Love Conquers ALL
“Love Conquers All” is purposely written after my last sermon: Love is a Choice.” This sermon will explain WHY you want to choose to love everyone. To what does it benefit you to love everyone, even your enemies? In my last sermon, I quoted a lot of scriptures telling you that God commands we love each other and the sermon was written in a more legalistic manner. This one is to help you understand how loving others makes your life better.
We experience many feelings and emotions, but the Bible tells us that love, hope, and faith are HOW we are to live the best possible lives on earth.
1 Corinthians 13:13- “Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love.” Even scripture tells us out of the three things that will help us traverse life on earth, love is the greatest gift of all. It also tells us these three things, regardless of the world around us and circumstances will last FOREVER! In other words, God has given us all of these things and no one can take them away.
In the real world love is often given and taken away for reasons other than godly purposes or definitions. Love can be controlling rather than nurturing and conditional rather than unconditional. This is NOT real love. It is a power struggle of the forces of good and evil. Love taken out of biblical context plays out in the form of control. “I will love you if you fulfill my sexual, monetary, subservient, and other needs.” This is NOT love and it is not God’s plan.
Love is to be given freely (unconditional) so that it heals, supports, empowers, and makes the other person feel good about themselves and be a better person. Love given for reasons of control and power hurts and damages other people. These painful experiences are often carried throughout life and when people learn the wrong definition (and homeostasis) of love, then they often “love” for the same, wrong, and displaced reasons.
There is a saying that “hurting people hurt others,” which is a concept we witness in many relationships, including our own. As long as we do what another person wants (control) then they will give us things that are a shadow of love, but instead of bringing healing, it creates pain,
Although we can’t control others, we can certainly control who and how we love. There are different types of love and we must keep that in mind as we follow God’s command to love everyone. In other words, He doesn’t want us to give intimate love to everyone. He wants us to give caring and compassionate love to each other. It is inappropriate to give every person the same type of love.
Biblically, there are 4 types of love, and giving the correct type in each situation is the key to allowing love to “conquer” the negative forces in our world.
The first Greek word for “love” is eros, which refers to romantic or sexual love. Giving this type of love is for intimate, safe, and trusting relationships that we build with ONE person. Monogamy!
The second is storage, which is familial love like that of a mother for her baby or of a brother and sister for each other. Although we are very attached to, and supportive of, our family members, this type of love is very specific because it is normally very deep and binding, yet not romantic or sexual in nature.
The third Greek word for “love,” philia, refers to friendship and comradery. This word is often translated as “friend” (one who is loved) in the New Testament. Once, in Romans 12:10, the New Testament uses the compound word philostorgos, which is translated in the NIV as “devoted . . . in love.”
Finally, agape is used to speak of God’s love that He has for the world and that Christians are supposed to emulate. This is the word for “love” that is most commonly used in the New Testament. For a while, it was thought that Christians must have coined the word agape to speak of a godly kind of love that the Greek world knew nothing of. But the word agape was in fact in use in the Roman Empire, and it was not coined by Christians to communicate God’s love.
The above explanation of differing types of love is narrated, explained, shortened, and summarized by me from “Got Questions.”
When we love each other appropriately, as described in the Bible, love can triumph over negative emotions providing both us and others a feeling of “being loved.” Which is feeling like we are cared for, nurtured, important, and supported.
It is in this way that love conquers all the negative inputs received from people in the world around us. When we are secure in our love from (important) others, then we can freely give the type of love God commands in John15:12-13. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
The Bible is written to teach us and improve our quality of life. Can you imagine how beautiful life would be if we all felt secure in intimate, family, friends, and God’s love? Feeling that a safety net surrounds us IS God’s plan and we must seek and accept only this type of love from everyone in our “inner” circle.
When we have this type of support system, then it is easy to love others (even strangers and enemies) because we are expecting nothing from them, but rather seeking to give them the love we have in our own lives.
In my experience, Agape love is the best. It is the love God has explained to us and commanded us to have for each other. Unconditional and supportive, yet not accepting abusive or bad relationships that prevent us from correctly learning the different types of love and the boundaries within each type.
Given and accepted properly (biblically) love does conquer all. Distorted and controlling, love devastates. I encourage each of you to allow only God’s definition of love to enter your mind, body, soul, and lives, then you will be empowered to use love to conquer all the pain, hurt, and suffering we see in our flawed world. May God bless you with strength, discernment, and the gift of being an integral part of healing our world. AMEN. Lisa ><>
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