Love Is More Than A Choice

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.

–Ephesians 4:31–32

This is a gentle pushback on a popular saying.

There is truth in saying “love is a choice” or “love is a decision.” It is true that if you don’t feel like doing good to your neighbor, love will incline you to “choose” to do it anyway. If you feel like getting a divorce, love will incline you to “choose” to stay married and work it out.

If you shrink back from the pain of nails being driven through your hands, love will incline you to say, “Not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). That’s the truth I hear in the statements “love is a choice” or “love is a decision.”

But I don’t prefer to use these statements. Too many people hear three tendencies in them that those who use the statements may not intend.

1. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to believe love is in our power to perform, even when we don’t feel like it.

2. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to make the will, with its decisions, the decisive moral agent rather than the heart, with its affections.

3. Saying “love is a choice” sounds like the tendency to set the bar too low: If you can will to treat someone well, you have done all you should.

I disagree with all three of these tendencies. In their place I would say this: Both at the level of desiring to do good, and the level of willing the good we don’t desire, we are totally dependent on the decisive grace of God. All that honors Christ—both affections and choices—are gifts to fallen sinners (1 Cor. 4:7; Gal. 5:22–23).

Beneath the will, with its decisions, there is the heart, which produces our preferences, and these preferences guide the will. “The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).

If our love is only a choice, it is not yet what it ought

to be.

It is important to hear me say “more than a decision.” I am not denying there are crucial choices and decisions to be made in a life of love. I am not denying that those choices and decisions are part of what love is. So I am not saying the statements “love is a choice” or “love is a decision” are false.

But I am jealous that the richness and depth (and human impossibility) of what love is in the Bible not be lost. Hence this little pushback.

TALK ABOUT IT

In your marriage, how might you be compromising your own long-term joy if you only thought of love as a choice or decision?

On the other side, how might it be detrimental to your marriage if you only thought of love as a feeling, and not also a decision?

In what concrete ways can you make your love for one another more than just a decision?