Welcome to the MHB Podcast. This is Michael Baun. And welcome to my eighty third episode. Tonight I want to talk about loving your neighbor and the huge impact that has on your own life. But first I want to thank everyone who has liked and followed this podcast on Facebook. Facebook works very well as a distribution platform for content like this. If you’re listening and you haven’t found the page yet – I’ll leave a link in the description of this episode. If you enjoy this work, remember to share it with your friends and colleagues. You never know who needs to hear it and you could change the course of someone’s life.
Okay so let’s talk about love. It’s worth pointing out that there are actually four different kinds of love. In the West, we use the word love to describe all of them – but in Greek they use four different words. Eros is romantic love of the sexual passion. Storge is the kind of love parents have for their children. Fileo is brotherly love. And agape is God’s love. Agape what we are interested in today. Agape is the purest form of love. Agape is self-sacrificial. Agape is the most difficult form of love for human beings to hold to consistently because human beings are not pure. But agape is what Christ is calling us to when he says, you must love your neighbor as yourself.
Everyone wants to be loved. Everyone. The desire to be loved subsumes even the desire for money. You often hear people say that it all comes down to money. That’s not a good explanation because it doesn’t attempt to explain why we value money. Money is just paper. It is our collective agreement about money that sets its value. What we really want are the products that money can purchase. These products can be roughly reduced to security, status, power, and entertainment. We desire security so that we can protect ourselves and our loved ones from the suffering that is endemic to life – as well as from the evil that is endemic to humanity. We desire status so that we can attract new people to love us. We desire power so that we can be the ones who provide for ourselves and for those whom we love. We desire entertainment to enjoy life and make memories with those we love. You’ll notice that love is the common factor in security, status, power, and entertainment.
What happens when we distort or damage love? What happens when a person’s spirit has turned away from love entirely? The desire to gain security transforms into a desire to violate security. Instead of protecting yourself and others from the suffering of life you wish to extend and produce the suffering for its own sake. That is a good definition for the evil that lurks inside of each human heart – the desire to produce and extend needless suffering for suffering’s own sake.
Without love the desire for status transforms from a healthy advertisement of competence and ability to love into something like an excuse for why you don’t need to. A good way of thinking about this is the college degree. Many graduates frame their degree and hang it on their wall. The person who uses status properly hangs the degree to display their willingness and ability to do a job well. The person who uses status improperly hangs the degree in an attempt to show that they’ve arrived and since they’ve paid their dues they no longer need to work to improve themselves. The biggest difference between a good doctor and a terrible doctor is that a good doctor actually wants to help her patients – because she loves her patients.
Without love the desire for power transforms from wanting to give of yourself for the well being of others into wanting to gain for yourself at the expense of others. This is the difference between a good leader and a bad leader. Both have power as a consequence of being the leader. The good leader loves those he is seeking to lead. As result, he’s willing to shoulder the sacrifice himself if that will promote the well being of his followers. This is why Christ is called the Good Shepherd. Jesus had all of the power, and yet he willingly gave himself to be crucified so that we might have eternal life. The crucifixion was the highest expression of self-sacrificial – or agape – love.
Contrast the good leader with the bad leader. The bad leader does not love his followers – he loves the power itself. So the power is no longer a means to give of himself unto others. The power has become the end itself. The lust for power is the black hole that sits at the center of this person’s universe. It is the very motive of his heart. So instead of sacrificing himself, he intends to sacrifice everything and everyone around him if that will serve his power. This is the totalitarian who imprisons anyone who speaks against him. This is the mob who burns down their neighbor’s business while claiming that they stand for love and tolerance.
When your life is full of love you want to share this joy with your loved ones by way of entertainment. You want to experience moments of happiness and make good and lasting memories. But if you are without love, entertainment becomes the drug you use to escape the suffering of being without love. It is a vicious cycle where highs are followed by crushing emptiness which then must be followed by even higher highs. Your world begins to look darker and more bleak and then you start believing life is ultimately meaningless. When facing the terrible tragedy of that nihilistic viewpoint, you begin to have more faith in the escapism than you do in love itself. It is at this point that you are willing to destroy all of your relationships if doing so will serve your addiction.
So we can see that love is mixed in with pretty much everything that we value in life. And we can see that when love is stripped away these values quickly become pathological and the person’s well being declines. Next we need to think about how love changes your interaction with others. In his book How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie said that you can win more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to make other people interested in you. He also said that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest sound in the world. I’m quoting Carnegie because when people hear Jesus say to love your neighbor as yourself – they often think this is purely for the benefit of the neighbor. But it’s not. It’s similar to how worshiping God is not for God’s benefit – but for your own. Among the many benefits of worshiping God is the assurance that you will not become enslaved to something else – or to yourself.
