Tainted Love
Dear Reader,
‘All you need is love,’ the Beatles sang to us and we sang along.
‘Love is love,’ the advocates for the LGBTQI+ alphabetti spaghetti minestrone of sexuality declare, and we all nod sagely.
‘I’m doing it because I love him,’ declares the celebrity, only to declare a few months down the line,’ I’m doing it because I don’t love him anymore.’
‘Love wins,’ the Bishops declare as they re-write church doctrine and liturgy in the name of the gospel of inclusivity.
We use love to justify our actions, that fleeting high which makes us feel good for a moment, we invoke its name and cloak ourselves in it to give ourselves a façade of righteousness. Love overrides logic or reason, love frees us from restraint. Love is the drug we love to indulge. Love is the acceptable, tattered, remnant of the Christian faith. Love has a lot to answer for, that four letter word.
In the name of love the world has been turned wrong way up in the last sixty years. It took hundreds of years and thousands of martyrs being thrown to the lions or tarred and set alight like so many human torches, for the world to be turned right way up. Only sixty for It to be turned back the wrong way. Two revolutions in the name of love.
‘Greater love has no man than this, that he lay own his life for his friend,’ declared Jesus, the King of Love. His kind of love is not the acceptable kind. His kind of love is sitting down in the street with the beggar and washing his wounds. His kind of love means summoning your courage to do the right thing, again. His kind of love can take you to hard places, like a whipping post or hanging from a tree with a crown of spikes thrust down upon your head.
Love is a hard thing, loving your neighbour can be the hardest thing of all, when he screams in your face or turns up the music at 2.00 in the morning. So much easier to love at a distance, that poor mother and child on the 10 o’clock news, the refugee floating face down in the water. Love that pulls at your heart strings and squeezes the tear from the corner of your eye, love – the second-hand emotion – that’s the easy love we like. Love that costs us £3 and a text at ‘our standard network rate.’ True love we say, is when we feel it, when we’re looking into our lover’s eyes and we just can’t find the words to speak. What a let-down language can be, especially the English language, trying to fit so many different meanings into that short, paltry, over-used word.
The love we are happy with, the love of the last sixty years, the love of the ‘Summer of Love’ has been eros; sensual, sexual, romantic, erotic love. The passion that turns our heads, overwhelms our hearts and has sent our society into a spin. Eros has validated our lusts, justified our adulteries and we have turned a blind eye to the destruction it has wreaked, tearing down the ancient structures of our society to accommodate it. The remnants of families lie strewn across the field, children wandering fatherless and hungry amongst the wreckage, while plumes of smoke rise from the incinerators of the abortion wards as 200,00 babies a year are sacrificed to the gods of human lust. Did the words of the Apostle ever ring more true than they do now?
‘when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools… Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts…God gave them over to a reprobate mind… Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.’
From throwing off the Christian faith and embracing the false god eros, it has been a short time until the anti-christian nature of the spirit has been revealed. Those who embrace the christian faith or values are scorned and ridiculed, while those who practise and champion the new licentiousness are lauded and praised. Mobs rage and march, institutions kow-tow and new laws are put in place to harass and silence those who speak against the new order; ‘hate-speech’ it is called, a phrase full of Orwellian overtones.
What then of love? If eros is not real love, what is? The Bible speaks of a different kind of love, agape in the Greek. It is a love uncommon in humans. It acts when it has no reward, it does not seek its own good but the good of others, it goes the extra mile and the person who acts this way does so under no compulsion. Voluntary sacrifice, the privilege of the free man, is the heart of this love. This is where human love and divine love mingle, this is the love of the King of Love, of the God-Man Jesus. The Man who sacrificed His life for the life of others.
‘In this God showed His love for us, that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’
This is the love that the world needs, not the self-centred, self-indulgent, carnal love of eros but the heroic, sacrificial love of agape. Agape will enlighten our darkened hearts, renew our foolish minds, curb our physical appetites, for it will take our eyes off the ‘needs’ of ourselves and onto the needs of others. That love, which is pure and unchanging, satisfying, life-giving and eternal. The agape of God, demonstrated for all to see on a Cross outside Jerusalem, that is the cure for our blighted souls, that is the doctrine of the true love our world so desperately needs.
All you need is love, it’s true, just make sure it’s the right kind of love, for if we are not ruled by agape we will be ruled by iron.
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