Recalibrating the Meaning of “Love” in a Love-lite World

Host: Hon. Sam Rohrer

Guest: Dr. Renton Rathbun

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 3/9/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Sam Rohrer:

Hello and welcome to this Monday edition of Stand in the Gap Today as we tackle the lead issues of the day from a biblical worldview and a constitutional perspective. Now, today is our monthly focus specifically on apologetics, biblical worldview and education with returning guest Dr. Renton Rathbun. Dr. Rathbun is a speaker and a consultant on biblical worldview instruction for BJU Press. He’s been a college professor for over 20 years on both Christian and secular college institutions. And in addition, he teaches and preaches across America regularly, focusing on biblical worldview and apologetics and just recently assumed the pastorate of a church in upstate South Carolina. Now, that being said, while there’s so very, very much big news, a lot of big news out there, which I could address starting with the expanding war in the Middle East, and it is expanding broadly between Israel, the US and Iran, actually US and Israel against Iran, but it’s now broadening to include Russia and China, the Middle East nations and beyond.

I’m going to jump over this big issue today though and deal with it more so the Lord willing on Wednesday, day after tomorrow of this week. Now, in a world of increasing conflict and war of which certainly we are in, I’ve chosen to return to the opposite concept and that is of love. Yet I fully recognize that this word love and the concept of love is greatly misunderstood, generally redefined to mean almost whatever person chooses to make it. For instance, as used in the Bible, there are three types of love, arrows, fleshly love, phileo, brotherly love, like Philadelphia, phileo of brotherly love, and agape, godly love. Yet according to modern AI, I just checked today, there are now eight types. They added into it. In addition to agape and phileo and eros has been added storage, they call it, or familiar, leudus or playful pragma or enduring mania or mania or obsessive and falasia or self-love.

Now that’s interesting. I find that interesting. So in a world of seemingly ever expanding definitions of love where the definition continues to grow, it seems to include almost anything a person wants it to mean. So today here on Stand in the Gap today, we thought that it would be a helpful thing to focus on what the Bible says about love, where in the purest sense, we learn that God alone is love. Now, with that being said, the title I’ve chosen to frame today’s conversation on this topic with Dr. Renton Rathbun is this, recalibrating the meaning of love in a love light world. All right. And with that, Renton, Dr. Rathbun, thanks for being back with me on the program today.

Renton Rathbun:

Oh, well, thanks for having me. This is going to be more important than people really even understand, I think.

Sam Rohrer:

Well, you know what? We deal with it so much, Rent, and that’s the thing. We hear it. It becomes almost trite, but it’s not. Love is perfectly defined and demonstrated in the Bible we know, but the world and the world system has long sought to redefine the meaning of love, the demonstration of what love looks like. And to take something that God alone is, God is love, and almost to recast it as something so different that in our days, it almost becomes the opposite of how God has defined it to be. Now, in an earlier Stand on the Gap Today program, you were with me back in December, we together tackled one aspect of love in a very insightful program. Listeners really appreciated this. The title was love and the Gen Z problem. Now, let’s address the need here now to recalibrate the true meaning of.

Here’s the first question. So how would you define the term love, Renton, and why in our day is it so important to continue recalibrating the definition of this much used word?

Renton Rathbun:

Our first instinct when we’re talking about defining terms is to see what it does. And we do this often. We often define terms as what the term does instead of what it is. And so we really need to be careful because I think a lot of people might say, well, love is when we sacrifice for someone or love is being kind or love is patience. And we even see this in one Corinthians 13 where it says love is. And so we think, okay, well, that’s the definition. But when we see these terms, what we see is that this is really talking about, especially in one Corinthians 13, this is the fruit of love. This is what love … Love does these things.

So as Americans, we do want to think about love as the concept, but like you said at the beginning, one John four tells us that God is love, but we have to reckon with this that love isn’t this concept that we’re all kind of dipping our spoon into. It’s actually a person. And that changes how we should be thinking about love, that God isn’t trying to measure up to a standard of a definition, and so we must try and measure up to that standard. What we’re really seeing is that if God is love, then the only way to have love is to have God. And so when you look at one John four, or Ephesians chapter three and chapter four, you see that this love is made possible only through our union with Christ. And that’s what makes it possible is if we are in union with Christ because we know that we are sinners and are unable to have the Lord accept through Christ.