Loving your neighbor is also for your own benefit – as well as your neighbor’s. If we accept Carnegie’s claim that all people desire to be loved then it gives us an opportunity to give them what they want most in this world – love. When you love someone in a self-sacrificial way, you become a source of tremendous meaning and joy in that person’s life. And then they begin to love you because you make them feel that way. It’s an upward spiral of you giving love and them giving it back to you. This is why steel manning is the most effective way to have a conversation with a person who disagrees with you. Steel manning means making the case for your opponent’s position at least as well as they made it. This would be opposed to straw manning which means to misrepresent your opponent’s views and then attack the misrepresentation. When you steel man your opponent, you show them that you take their beliefs seriously and that you understand their point of view. This is the only way to build enough trust with a person to persuade them to see things from your own side. In politics, the left and right are having a difficult time sitting down for discussion because neither side wants to stop misrepresenting what the other side believes.
This matters to you because if most of the people in your life are giving you a hard time – it’s likely that you aren’t doing a very good job of sacrificing yourself to love them. You might say, well I don’t want to sacrifice myself because then I lose. But remember, you have a much better chance of winning them to your side if you step out in faith and initiate the love. You have to be the first mover. A common mistake many people make is that they try to shape themselves into the most interesting person they can be – thinking that this will cause others to love them. So you can imagine a guy who spends 4 hours a day in the gym because he wants to change what others think of him. Or you could imagine a girl who spends thousands of dollars on making herself look as good as she can so that others will recognize her for it. The problem is that these two people are focusing a huge portion of their resources on themselves. Which means they’re not focusing on loving others. And worse still: when others refuse to acknowledge their self-centered effort, these people can’t understand why they are being rejected and so they become resentful and bitter.
Instead consider a guy who spends 4 hours a day in the gym so that he can improve himself in an effort to better serve others. Or imagine a girl who spends a lot of money on her appearance so that she can inspire others to look good as well. This changes the game entirely, because both of them are now focused on promoting the well being of others – not themselves. This time the guy is respected by his peers for his dedication and hard work. The girl is admired for her beauty and looked up to as an icon. The only thing that has changed here is that their attitudes have gone from self-importance to other-importance. This has caused them to be respected, admired, and loved. Ironically, these two also get the self-benefit that the first two got but they get none of the negatives that come from being self-oriented.
If you love people in a self-sacrificial way, almost all of them will love you in return. This is going to open more doors to you than you can possibly imagine. Networking and who you know is extraordinarily important in nearly every domain of modern life. Now, Christ also says to love our enemies. So we don’t get to choose which individual human being is worthy of our love or not. We are called to love everyone. This means people of other religions and people who disagree with your worldview. But how do we do that? The first thing we must always keep in mind is steel manning – which we discussed already. You need to do your best to show everyone in your life that you understand them. You need to show them that you take them seriously because they are made in the image of God and they have intrinsic divine value.
The next most important thing to keep in mind is the separation of ideas from individuals. A human being is not his or her ideas. A person can be deeply confused and totally wrong about the nature of reality and this confusion does nothing to infringe on their value as a person. You should be able to love people of different faiths and different sexual orientations because a person’s faith and a person’s sexual orientation does not make up the entirety of who they are as a person. I understand that this can be difficult sometimes because many people will try to self-identify with things like these. It’s on you to prevent yourself from demonizing anyone and to remind yourself that there is infinitely more to this unique person than surface level ideas or behaviors. A good tip for this is to always address people as individuals and use their name. You must resist lumping individuals into groups because group identity is the incorrect level of analysis when determining who a person is.
If you’re successful at separating ideas from people, then you can be in the world and not of the world. You can serve and love people who are diametrically opposed to what you believe – because you won’t be serving and loving this person’s ideas. You’ll be serving and loving the person. This really is how we conquer political correctness. Political correctness is unnecessary in a world where every person is known as a unique individual and not as representative of a group. The best part about loving individuals is that this is the most likely road to them allowing you to be their leader. Countless people have come to Christ not because of reason and logic – but because a Christian chose to love them and so they loved a Christian.
People respond positively to love because love is the most important thing to people. This is why a vast majority of your cognitive overhead is spent on your relationships and not on trying to understand metaphysical reality. Most people care more about the well being of their loved ones than they do about whether the universe is 14 billion years old or not. I think love takes such a prominent role in our lives because love is real. It’s real in the same sense that gravity is real. Love is not just a brain state brought on by a combination of stimuli. Love is an objective reality. It might be the most real thing there is – which would account why nearly all of us orient ourselves around it.
