This blog is based on a message by Pastor Todd Cosenza.
There is a lot of talk about love today. People take positions, defend choices, and build entire belief systems around what they think love means. But not everything called love looks like God’s love.
That confusion exists outside the church, and it exists inside the church too. We cannot define God’s love by popular opinion, by our feelings, or even by what sounds compassionate. We have to go to God’s Word to understand what His love actually looks like.
God wants us to understand His love with our minds and experience it in our hearts. It is both. We study His Word, receive His love, and grow through that relationship with Him. His love is not merely an idea to agree with. It is something we are meant to know personally and live out practically.
Real Love Is Sincere
Romans 12:9 begins by calling us to sincere love. That means love must be genuine, not a performance. It cannot simply make things look good while leaving everything underneath untouched.
Real love affects people. It gets into the messiness of life. It does not lie, put on a show, or pretend that destructive things are harmless.
But before we go further into Romans 12, we need to distinguish between different kinds of love. They have different capacities, and expecting one to accomplish what only another can do leaves us frustrated and hurt.
Three Kinds of Love
Agape: God’s Love That Prefers Others
Agape is God’s love, a love that prefers others. It moves beyond self-interest and seeks another person’s good.
We can be saved and set free from sin because God acted for our good by sending His Son to die for us. That is the kind of love we are called to express in Romans 12. Our expression of His love must be sincere.
Agape is more than warm affection. It is a love that gives, forgives, honors, and puts others ahead of itself.
Phileo: Friendship Love
Phileo describes friendship love, the warmth and affection we experience through personal connection. We care about a friend, a brother or sister, a parent, or someone close to us.
There is a genuine sense of belonging in that kind of love. We enjoy one another and value our relationships.
Eros: Romantic Love
Eros describes romantic love, the affection and desire between a man and a woman. It is another kind of love we recognize in the relationships described in Scripture.
God has given people the capacity for friendship and romantic love, whether they know Him or not. Those are good gifts. But neither one can replace the love that comes through communion with the Lord.
Friendship and romance have their place. God’s agape love is the love we must continually receive from Him.
God’s Love Is a Continual Flow, Not a One-Time Supply
When you came to Christ, God did not give you a small supply of love and expect you to stretch it across the rest of your life. We are meant to have fresh, continual experiences of His love.
Think about marriage. If I told my wife that I loved her on our wedding day and never communicated it again, that would not be enough. Love needs to be expressed continually. A living relationship has an ongoing exchange of love.
Love is not like a stagnant pond. It is a flowing river, refreshing and giving.
Or think about something like vitamin C. Our bodies need it, but cannot produce it by itself. We must receive it through what we take in. Once received, the body can use it. That gives us a picture of our dependence on God: we do not manufacture His love by ourselves. We receive it from Him and then express it toward others.
We need communion with the Lord, not merely the memory of an encounter years ago. There is a fresh supply available. Come on, we are meant to live under that flow!
Come to His Table
That word “agape” not only means to prefer others, it also means “a love feast.” The picture of an agape feast helps us understand God’s love for us. The New Testament church would often have an agape feast, where the rich and poor sit together, where those with resources provide for those without, and where the food keeps coming. Nobody’s economic position determines whether they belong. Sometimes the feast would last for days.
That is a picture of God’s abundant love: a feast that does not run out.
In Psalm 23:5, David describes the Lord preparing a table for him even in the presence of his enemies. The question for us is simple: Whose table are we eating at?
We can keep going to other people, expecting them to meet every need. We can expect friendship to satisfy everything inside us. We can expect romance or marriage to fill every empty place.
But those relationships cannot carry that weight. God invites us back to His table, where we receive what only He can provide. Friendship love and romantic love are gifts, but they are not substitutes for God’s own love for us.
God’s Love Gives Us Power to Forgive
1 Peter 4:8 calls believers to love one another deeply and describes love as covering a multitude of sins. This is where the power of agape becomes deeply personal.
We have all been hurt. Someone has disappointed us, sinned against us, or left us carrying pain. The question is not whether hurt happens. The question is how we deal with it.
Friendship affection alone cannot accomplish the release we need. Romantic feelings alone cannot free us from the pain someone has caused. We need God’s love at work within us.
Imagine a large stain on a wall. Simply painting water over it does not make it disappear. You need something capable of covering that stain. In the same way, we need more than affection to deal with the deep effects of another person’s sin.
As we receive God’s forgiveness and love, we gain something to draw from. We can release someone because God has first forgiven us.
That release is not pretending the hurt never happened. It is refusing to keep holding the debt. It is declaring that another person’s actions will not be given endless power to torment us.
We can bring the hurt to the Lord and pray in this way: Father, because You have forgiven me, I choose to forgive this person. I receive Your love, and from that love I release what they owe me. I will not keep feeding this wound.
