What is Love?" | February 15, 2026 | Ps Joel Lowery

What exactly is love? It's a question we've all pondered, yet one that remains surprisingly difficult to answer. We use the same word to describe our feelings about tacos, football, and our life partner. We declare our love for pizza with the same vocabulary we use to express devotion to our children. This linguistic confusion reveals a deeper problem: we've lost the ability to distinguish between different types of love, and it's affecting our relationships in profound ways.

The Foundation Problem

Marriage isn't failing because love disappears. Relationships aren't crumbling because people stop caring. The real issue runs much deeper: we're building on the wrong foundation.

Imagine a four-legged stool. Each leg represents a different type of love, and all four are necessary for stability. Try to sit on a stool with only one or two legs, and you'll quickly find yourself on the floor. Yet this is exactly what many of us attempt in our relationships - we build everything on a single aspect of love and wonder why things feel so unstable.

The ancient Greeks understood something we've forgotten: love isn't monolithic. They had multiple words for love, each describing a distinct experience. Scripture reflects this wisdom, weaving together four types of love into a complete picture of what relationships should be.

Eros: The Spark

Eros is the love of attraction, passion, and desire. It's the butterflies, the chemistry, the excitement that makes your heart race. This is the love celebrated in Song of Solomon, where lovers describe each other in poetic (if sometimes unusual) terms.

Here's what we need to understand: God created eros. He designed attraction, passion, and physical intimacy. These aren't embarrassing topics to avoid but beautiful gifts to steward wisely.

Eros says, "I want you." It desires presence, attention, and connection. In marriage, this kind of love is vital - nobody wants to be married to someone who doesn't actually want them.

But here's the catch: eros is powerful yet unstable. It's the most exciting leg of the stool, but it cannot stand alone. Being "in love" is a temporary emotional state. It feels eternal in the moment, but feelings fluctuate. Butterflies fade. Stress increases. Bodies age. Beauty, as Scripture reminds us, is fleeting.

When relationships are built solely on eros, people leave when the feelings fade. They assume love has died when really, it was never properly established in the first place. Culture tells us that if we don't feel it anymore, we should move on. But what if feelings were never meant to be the foundation?

Phileo: The Friendship

Phileo is friendship love - the love of shared values, loyalty, and connection. It's the ability to look at your partner and say, "You're my best friend." This is the "you too?" moment when you discover someone who shares your perspective, your mission, your vision for life.

This love doesn't just exist in marriage. It's what we hope develops in communities of faith, where people move from face-to-face encounters to shoulder-to-shoulder partnership in life's mission.

The strongest marriages aren't built on chemistry alone. They're constructed on shared vision, shared faith, and shared mission. When couples stop being friends, marriage becomes transactional - a constant negotiation where both parties feel they're losing.

Phileo asks important questions: Can you laugh together? Can you talk without every conversation turning into a fight? Can you enjoy sitting in silence together? This love is what keeps the fire burning after eros lights it.

Storge: The Comfort

Storge is affectionate, familial love. It's comfort, attachment, belonging, and safety. This is the love that says, "You're home. You're mine. You're my person."

Storge develops through shared memories, inside jokes, and accumulated history. It's the most humble of loves - the love that quietly shows up, that provides simple presence. It's comfortable in the best sense of the word.

But comfort has a shadow side. Natural affection can become possessive. Comfort can drift into complacency. We stop pursuing, stop being intentional. Comfort alone won't sustain passion or growth.

This is often what happens with empty nesters. For years, the shared mission of raising children provided structure and purpose. When the kids leave, couples face each other and realize they're not sure they even know each other anymore. The comfort was there, but the other legs of the stool had weakened.

Agape: The Choice

Agape is different from the other three. It's not primarily an emotion - it's an action. This is sacrificial, covenant love. It's self-giving, patient, kind, keeping no record of wrongs.

Agape says, "I choose your good over mine." It says, "I'll stay even when my emotions say I don't want to." It forgives and serves regardless of whether the other person has earned it.

This is the love described in 1 Corinthians 13, where we learn that love is patient, kind, not easily angered. It's the love that takes relationships out of the transactional realm. Agape refuses to keep score because it operates from abundance, not scarcity.

Here's the revolutionary part: agape doesn't depend on the other person's response. Their response is not your responsibility. God's design calls both people to pursue agape simultaneously. When both are running after selfless love, both are being served abundantly.

But even when the other person fails to love well, agape continues. It requires risk and vulnerability. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Agape is cross-shaped love - the kind demonstrated when God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son for people who didn't deserve it.

The Divine Design

Here's the beautiful truth: when all four legs are in place, something remarkable happens. You create a seat for Christ Himself. Your relationship becomes a reflection of the gospel, a living picture of how Christ loves the church.

God is love. Not that God feels love as one emotion among many, but that love is His very nature. This means we cannot truly understand or practice love apart from Him. When we try to define love outside of who God is, we miss it every time.

The natural loves - eros, phileo, and storge - are wonderful, but they're not self-sufficient. They must be elevated by divine love. Agape transforms everything. It makes passion safe, friendship deep, and affection steady.

The Challenge

Stop asking, "Do I feel loved?" Start asking, "Am I loving them?" Agape starts with you, not with the other person.

Your happiness is not your spouse's responsibility. Read that again. If you're waiting for your partner to become perfect so you can finally be happy in your marriage, you're building on sand. When we place our joy on anything other than the firm foundation of God's love, it will fail.

Before we can love others well, we must reconnect with the source of love. We must realign our hearts with the Father's heart. We cannot love the way God calls us to love on our own strength. We need Him.

Marriage isn't primarily about happiness - it's about reflecting the gospel. Relationships aren't just for our fulfillment - they're meant to display Christ's love to a watching world.

Build on all four legs. Cultivate passion, friendship, comfort, and sacrificial love. But remember: the stool isn't complete until it provides a place for Christ to sit at the center of your relationship. That's when everything changes.