The Best Love Triangle

Typically love triangles mean drama, fights, hurt feelings, and abandonment, but I want to take a little time to reflect on this Valentine’s Day on the best love triangle. In fact, it’s the love triangle that God calls all of His followers to be in. And it goes something like this:

1. Love God

This one’s pretty obvious, right? I mean, we know that we’re supposed to love God. We talk to Him. We listen to Him when He speaks. We tell Him how much we love Him. The first part of the love triangle is incredibly important. We need to love God. I can’t imagine anyone arguing that you could love God without loving God, so I won’t spend any more time arguing for this.

2. Love Others

There’s a pretty famous passage where Jesus sums up the entire Old Testament law that the Israelites had spent so much time studying and dissecting and arguing about in two simple commands: “Love God. And love each other.” It’s pretty clear that we’re supposed to love each other.

3. Love God’s Commands

This may be where I need to start explaining. But for right now let me just keep it simple: There comes a point and time when I can say I love someone and buy them gifts and say nice things to them and all kinds of stuff and yet choose to not do what they’ve asked me numerous times to do. At that point, you’d really have to work to convince anyone who knew what was going on that I actually loved the person.

So here’s the beauty of this crazy love triangle:

You can’t love God without loving others.

How could you possibly say you love God but hate the people He loves? You may be miffed by people. You may even have some people that you can hardly stand at all. But if you love God you will love the people around you. You’ll know that God loved you even with, and in spite of, all your imperfections.

You can’t love others without loving God’s commands.

How do you love others? I mean, how do you even know how to love others? Well for starters, six out of the ten commandments in Exodus 20 are rules on how we can love others. And when you look at the rules that God gives us all throughout the Bible He is showing us exactly how we can love others. He’s giving us all the keys we need to unlock those doors of personal interaction.

You can’t love God’s commands without loving God.

Some people can be so self-righteous. Shocker, I know. But seriously, some people can get so excited about the checklist they have in their mind and heart of all the things they’ve done for God. They would claim that they love God’s commands, and you might even believe them. But don’t. Someone who loves throwing around Bible verses and commands to show how they’re “nailing it” and how other people are just missing the mark are not in love with God’s commands. They’re in love with themselves. The only way you can love God’s commands is in knowing and loving the one who gave them and knowing and loving the heart behind the commands. Otherwise (and this is the case with our self-righteous people), they’re just other tools to help us love ourselves unhealthily.

You can’t love others without loving God.

I know this may not be super-popular or P.C. to say, but I don’t think you can fully love others without loving God. Sure you can say and do nice things and you can take care of their needs, but there is no better fuel to that fire then the compelling love of God that moves in and through our hearts from His to those around us. Furthermore, as much as there are great organizations that are non-Christian that I absolutely think are loving people, I think that it’s falling incredibly short when you only take care of people’s physical needs and ignore their spiritual needs. To really love people well you need to love God so that 1. You’re not trying to love within your own feeble capacity to love even the unlovely. And 2. You’re loving people enough to share with them the Source of your love for them.

It’s a messy love triangle and I can’t pretend to have fully explained it or made it clear. But I do hope that it’s shown you at least to a degree how important it is to have a balanced love. We can’t be Bible thumpers and people haters. We can’t be lovers of God who do whatever we want uncaring of what He’s commanded. We can’t love people and ignore God. Don’t give love a bad name.

So on this day of love, while people are so focused on the outward signs of affection, let me ask you: What is God calling you to do to keep the love triangle going in your life?

1 John 4:7-8; 2 John 1:6; 1 John 4:12

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. As you have heard from the beginning, his command is that you walk in love. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.