Now, love itself then is this, being devoted. And that’s what I want to demonstrate for the rest of this hour, is that love itself is being devoted to God through that union with Christ. And that being devoted, we can even call this, it’s a state of being. It’s not necessarily an activity, although that fruit has a lot of activity to it, but being devoted to something, this is something from the Old Testament all the way to the New Testament, is that sense in which you have been committed to something. And what we see is that real love is being devoted to God through this union with Christ and my devotion to God makes it possible for me to be devoted to others. And that’s where we get those two great commandments, the commandment that says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength.

I mean, if that doesn’t tell us what devotion is or being devoted to something is, nothing will. But with that devotion, because we can be devoted to God, then that is how we are able to devote ourselves to others. And then that devotion, that’s how we should be thinking about love, not as some kind of feeling or anything like that. It is a devotedness. And that’s what I want to talk about as

Sam Rohrer:

We

Renton Rathbun:

Go through this hour. All

Sam Rohrer:

Right. I think that’ll be absolutely excellent, Renton. Ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. Our theme today is this, recalibrating the meaning of love in a love lite, L-I-T-E, love lite, where the world uses love all of the time, does it not? In most cases, they have no idea what it really is and certainly not in the terms of what the Bible says, but at the end of the day, that’s the only definition that counts. So Dr. Rendon Rathbun, director of the Center for Biblical Worldview at Bob Jones University and instruction for BJU is with me today. And we’re going to continue on this subject. Well, if you’re just joining us today, welcome aboard. This is Stand in the Gap Today. I am Sam Rohr, and my special guest today is Dr. Renton Rathbun. He’s with me generally once a month, where we deal with the issue of biblical worldview, apologetics, education, and some things related in that space.

But today, our theme is this. It’s a word, frankly, that we all use, no doubt we all like to have demonstrated to us. We oftentimes, or sometimes maybe demonstrated to others, but many times we don’t. What is that? Well, the word is love. The title is this, recalibrating the meaning of love in a love light, L-I-T-E, love late world. All through human civilization, the human understanding of love has been reflected in, well, all kinds of things, art, sculptures, writings, even architecture, and so much more. Even this understanding of love, though, has varied through the generations, and it has reflected itself in varied ways as witnessed in any given cultures, for instance, style of art or music or writing or family or government values and laws, right? And in reality, history would likely present more examples of what true love is not. Then I’m going to suggest what true love actually is.

And therein is the challenge for all ages, including ours today, which talks a lot about love, but frankly, manifest little of what it really means. So Renton, you and I know that language and entire cultures can be quickly distorted by simply redefining the terms, done all the time, but to help frame our discussion more clearly today, you define love, define it again, if you don’t mind. And then let’s do this as a comparison. Define the opposite or the antonym of love, what it is, what it is not. And while you’re at it, would you describe what the world system deceptively presents in our days as, well, I’m going to say synonyms for what they call love, but it really is not?

Renton Rathbun:

Absolutely. Yeah. If love were just a concept with a definition that stands above God that he too has to meet, then the opposite, I suppose, of love would be hate, but instead what we see is that God who is love talks about hating things and sometimes even people in the Bible. In Psalm 11: five, he says this, “His, speaking of God, his soul hates the wicked and the one who loves violence.” And of course, the famous verse in Malachi one: three where it says, “Esau, I have hated.” And so you see this. So what is then the opposite of love if that is the case and of our definition then for us as humans, for us to have love, what we need is Christ to be united to the one who is love. And so in that case, love, our definition for love is being devoted, being in the state of being one who is devoted to God, and therefore the opposite of love would then be my devotion to myself.

And so we see this in the garden with the snake and Eve when the snake tells Eve that, did God really say, and if you eat this tree of this tree, you can still get what you want, but be devoted to yourself, Eve, do what’s best for you. Don’t be devoted to God. And so this devotion, being set aside or being devoted to God, we see the opposite is how I’m devoted to myself. And what we see in the world today is song after song, movie after movie, book after book, play after play, poem after poem, assuring us that real love is when someone affirms something that I love about myself and my devotion to me becomes the heart of what love is. In fact, early in the 80s, you saw this in movies where people were saying, “You got to love yourself, man. You got to love yourself, you’re going to love other people.

