Hating To Love

Hating To Love, When Love Meets Reality:
Raising four children, working with a ton of students for 20 years and now having 11 grandchildren, there's a profound collision that happens in every parent's life—the moment when your children stop being extensions of your will and become individuals with their own choices. For me it was terrifying yet beautiful in a way. And for those of us who claim to follow Christ, it reveals something uncomfortable about the way we've been loving all along.

Conditional Love Crisis:
Imagine watching someone you love more than life itself make decisions that terrify you. Decisions that, according to everything you've been taught about faith and eternity, are leading them down a dangerous path. Your instinct is to protect, to correct, to redirect. You pray harder. You set boundaries. You enforce rules. All in the name of love. But what if that kind of love isn't really love at all?
This is the uncomfortable truth many of us must face: we've been loving people with a religious love—a love bound by conditions, restrictions, and requirements. We love people when they make choices we approve of. We love them when they're heading in the right direction. We love them when they fit within our understanding of what's acceptable.
But can we love them when they don't?
Here's a question that might shake you to your core: Can you love someone even if they choose a path that leads to death and destruction?
It sounds almost heretical to ask. Our immediate response is, "Yes” but if they choose wrong in our sight, we can kick-in to manipulation and restrict them or even cut them off to prove a point. We say to ourselves and others, “I love them too much to let them go there!" But consider this: God allowed His own Son to descend into hell. He turned His face away from Jesus on the cross because Christ had become sin itself. Yet it was love—perfect, divine love—that made that possible. The challenge isn't whether we care about people's eternal destinations. The challenge is whether we can love them regardless of their choices and final destinations.

Layers of Love:
Ancient Greeks understood something we often miss: there are different types of love, and not all of them reflect God's heart.
Storge is family love—the natural affection between parents and children, siblings and relatives. It's beautiful, but it's also limited. It wants what's best, but it can become controlling.
Phileo is friendship love—the bond between close companions. Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love," takes its name from this word. It's the love that makes us loyal, but it can also be conditional on reciprocation.
Eros is romantic or sensual love—the passion we feel for people or things that give us pleasure. It's the reason we say we "love" our favorite song or device. It's driven by what we receive.
But then there's Agape—God's love, complete and unconditional. This is the game-changer

It Costs Everything and Demands Nothing:
First Corinthians 13 isn't just a beautiful passage read at weddings. It's a mirror that reveals how far we fall short of genuine love. Read it again, but this time, substitute "God" for "love":
God is patient and kind. God is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. He does not demand His own way. He is not irritable and keeps no record of being wronged. He does not rejoice about injustice, but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. God never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful and endures through every circumstance. This is the standard. This is what it means to love like God loves. And here's the uncomfortable truth: this kind of love costs us everything and demands nothing from the person we're loving.

Christian or Disciple:
There's a difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. Christians often love based on theology, doctrine, and fear of hell. We love people in order to save them. We love them with an agenda. Disciples love people simply because they are people created by God. First John 4:7-10 makes this clear: "Dear friends, let us continue to love one another for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love." Notice the logic here: If you don't love, you don't know God. Not because you haven't studied enough scripture or attended enough services, but because God IS love. To know Him is to love like Him.

Will They See God:
Here's a truth that might make you uncomfortable: The only way most people will ever experience God's love is through their experience of you. Think about that for a moment. The person checking out your groceries, the difficult coworker, the family member making choices you can't support—they won't experience God's love through your words about God. They'll experience it through how you treat them. We want people to get saved so they can experience God's love. But the biblical model is the opposite: we love them with God's love, and through that experience, they encounter Him. Christians often have prerequisites when loving someone they invest time, energy and money into.

The Practice of Divine Love:
So what does this look like practically? It means loving people past their decisions—good or bad. It means your affection doesn't fluctuate based on their choices. It means you can look someone in the eye who is making destructive decisions and genuinely say, "I don't agree with what you're doing, but I love you completely." It means your words match your actions. You can't say "I love you" and then treat someone with contempt, criticism, or condescension. Love isn't just declared; it's demonstrated. It means loving the person, not their behavior. Not their potential. Not who they could become if they just got their act together. But who they are right now, in this moment, in their mess.

The Cost vs. Reward:
This kind of love is expensive. It costs you time, emotional energy, mental space, and sometimes resources. It requires you to set aside your need to be right, your desire to manipulate and control outcomes, your fear of what might happen. But here's the crazy paradox: the more you love this way, the more capacity you have to love. God doesn't give you resources you won't steward well, but when you steward His love properly—pouring it out on others without expecting anything in return—He multiplies it. You'll find yourself with more time, more peace, more joy, and more impact than you ever had when you were trying to love people into compliance. The truth is, we often love strangers better than we love the people we know, because strangers haven't disappointed us yet. But God knows everything about us—every failure, every rebellion, every selfish choice—and He loves us completely. If His Spirit lives in us, we can do the same. This is what it means to “Hating to Love”—to resist our natural inclination toward conditional affection and choose instead the costly, uncomfortable, transformative love of God. It's the hardest choice a disciple can make. And it's the only choice that truly changes the world.
The Challenge:
Ask yourself these questions:
Who do I say I love? How do I actually love them? Can I love them past my relationship with them? Can I love them past their decisions? Can I love them past my influence in their lives?
How can I "God" them—show them who God is through how I treat them?