Can We Love Without Loving God???

If I say yes, I know many Christians may be irked by it.
If I say no, many others will be irked by it (including Christians I'm sure).
I can't really give an answer without rubbing against one side or another.
Nevertheless, I'm going to try to figure this one out, for my sake at least.

I, personally think that we can. I do believe that those who don't know God yet on a personal level can express love on the level of or sometimes (unfortunately true) on a better level than some who call themselves Christians. Now, this does not mean God is suddenly made obsolete in the realm of love and relationships. Absolutely not. It is the very reason that God made us and that we're all sown with a seed from Him that we are even remotely capable of trying to express love. This is where God should take over in our lives, because the ability to love is not from us, although it has been graced unto us by God. Without him, yes we can express love, but only so far, and so consistently. Without God, our ability to love is so drastically diminished and hampered that inevitably it might even altogether disappear.

Now before I go on, let's define terms.
Love: it's a tricky thing to define, it's easier to define what it isn't than what it is.
Love is not just: infatuation, feeling of compatibility, 'liking', romance.
***It's nigh impossible to look at a couple and judge for one's self whether they love each other or not, whether or not they're Christians. They themselves know and God knows, that's all that should matter to us.

My experiences with love have not been numerous, nor am I an expert, but I can say I've been blessed to experience, in my opinion, one of the deepest forms of love on this Earth. The love I experience with my Grandma is in my opinion the purest form (more so the love on her part than mine, but still).

Selfless sacrifice, a constant compassion, patience, consistency, devotion, service, the list goes on and on. These are some of the few words I can use to describe my Grandma's love for me and my mom. We've fought, yelled at each other, argued until we got tired, left the house for months, gotten furious with each other, and yet she still remained. The love from her the next day, regardless of circumstances never changed. Her level of devotion never wavered even when mine seemed nonexistent. When I was unable to love her back, she kept on loving. When I disgraced her and hurt her, she took me into her arms. When I didn't know God, she was always praying for me.

The description above may sound like someone you personally know as well, but the one thing that drives it home for me is that she has her own family. She is not a blood relative nor have any connections to my family, besides the fact that she met my mom through mutual friends. She committed her life to raising the kid of a poor immigrant mother and she stuck with that promise until the end. Through the thick and the thicker, she was always by our side when she could have left any moment to go back to her family. She sacrificed her life, not through death, but through love and service.

When I examine my relationship with my Grandma and start thinking about how she does it, I can't come up with a better answer than, "She loves God more." Her love is word for word, what the Bible describes love to be:
⁴Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

She loved as Jesus loved. Simply put, her love was always greater than mine, because she relied on God so much more. My humanly affection towards her, my sense of indebtedness, my sense of obligations, my shames, my gratitude, all together could not compete with God's love that flowed through my Grandma. Now is there a chance that I'm just a really ungrateful, depraved man that sucks at expressing love, maybe. But, I'm willing to bet my life that it's because God is that much greater rather than my inabilities that my Grandma's love for me and my mom never wavered.


My mom has dedicated just as much, if not more, of her life into raising me. She's worked 12+ hours for as long as I can remember. She always found a way to support this family no matter what it cost her. Her sacrifice is no less than Grandma's. However, there is only one stark difference between the love I felt from my Grandma and the love from my mom. My Grandma's love was unconditional, my mom's no matter how hard she tried, was always slightly so. There is a certain depth to the love that my Grandma shows us, a certain sense of otherworldliness. A love that when one feels, has no doubt that it is genuine and from the heart.

Now back to the question: can we love without loving God?
Sure, but we were called to love so much more than we are humanly capable of. We were called to do so, not because it's God's way of trying to make our lives hard and miserable, but quite the opposite. We were called to love like He does, because this very love that we try on our own is not from us, and He wants to be a part of our lives in that very way- through loving. If we try on our own, we will always fall short of our potential to love, which is quite in fact infinite once we rely solely on God. When we come back to God and begin a deep relationship with Him, where we love Him and allow Him to love us, our ability to love will increase vastly. We will be learning how to love like He does from the very creator of love - God himself.

He's been yearning for a relationship with us from when Time began. He's been calling out to us and hinting at us by allowing us to love one another, no matter how imperfectly it may be. It is through our imperfect trials that we should learn that there is a greater form of love that is greater than ourselves. God's been waiting with open arms to show us how to love like He does. He sacrificed it all first. We can try to love on our own, but we'll always be treading water with our heads barely out of the water. Once we love God, and let Him love through us, that is when we'll be grabbing hold of that lifesaver that we know as Jesus Christ.