” And this whole idea of loving yourself and affirming yourself and being comfortable with yourself and believing in yourself. We have all these little phrases that we hear everywhere because Satan wants us to change our devotion from God who is love to ourselves. And so I would say the term used most, especially today is affirmation. Are you affirming what I want? And we even talk about this with the hideousness of hospitals that have done gender affirming care for people, which is butchering the bodies of children. And so what we see is the real opposite isn’t … Hate isn’t the opposite of love. Devoting myself to myself,

Sam Rohrer:

That’s

Renton Rathbun:

The opposite of devoting myself to God.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. Let’s go a little bit deeper on this, Renton. Let me ask you on why. You did define the what, but let me go a little bit of why. I want to put it this way. Why is there such an infatuation with love and human culture like love songs? You talked about that, love poetry, love references, but with the references and the depictions, like the gender affirming care in the hospital, is that unlinked, totally unlinked from the biblical definition of love.

Renton Rathbun:

Yeah. Sometimes there is tension between the fact that we’re all made in God’s image and at the same time, we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. In other words, although we are made in God’s image, how is it then that we still long for sin and protect sin and suppress the truth and unrighteousness? And this is because in God’s image, we long to be devoted to something. He made us that way because God is that way. The Father is devoted to the Son. The Son is devoted to the Father. Both are devoted to the Spirit. The Spirit is devoted to both. This devotion is what we call love for each other. Even what we’ll even talk about later is holiness. And so we see this devotion. If we are going to be in the image of God, we will long to be devoted to something, but Satan knows that.

Satan knows and he is going to try and make us … He’s going to use that God-given thing, this desire to be devoted. And he wants to switch it around and say, “Be devoted to yourself.” And in our sin, we long to see anything we can justify this change of devotion from God to ourselves and we want to feel good about it.

And all these medias are teaching us how to justify that act.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. So let me go one step further on that, because I think that really helps to clarify a lot. So here’s another why question. Why does the world, in the world system, which the scripture tells us about the world and the world system, why does that system of music and art and movies, why does it focus so much on this concept of love, but presenting a distorted view of biblically defined love? And I’m going to say, what warning should this communication be to all true believers? I mean, this is happening out there, obviously, but why does the world love to talk about love, but not God’s definition of it?

Renton Rathbun:

In a word, I’ll put it this way, it’s rebellion. Today, the only way it seems that pastors are willing to talk about sin is if sin is happening to us, that we are victims of sin, and God is our savior who will free us from our victimhood, and we are otherwise decent people, but sin beats us down and we need a savior that will save us from the abuse of this sin that is plaguing us. But sin is not merely confinement. Sin is the fruit of rebellion. We actively hate God according to Romans one. Our lusts and the evil that we produce is born out of the core of who we are according to Ephesians two. The sin is not from out there. It’s born in us, according to James one. So art, music, movies, they are powerful because they track the way our brains make meaning out of the world.

And we make meaning out of the world through story. Art, music, movies are constructed in story format so that in our rebellion, we long for stories to justify or make meaning out of our hate for God. See, that’s the big gap that Satan wants to bridge because he knows the minute you take your devotion away from God and put it to yourself, there is going to be this void there. Life will not be meaningful because you are cutting yourself off of reality. And so what music and movies, they appeal to us because they’re in story form, which will give us an example or a way of making meaning out of our rebellion that makes us feel right about our rebellion. And that is at the heart of the deceiver, Satan,

Sam Rohrer:

Who

Renton Rathbun:

Understands that work and knows that we are best fooled when we can make meaning or make justification from our rebellion that comes against the Lord, not just sin that happens upon us.

