Have you ever written down a word and the more you looked at it the more strange it seemed, like some foreign term that didn’t mean anything?
Sometimes I think the word love is like that for me.
Maybe it’s become an alien word in our culture: We love our friends. We love a new movie. We love our ferret. We love caramel mocha frappuccino. We love our car.
Something’s not right.
The Greeks had several different words that we simply translate as love. Each one had a different emotional hook, a different emphasis. For instance, the city of Philadelphia comes from one of those Greek words—phileo—meaning a brotherly-type love. Our word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, usually defining a more passionate or sexual love. Christians sometimes use the word agape, describing a more deliberate, self-forgetting love. The brilliance of this is that it doesn’t wear out a single word that in English is squeezed into so many different contexts.
When we speak of the love God has for us or His command that we love one another, we might forget that love is a verb—there is action connected with it. No action, no real love.
The most famous verse in the New Testament is arguably John 3:16 in which John uniquely defines love with a specific corresponding action:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…”
And so this makes me wonder: if the word love is used so ubiquitously and casually, what might happen if we exchanged it with the word serve instead?
I once posed that at our church and got an interesting response from someone who told me he began thinking about his marriage like that. What if instead of saying he loved his wife, he began saying he served her? That led him to thinking about ways he could creatively serve her.
That’s love in action.
Maybe that’s why Paul used that word specifically in Ephesians: “Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving the Lord, not men…”
So try this experiment: for the next week, substitute the word love with the word serve and see what happens. I bet the next time you do and say something like, “Wow, I serve my new car…” you can’t help but think “Ouch. I wonder if I really do?”
Dave Workman | The Elemental Group
How self-aware is your organization? The Elemental Churches Inventory guides your leadership team through a multi-faceted review of strengths and opportunities in four critical elements of your church’s life: Integrity (systems, processes, infrastructure), Passion (commitment to the mission), Servanthood (outward-focus), and Imagination (innovation, openness to change). And because of its unique web-based and curriculum approach, it’s a third of the cost of typical consulting! See for yourself here.
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