Love Is Loyalty

Somebody's going to read the word love in the title and already feel tired.

I get it. We've worn that word plumb out. We've stuck it on coffee mugs, in country songs, and even on divorce papers. It's gotten so soft and so stretchy that it doesn't do anything anymore. Love is the feeling you get three dates in. Love is the thing you fall into and then fall out of, like a ditch on a red dirt road (where have I heard that before). Love is whatever you happen to feel about a person on a Tuesday — and if you stop feeling it, well, the feeling left, so I guess the love did too. Not my fault. Hearts want what they want.

And then there's the other ditch, the religious one. In a lot of churches love got promoted to some shimmering, pie-in-the-sky, super-holy thing that only saints, grandmas, and your golden retriever can pull off. A glow. A frequency. Something you're supposed to radiate. And a regular dude with a temper and a mortgage and a boss (or a customer) hears that and figures love is for other people. Better people. People who are wired different than he's wired.

I want to take a swing at both ditches, because I think they're both wrong, and I think the fix is older and tougher and a whole lot more useful than either one.

There's this old letter

About two thousand years ago a man named John — called himself "the old man," a term of authority, not age (he was probably only mid-50s), one of the guys still around who'd actually known Jesus personally — wrote a short letter to some churches that were being attacked from the inside. People were walking out. Folks who'd sat in those rooms for years up and quit, and not just quit — quit and then turned around and trashed the people they left. The ones still sitting there felt like you felt when your first crush broke up with you. Was it us? Were we the problem? Did we ever really have anything worthwhile at all?

And John, this "old man," writes them a letter that uses one word more than just about any other. Love. He hammers it. Love one another. We know we've crossed from death into life because we love. The whole letter runs on it.

Now here's the thing nobody tells you. We hear "love" and our brains go straight to the warm spot in the chest — the feeling. And the word John wrote in (his language was Greek, and the word is agapē) was a roomy one, same as ours. Out in the world it could stretch to cover all kinds of things, just like love in English covers everything from your wife to your truck to your mama's cooking. A word like that doesn't really get pinned down by the dictionary. It gets pinned down by how a particular man uses it.

And that's the whole key: pay less attention to the word and more to what John does with it. Because across this little letter, John takes that roomy word and leans on it the same direction over and over until it points at one thing. Not the warm spot in the chest. When John says love, he means something closer to what an old soldier means by it, or a man talking about the people he'd take a bullet for. He means loyalty.

That's it. That's the whole secret. In John, love is primarily one thing, and the thing is loyalty.

What loyalty actually is

Let me get concrete, because "loyalty" can get vague on you too if you let it.

Loyalty is whose side you're on when the chips are down. It's the answer to a simple question: when it comes to a fight, who you standing with? You already know what this is. You've felt it your whole life. It's the buddy who shows up at two in the morning with a truck and a chainsaw because a tree's on your house, and he stays till it's done. It's the guy in a room full of people wearing his beat-up old Cleveland Browns shirt — the team's been breaking his heart for thirty years, they're not winning anything, and he wears it anyway, because that's his team and he's not switching jerseys just because it got hard. That man's loyal. He stands for his folks.

Now flip it. Loyalty is also a thing you can break, and we all know exactly what breaking it looks like. Say you're dating somebody. He's supposed to be yours. And you find out that last Tuesday, the night you couldn't make it, he took some other girl out instead. You confront him and he says, "Baby, no, I love you. You were just busy. It didn't mean anything."

Ask any room full of people whether that's okay, and the whole room says the same thing: [Explitive!] No! It is not okay. And here's why it's not okay. He didn't stop having feelings. He probably had a great big pile of feelings — for her. The problem isn't the feelings. The problem is he wasn't loyal. He tried to have two teams. He was wearing your jersey and hers, and you can't do that. The heart that's split isn't loving, no matter how warm it runs.

That's John's whole point about God, by the way. He says don't love the world and its stuff, because God will not be one loyalty among many. Not because God's insecure — because that's just what love is. A loyalty you share isn't loyalty. A boyfriend you share isn't a boyfriend. You can't be devoted to two teams.

So what?

Here's where the loyalty reading rescues love from both ditches at once.

It rescues it from the feeling ditch, because now your love doesn't live or die by your mood. You don't have to manufacture butterflies for people who annoy you. I know whether I'm loyal to my people the same flat way I know I can't stand broccoli — it's just a fact about me, settled, not up for a vote on a bad day. You can be loyal to your wife while you're aggravated with her. You can stand with your church even if one of the deacons was a jerk. The feeling comes and goes like weather. The loyalty's the thing underneath, and that's the thing John's after.

And it rescues love from the pie-in-the-sky ditch, the perfectionism ditch, because loyalty is not some rare spiritual superpower. It's the most ordinary, blue-collar, rubber-meets-the-road thing there is. A dog has it. A good neighbor has it. You already do this for somebody — a kid, a friend, a team, a town. Jesus isn't asking you to levitate. He's asking you to pick a side and stand on it.

That doesn't make it easy, mind you. Loyalty is cheap until it costs you something, and then it's the most expensive thing you own. But expensive is different from impossible. A regular person can be loyal. A regular person is loyal, all the time, to all the wrong things. The gospel just asks where you're going to aim it.

Sooner or later the Bible's going to ask you to love Jesus. And a lot of good people flinch at that, for one of two reasons. Either they figure loving Jesus is a thing only the super-holy can pull off — the folks with their hands in the air and a glow on their face — and that's just not them, so they count themselves out. Or they've soaked in the culture's version, where loving anybody means going soft and mushy and weepy, and a grown man with grease under his nails wants no part of that. Both of those are lies, and both of them leave good people standing outside a door they were always allowed to walk through. Because if love is loyalty, then "love Jesus" means be loyal to Jesus — stand with Him the way you'd stand with your brother in a fight. That's it. That's a thing a truck driver can do. That's a thing a soldier understands down in his bones. You don't have to turn into a different kind of person to love Jesus. You pick Him, and you stand there.

Now what?

Now I'm not going to pull a fast one on you and make this into a nice general life lesson about being a stand-up guy (but, yes, be a stand-up guy for Heaven's sake). Stick around for the actual point, because John's got one and it's sharper than "be loyal."

John says the reason any of this works — the reason we can love at all — is that God went first. Before we ever picked a side, He picked us. The line is right there in the letter: not that we loved God, but that He loved us (1 John 4:10). God didn't wait to see if we'd be loyal and then decide whether we were worth it. He moved first, toward people who'd given Him every reason to quit them, and He proved it the most expensive way there is — He sent His own Son, Jesus, into the mess to die for it.

That's the deepest loyalty in the universe, and it ran downhill, from the One who had every right to walk away, to the people who'd walked away from Him. Old book, old word for it: it's covenant loyalty — a bond you don't bail on, a promise that holds when the other guy hasn't earned it. That's the love John's talking about. Not a glow. A God who will not quit His people.

And here's the turn that makes the whole thing land. John says since God loved us like that, we ought to love one another. Not love God back — you can't pay Him back, the gift's too big, every attempt to square the account just turns it back into legalist crap. Instead the loyalty He poured down on us is supposed to run sideways, into the people next to us. The church John's writing to didn't need more feelings. They needed to quit navel-gazing and start standing with each other. So do we.

So no, love isn't a warm fuzzy. It isn't legalistic perfection. It isn't a feeling you have to fake on the days you don't feel it. It's the oldest, hardest, most ordinary thing a human heart can do: pick your people and stand there. Jesus already did it for you. The only question He's asking is whose jersey you're wearing.

— tobe