Sam Rohrer:

And Renton, we’re close enough here to the breakup. I’m not going to ask you another question, but I’m going to pose it here and then have you answer the next segment where we’re actually going to talk more about what, say, love described what it is or what it should be. We’ve just kind of talked about what it is not and that kind of thing. But I’m going to ask you this question. Is love a choice? Is love a condition? Is love a relationship? What exactly is it? I’m going to ask you that question when we come back and then we begin talking about love described what it is, what should it be? We’ll be back in just a little bit. Ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. We’ll be right back. All right. Welcome back to Stand in the Gap. We’re midpoint now on a very, very important topic.

I think so. And my guest Dr. Renton Rathbun does as well. He’s actually preaching a sermon and he’s been doing some things on this matter of love.

Don’t we all want to be loved? We all do. Sure we do. Do we not see an awful lot of deceptive presentations of what love is in this world? Absolutely. I think we all can agree on that also. And so the title of chosen today for us to frame this conversation is recalibrating the meaning, the definition of love. In a world that is, well, I’m going to say love lite, L-I-T-E. Talks a lot about it, but not too substantive, right? So throughout scripture, Satan is described as the great deceiver. He is a liar. The Bible says, and he is the father of lies. Well, what a title to have, right? But there’s nothing good about this individual called Satan. He rebelled against the God of heaven. He masquerades to this day as an angel of light. And all that God is, he is not. And he attempts to represent though himself as God, but he remains the devil himself and the very antichrist who walks around, as scripture says, is a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour, and the one of whom the opposite of the truth must be ever watchful and alert.

Okay. Now that being said, Renton, I posed a question to you in the last segment. I just want you to clarify, just thinking about it, then we’ll go further into it because I want you to define, and maybe you wrap it together, because I want you to define how does the Bible actually define love and how does it describe it, but work into that as well. Is love simply a choice? Is it a state of being? Build that out a little bit and kind of work those two things together if you can.

Renton Rathbun:

Yeah, that’s a great question because we do get this confused. We think that acts of love are the love itself. And what we see in scripture is there is a state of being that you must be so that those acts of love really are acts of love. Otherwise, you can mimic actual acts of love, but not have love. Well, how is that possible? Well, what we see in one John chapter four, verse seven, it says, “Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.” And so here you have some conditions, particularly this idea of being born of God. So everyone who loves is born of God, which means if you’re not born of God, you do not love. The one who does not love, it continues, does not know God for God is love.

Now what we see in Ephesians 4:32 is this carried out into activity. It says, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, and how are you supposed to forgive each other just as God in Christ forgave you? Therefore, and this is the big movement that we need to understand about love. Be imitators of God. How? As beloved children.” And you see

This idea of children coming up over and over. Matthew five, when Jesus is talking, he says, “You have heard that it was said, you shall love your neighbor but hate your enemy, but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that. Why? So that you may be sons of your father who is in heaven.” So what we see is that love is possible if you are united to the one who is love. And we are united to the one who is loved through Christ, and this is a devotion that we have for him. So love, when we look in scripture, it’s always consistently spoken of in terms of imitating God. It’s spoken in terms of being his child. It’s spoken in terms of also being holy. And we see this in one Peter 1:15- 20, because what we see about holiness, and this is a big thing I really want our listeners to understand, holiness is about holding a standard, but the holding of the standard is by way of devotion.

See, this is the thing, God was holy long before anything was created. And so how is that possible if all that holiness is being set aside, well, God wasn’t set aside. He was the only thing in existence. How was he holy before the foundation of the world? And he was holy before the foundation of the world because he was devoted to himself. If I can put it this way, the persons of the Trinity were devoted to each other. And that devotion is what we understand of as holiness, but it’s generated by love. That devotion is that love that holds them together so that the last thing we see that scripture constantly talks about when referring to love is this idea of sacrifice, giving yourself up. And you see it in Ephesians chapter four, where it talks about, where it says, “Be imitators of God as beloved children and, or another way of saying it is by walking in love just as Christ also loved you and gave himself up for us.” And we see that in one John four, we see it in Matthew five and we see this constant reminder that for us, love is best demonstrated and best understood out in the world through that sacrifice, giving myself up.

So it’s a state of being in my devotion to God is expressed in my sacrifice to God and others. And that’s how scripture tells us that we are to understand love.