Christ tells us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Someone might say, isn’t the Bible full of cruel things and doesn’t the Bible promote slavery? Let’s deal with slavery first. The truth is that the Bible does not promote slavery. For those who repeat this trope, it is their understanding of the Bible that promotes slavery. The Bible is a narrative, and so each line must be read in the context of each paragraph. Each paragraph must be read in the context of each chapter. Each chapter must be read in the context of each book. And each book must be read in the context of the entire canon. Every verse in Scripture must be interpreted in light of the rest of Scripture.
People who claim the Bible promotes slavery miss the Exodus story entirely. It’s a whole book in the Bible dedicated almost entirely to telling the story of how God helped his people break free of slavery. And they also disregard Christ as He gives the two greatest commandments – love God and love your neighbor. It’s not love God and enslave your neighbor. The reason slavery is pictured in Scripture is because human beings took slaves. You have to read all of Scripture through the interpretive structure of loving God and loving your neighbor. If you come out with an understanding that prevents you from doing both of these, then you are wrong and you need to read it all again. This is because Jesus – God Himself – tells us that the law and the prophets (i.e. the Bible) are summarized fully on these two commands. You have to attach primacy to this statement from Christ. To say otherwise is to abandon logic because you would have no reason not to say that Er is actually the most important character in Scripture. Many of you probably don’t even know who Er is. His name is two letters: E R. He has maybe two verses in Genesis 38. All that it says is that Er was wicked in the sight of the Lord and the Lord slew him. So if you’re willing to remove enough context to say that the Bible promotes slavery, you also have to be willing to remove enough context to say Er is more important than Jesus Christ. Both claims are equally absurd.
Now let’s think about suffering. There are many cruel things in the Bible because the world is full of cruel things and the Bible is a reflection of reality. But how could a loving God allow this suffering? Well there’s the free will argument. We have the free will to love God and this can’t exist without the free will to disobey him. Thus God could easily create a universe with no suffering or evil – but if he did we would not be in it. Also consider this: the highest form good is not the absence of suffering, the highest form of good is that which has been redeemed from suffering. Imagine you’re in an air conditioned room with a recliner. There’s nothing that can cause suffering in this room. It is fully absent of suffering. That’s a good deal. But you know what a better deal is? Walking into a room like this after standing outside all day suffering in the hot sun. The bliss that comes from being redeemed from that suffering is a whole different plane of existence. It is the highest dimension of good. And it’s impossible to access it without first going through the suffering.
In the same way, heaven is a place where is no more suffering, no more tears, and no more death. This was like the Garden of Eden. It would be a good thing for God to keep us there and prevent us from doing something stupid like leaving. But it would be even better for God to endow us with the free will to choose Him – knowing that we would fall. And then for Him to come down and meet us in our fallen state and perform the greatest act of self-sacrificial love in an effort to redeem us from the suffering. Then we get to enter into heaven by choice and be in full communion with Him because where there is free will there is also the possibility of love. Entering into heaven, we are redeemed from the suffering. This is a state of being that cannot be comprehended without first experiencing the suffering. God allows us to suffer because by doing so He also grants us access to the highest form of good. There is no resurrection without the crucifixion.
So what do you have to do to get there? Just keep looking up. Keep seeking God. Keep loving your neighbor. Understand that the world can be a cruel and terrible place. Understand that as a human being you have the unique capacity to make it better or make it a whole lot worse. The choice is yours and it’s a choice you have to make every day until you breathe your last. God knows you won’t be perfect. God knows you are not a saint. God knows I’m not a saint. God knows both you and me struggle with sin and may continue to struggle with sin. But the good news is that God is the very embodiment of agape love – of self-sacrificial love. The good news is that God has already provided for us and done everything we need to be forgiven and redeemed from the suffering of the world. The best thing you can do is allow that understanding take up residence in your heart and in your mind. That understanding will go a long way to bringing you peace and setting you free from the power of your guilt. And then each day you can wake up and ask yourself in what little ways can you imitate Jesus in His self-sacrificial love so that you, too, can play a part in redeeming the world from suffering and evil. So that you, too, can choose to love.
If you find this content valuable, feel free to share it and to use it in your own studies. If you’d like to support this podcast, you can do so at http://www.patreon.com/michaelhbaun. There is a link in the description. Your generosity goes a long way to promoting the growth of this enterprise and the cause of free speech. Thank you all for joining me this evening, and I will see you in the next episode.
The MHB Podcast 