them. For example, three of the patterns were:
• It is a dire necessity for me to be loved or approved by every significant person in my social sphere.
• I must be thoroughly competent, adequate, and achieving in all possible respects if I am to consider myself worthwhile.
• There is a perfect solution to human problems, and it is catastrophic if this correct solution is not found.3
Each of these problems looks for its solution in the self. At the heart is the idea that man should be able to do what only God is capable of doing. The problems we try to resolve in our modern minds are not those between God and man, but between man and man—how do I stack up against others? And if I stack up poorly, how can I improve myself to do better? Is it any wonder we have trouble loving God when we are so occupied with perfecting ourselves?
The essence of prayer is love. The biblical heroes of the faith realized that. They all begin their prayers with worship. Unfortunately, we have lost the priority of love in our prayers. Too often the prayers of modern men and women start with apology. We gratuitously pay God homage by apologizing for our imperfections, which will surely get better as soon as we get a chance to attend to the problem. “Just bear with me, God.”
The result is that, for many, the Bible has ceased to be a book of choice—love God or love him not. It has become a behavioral reference book. We search its pages for clues to the proper set of behaviors that will make us lovers of God. When we find them—and the models are there—we resolve to put them into practice thereby manufacturing the “love of God” that is the primary motivation to prayer. Unfortunately, we fall short of what love really is. We end up with a kindergartener’s copy of the Mona Lisa. And our motivation for prayer gets off on the wrong foot. In fact, it doesn’t even stand up at all.
Ennobling Prayer
What can we do about restoring love to its proper place in the life of prayer? The first thing, perhaps, is simply to realize that true prayer reflects love of God, not fear of our own mortality in the face of a wrathful deity. Thomas Aquinas noted long ago, “If prayer were a cringing, whining, coaxing of a whimsical God, it would debase a man; … it is, in fact, the ennobling thing that has so set apart the saints from the cowardly braggarts who deify themselves and the whining cowards who dehumanize themselves.”4 Love of God, reflected in our prayers, makes us fully human.
The paradox of loving God is this: If we forget about perfecting ourselves and love our Creator, we become perfect in God. If we do it the other way around, we not only fail at perfection, but we send God a counterfeit love that further estranges us from him.5
Thus, we need to establish what Judy Morford calls a “first love” relationship: “I like to use the phrase, ‘warp and woof’ to describe the Christian’s relationship to God—even though it is a cliché. The phrase comes from the weaving process, and describes the interchange of threads that make a fabric. It also applies to the Christian life. The threads must come together in a fundamental pattern, or they remain useless threads. To become cloth, they must be put together in a special way. Love of God is that fundamental pattern in the Christian’s life. Without that, the threads of our life remain isolated behaviors that have no meaning, and no amount of improving the threads will make it a piece of cloth.”
In teaching this to people at the church or to counselees, Morford uses the first chapter of 1 Thessalonians “where Paul presents a trilogy of things he’s thankful for in the young Christians: their labor of love, their work of faith, and their hope grounded in Christ. I think it’s clear that love is the basis of their work. Without it, their works are meaningless.
“My own prayer life has been through many changes over the years. As a young mother, I had a five-year-old, a three-year-old, and a one-year-old, and I found the only time I could really pray was literally in the middle of the night. If I woke up then, I would pray. As the kids grew older, I began to get up at 4:30 in the morning to pray. I still don’t have ideal conditions for regular prayer. As a mother of three teenagers and working full time, I sometimes get too tired to pray. But most days I’m able to work in some time for quiet prayer.
“Because of my changing schedule over the years, I’ve asked myself, Just what does God expect of me in my prayer life? The answer I come up with is he wants a love relationship. He doesn’t want a hired servant; he wants a bride. A true love will always find a way. It may not always be the same way, or the prescribed way, but it will be a way that reflects love. That’s what God wants from me.”
Modeling Love to One Another
Besides recognizing that prayer is grounded on a love relationship with God, we must also look to the one element of society that can still model Christian love properly—the body of Christ, the church. Joseph Sittler has observed, “Love is the function of faith horizontally just as prayer is the function of faith vertically.”6 Perhaps we must concede that we will not find much Christian love modeled in our secular society. But the church is set up to do precisely that. Both the holy catholic church and the besteepled clapboard church on the corner are living witnesses to and training grounds for what loving one another really means.
What happens when members of the body of Christ model this love to one another, both in relationships and prayer? God’s will is experienced and enjoyed—and we rejoice in it together, no matter what the particular event is. It may be healing; it may be tragedy.
One pastor told two stories of love in action. One was of a young man in the congregation named Rick who had a motorcycle accident and was given almost no chance of living by the doctors attending him. If he did live, the doctors told his parents, he would be severely paralyzed. The church came out every night for a week to pray. Slowly the young man recovered and now, seven years later, is totally healed and active. The congregation rejoiced in answered prayer.
The other was a bittersweet experience. A twenty-nine-year-old mother of a two-year-old son died from cancer. “We prayed over Susan with the elders, anointing her with oil. The congregation prayed for her fervently, as we had for Rick five years earlier. But healing didn’t come. In that process of frequently lifting her up to God, I learned that even when God doesn’t give us what we want, he gives us the encouragement we need to go through the experience. We wanted her healed so badly, but we gave her up to God. And it became clear, even in the way she died, that God was at work.
“In both instances I saw a tremendous uniting of our body. In the first, a uniting of enthusiasm, excitement, and joy. In the second, a uniting in hurt and sorrow. A deep love for each other and God came out of both experiences, I think largely because we prayed desperately in both, but were willing to put our love for God and a desire for his will first.”
What the world needs desperately is Christian love. But the world cannot manufacture it. It must come from the Source, reflected through the lovers of the Source.
Francois Rochefoucauld, Sentences and Moral Maxims (New York: French and European Publications, 1976) Maxim 70.
Isaac Bashevis Singer, “Prayer,” GEO (February 1983): 81.
A. Ellis, Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (New York: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1962).
Thomas Aquinas, My Way of Life (New York: Confronternity of the Precious Blood, 1952), 35.
See also Scott Peck’s excellent discussion of modern man’s weak attempts to love in The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 81-184.
Cited in Donald Bloesch, Essentials of Evangelical Theology 2 (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), 56.
Copyright © 1985 by Christianity Today