Sam Rohrer:

Okay. So God is love and you describe that nature, God, Father, Spirit and Son, devoted to each other in a complete wholeness before there was ever such a thing as sin, that complete perfect relationship, so to speak, existed. All right. Well, then sin came into the world and now we have all of the problems related to things that look like love. People say love, but it’s not love because there’s no God in the middle and there’s no Jesus Christ that is a part of that. So I’m just rephrasing things a little bit. So all right, let me just go ahead and go into this and have you break it out because in a prior conversation, Renton, you and I observed how that it is fascinating to some extent, as in odd, fascinating, that as true believers who know the love of God by experiencing salvation through faith in Christ alone, okay, by a person, Jesus Christ were brought into that fellowship, but many may not speak of true love, but often we witness, for instance, liberal churches and the world, clearly unsaved people, almost like dominating the public conversation in a narrative using love all the time, but it clearly doesn’t match up to what scripture says.

So work that out a little bit. What are your thoughts about that and why is it that we see such a heavy usage of the word love in the world trying to portray it like it is, but it’s not?

Renton Rathbun:

You know, this is actually a really good question to help people understand how important it is, what we’re saying today, because this is how the liberal churches work. They will say, love is this activity. So if I’m going to be kind, then when someone who might be a homosexual or be going through surgery because they believe they’re trans, if I’m going to be kind, because that’s what love is remember, love is being kind, I want to make them feel welcome in my church. And I want them to know that we don’t judge them because it would be unkind for me to judge them. And so really, we just really want to accept and affirm them because that affirmation is kind. And this is where you need to understand the fruits of love is not the same thing as what love is. And so if I am devoted in my … If I understand love to be in my devotion to God, then his commandments and what he wants becomes the thing that I care most about.

So that how do I care for my neighbor? Well, if I’m going to be devoted to my neighbor, I need to be devoted to them in truth that I know from my God who I am devoted to so that when I see someone who is homosexual or trying to convince themselves of being trans, I want to help them. Being kind to them then means don’t affirm what they’re saying. Try to help them see what they’re doing as sin so that they will repent and turn to the Lord and that’s the best way to love them. I’m not being mean to them and I’m not yelling at them, but I am trying to help them understand what you are doing is going to take you right to hell and I love you too much to want you to go there. And so I am going to tell you the truth that will be hard.

I know that there is a temptation for pastors to get people in the door and affirmation is the key to get people through the door, but if you are devoted to your God, you will then know how to be devoted to others that you might actually love them. And that’s when Corinthians 13 will really start making sense. You’ve got to have devotion to the Lord first.

Sam Rohrer:

All right, ladies and gentlemen, stay with us. We’re going to conclude this. We’ve talked about love, defined it, what it’s not, what it is. Now we’re going to try and bring this together and say, all right, now how do we demonstrate it? We’ve talked a little bit about that too, but how to manifest true, genuine biblical love in our day. So stay with us. We’ll wrap this up in just a few minutes. Well, Renton, as we try to wrap up this program and we spend so much more time on, at least we could, I mean, spend so much more time, but the scripture warns us in so many places that we must be alert to the great deception in our day. The serpent himself, to which you referred, deceived Eve in the garden, deception has flowed through human civilization these 6,000 years here or so.

And the Apostle Paul in two Timothy and in many other places talks about latter days that there’ll be many that would depart from the faith, deceivers would arise and all of that. So we know that we are in days. And boy, what a day. We’ve talked about it on this program other times, just how deceptive these days are in which we live by words being redefined. It’s being redefined all the time. Politicians love to redefine terms. Whoever controls the terms controls the debate. So terms are redefined. God is redefined. Prayer is redefined. Faith is redefined. And our theme today here, our subject is love. So in that light, because of that, it’s really important that we get this whole thing straight. We’re presented it with such confusing and tempting things, but it certainly includes as we’re talking about this deception, concept of love. A scripture also tells us in other passages that the deception or day would become so great that even if possible, even the very elect would be deceived.