Forgiveness releases the other person from what we hold against them, and it releases us from carrying that debt. That is the freedom God’s love makes possible. Friendship love and romantic love cannot do that.
Real Love Hates Evil and Holds On to Good
Romans 12:9 does not stop with sincerity. It tells us to hate evil and cling to what is good.
That may not be where we expected a passage about love to go. We might have written something about pleasant feelings or keeping everybody comfortable. But God connects sincere love with a clear hatred of evil.
God does not hate people. He hates what destroys them:
- The lies that take root and crowd out what is good.
- The sin that brings destruction into their lives.
- The temptations and spiritual bondage that hold them captive.
To walk in God’s love, we need to get both our love of good and our hatred of evil right. We love what God loves and reject what God rejects. His Word, not our opinion, establishes that distinction.
Wanting to stay friendly with someone is not a reason to affirm every belief they hold. Wanting to avoid hurting someone’s feelings is not a reason to approve every choice they make.
Real love can care deeply about a person while refusing to agree with what is destroying them. Love and agreement are not the same thing.
Jesus Shows Us Moral Clarity
Hebrews 1:9 describes Jesus as loving righteousness and hating wickedness, and connects that with God anointing Him with the oil of joy.
Jesus knew where the boundaries were. He loved what His Father loved and rejected what His Father rejected. He did not make avoiding offense His highest priority. Sometimes confronting a hardened heart meant saying something the person did not want to hear.
If the church wants to walk in God’s anointed power, it must walk in moral clarity according to His Word. We cannot claim to represent His love while continually compromising what He has made clear.
That clarity is not an excuse to hate people. It is part of loving them enough to reject what harms them.
Look for the Good God Is Developing
The other half of Romans 12:9 matters just as much: hold tightly to what is good.
We do not make a person’s faults the whole story. We look for the good God is doing, even in the middle of struggle. We look for the gold, the silver, the precious things He is bringing forward.
Then we call those things out. We encourage them. We hold on to them.
Rejecting evil and nurturing good belong together. We refuse to feed what destroys people, and we encourage what God is growing in them.
Honor One Another Above Yourselves
Romans 12:10 calls us to devotion toward one another and to honoring others above ourselves. This brings agape love right into everyday church life.
It also speaks directly to questions of race and diversity. If we are truly devoted to one another and honoring one another above ourselves, racial pride and prejudice have no place to stand.
This does not require a false, exaggerated low opinion of ourselves. We can recognize that we are doing well by God’s grace and still choose to honor another person above ourselves.
Think of it this way: I recognize someone’s faithful service and lift them up in honor. That person recognizes someone else and does the same. Then they honor another member of the church. It keeps going.
Instead of competing for recognition, we build one another up.
Ephesians 4:16 describes the church growing and building itself up in love. That is the picture: each person contributing, each person valuing the others.
Honoring others is not losing our place. It is helping the whole church to rise together.
This Is When Church Life Gets Good
I love miraculous power, healing, and the gifts of the Spirit. But church life does not become all it should be through those things alone.
There is a joy that comes when a church is flowing in God’s agape love and people are genuinely honoring one another above themselves. We are not just attending the same gathering. We are devoted to one another.
That love becomes practical when we recognize people’s faithfulness, appreciate their service, and honor the effort they make to be part of the church family.
It becomes practical when we forgive instead of keeping accounts, encourage the good instead of dwelling only on the bad, and care enough to hold to God’s truth.
This is what real love looks like:
- It prefers others instead of insisting on its own importance.
- It receives continually from the Lord.
- It forgives through the love God has first given us.
- It rejects evil without rejecting the worth of people.
- It clings to the good God is developing.
- It honors others and builds up the church.
When Other Loves Feel Exhausted, Turn to God
There may be times when friendship feels depleted because people have hurt you or walked away. There may be times when romantic affection feels exhausted in your marriage.
Those are the moments to turn toward God’s love, not away from it.
Friendship and romantic feelings cannot sustain everything we ask of them, but God’s love does not fail. His love gives us the strength to keep going when everything else tells us to quit.
We can stop expecting other people to fill every empty place within us. We can come back to God’s table and receive again.
Lord Jesus, forgive us for expecting friendship or marriage to answer every need. Teach us to receive Your love continually. Let Your love free us to forgive, give us courage to reject evil, and help us recognize what is good. Make us a church family that honors one another above ourselves. Amen.
Application Questions
- Where have I expected friendship or romantic love to meet a need I need to bring to the Lord?
- Am I receiving God’s love through ongoing communion with Him, or relying mainly on past experiences?
- Who do I need to forgive by drawing on the forgiveness and love God has given me?
- How can I hate and reject what is evil while encouraging the good God is developing in someone’s life?
- Who in my church family can I honor above myself in a practical way this week?
