![]() ![]() Carson writes, “The love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. In his chapter “Distorting the Love of God?” in The Love of God, D. People today struggle to see how a loving God can allow us to experience pain (though any good parent knows that part of your child’s growth will include allowing us to scrape our knees so we can learn important lessons). Because of that, much of the world’s talk about God’s love and even a lot of talk about God’s love within Christianity (used very loosely) doesn’t look and sound like love in the Bible. Our culture has a hard time understanding how love can include wanting the person’s good-which can include setting up boundaries or speaking a loving word that might be hard to hear-and only thinks in terms of making a person feel good about themselves. Love today might be more of a feeling, or love is reduced to only what others feel like is loving to them. “Love” can be used in a fluffy, over-sentimentalized way that has little specificity or depth to it. “While we still probably understand the meaning behind the way we’re using it in any given situation, all the repetition is having a formative effect on us-the word love doesn’t always hit us the way that it should and in the way that the Bible often intends it to hit us when it’s speaking of the way to love God and others….Because of the way that our culture tends to think of love-almost off-hand or flippantly-when it comes to being told God loves you, it can fail to land on us with the beauty and significance that it should.” Jen Wilkin ![]() ![]() The word “love” has almost lost depth because it can mean anything from a momentary taste (ice-cream) to an affection for the divine. We love everything from ice-cream to friends to God, but that “love” means different things (I hope) in each way we use it. “Love” can lose its meaning because we use it so often and so broadly today. Before discussing what God’s love looks like-and I’m looking specifically at how God loves us with as our father-I want to briefly consider a few reasons why “love” might lack clarity or even be unhelpful today.
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