So it tells us there is no one who should think, “Well, I’m immune. I’ve got it all figured out. ” So here’s my question as I just kind of ask you to kind of summarize, wrap up the program. In our final moments here, I’d like you to combine the instruction we’ve cited in this program regarding the concept of love, what it is, what it’s not, how true believers should define what it really means, and then demonstrate and manifest that in our current day, because that’s really the thing. When you were quoting some verses from one John, I was thinking of this one as well from one John five: three. It says, “For this is love that we keep his commandments.” So that ties in with what you’re talking about. God is love a person. It is a condition when we are one with God through Christ Jesus, through faith, but then it also manifests itself.

That kind of where I’d like you to go here right now. In true love, biblical love. What should the world see from a true believer who knows what true love is? Build it out and conclude whoever you’d like here.

Renton Rathbun:

Well, when we think of love, I think we need to start thinking in terms of holiness because when we see in one Peter 1:15- 20, where Peter is reminding us to be holy for God is holy, what’s being said there is be devoted to God for I, the Lord, am devoted to myself. I mean, that’s part of the strangeness of having a God who is triune, but it is also the glory of it because we see that we are being commanded to be like God. He is devoted to himself in his persons and so we are to be devoted to him in his persons. And this is not a kind of slavery that we are now just, we are devoted, we got to do it. It’s not like Islam where you are a slave to a God who does not make covenants. You are a slave to a God who can change his mind.

You are a slave to a God who demands and maybe, just maybe he might come through with a promise or two, but we are serving a God who says, “Be devoted to me. And in this devotion, if I could put it this way, the stickiness of the devotion is what love really is. ” And so he is saying, “Love me, for I love me. ” And when in this love we have within God, we can start seeing what it means to be devoted. And so this was what Satan was doing with Eve.

Satan comes up to Eve and see, God was offering Eve eternal life through obedience by way of devoting herself to him. It wasn’t just about eating or not eating the tree. It wasn’t just about that. It was about this obedience by way of devotion. But then Satan comes and says, “No, you can receive the fruits of this devotion, this eternal life, this eternal, this knowledge of good and evil.” You can have the fruit without the devotion. You don’t need to be devoted to God. You can be devoted yourself and still get that fruit. So what we find is this principle that Satan has been using since man was on the earth all the way to this day, and this principle is this, you can have the fruits of love without having a devotion to the giver of love. And so we see that fornication is this way.

It is this way of trying to get the fruits of marriage without having the devotion you are to have when you have a covenant of marriage. You see that this is spoken of in Ephesians five, where men are seeking respect from their wives without having devotion to their wives, devotion to the point where they would give up themselves for their wives because that’s how Christ gave up himself for the church. And you even see, as you look through Ephesians chapter four, Paul is saying very strange things to this very, very Christian, very good church. He says, “I implore you to walk in a manner worthy of your calling.” I mean, were they not walking in a manner worthy of their calling? Well, apparently not, because this is the command. So do it with humility and gentleness and patience showing tolerance for one another in love.

It says that those things are all springing out of love. And what we see as we go through there, Paul again in verse 17 says to them, Ephesians four, says, “Walk no longer like the Gentiles also walked.” In other words, even though we are children of God, even though we have this by way of our being born into the family of God through Christ, we have this condition in which we are able to love because we are unified to the one who is love and because we are unified with them, we are able to do it. But it says, according to Ephesians, this has to be developed. And so what we need to understand as Christians, this isn’t just merely a state of being where we can love, but we must work on it. We need to, as Paul says in Ephesians five, we need to walk in love.

And this walking in love is this way of living where we give ourselves up for others. The things that are dividing walls between us and others need to be put down so that we can give ourselves up to others because of our devotion to our God.

And in our devotion to our God, that’s going to make the activity of love look so different. People can try and, who are not born of God, they can try and mimic it, but it will never be true love. And that’s what we need to understand about love.

Sam Rohrer:

Renton, excellent. And we’re out of time. I really wish we could stretch this hour into a second hour. So many different applications we could make, but thank you so much for being with me today and on this subject. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for being with us as well. This has been standing a gap today. My guest is Dr. Renton Rathbun. He has a website at worldview.bju.edu is where you can go for information there and a lot of other things. But again, thanks for being with us and take this concept today of love. Hopefully you’ve experienced that love, that love of God through faith in Jesus Christ. Through that, we can demonstrate it to those around.