God’s Love vs. Culture’s Love: Unmasking 3 Dangerous Lies

Our culture is lovesick. Partly because we are created to love, and partly because the modern understanding of love is greatly distorted. Our media is filled with stories that shape our expectations of what love should be, and it’s not always for the better. We hope for love, try it out, and are often left feeling empty and dissatisfied.

In Scripture, we read that God is love and loves perfectly, but what happens when that is read through the lens of modern culture? Culture distorts love in 3 core ways: equating love with feeling, utility, and desire. Each of these concepts fails to capture what love truly is and leaves us longing for more.

Lie #1: Love is Just a Feeling

Some of the most powerful feelings one can have are encompassed in the phrase “falling in love.” But with the power of those emotions comes culture’s desire to romanticize love and mistake the feeling of love for what love is. To say love is only a feeling is to treat it as a temporary emotional experience—butterflies in the stomach or a “happily ever after.”

The Destructive Consequence

We all know feelings fade. To base love on feelings leads to instability as emotions shift and waver. If love is just a feeling, what happens when attraction fades or when hardship strikes? Does that mean we’ve simply “fallen out of love”? According to this understanding, when the spark dies, so does the relationship. This leads to instability, anxiety, and a restless pursuit of the next good feeling.

Lie #2: Love is a Transaction (Utility)

Love requires a choice, which is part of what makes it meaningful. An act of love displays the value of the one being chosen. But human beings are selfish, and sadly that choice is often manipulated for personal gain. Our consumer culture teaches us to view relationships as transactional. Love’s value only goes as far as its usefulness. This is witnessed when people hold love over someone’s head for manipulation or say, “I won’t love you unless…”.

The Destructive Consequence

This conditional, utilitarian love leads to fear, insecurity, and unhealthy performance-based acceptance. At its core, it reduces people to tools that only have instrumental value. We long to be loved for who we are, not what we can provide. This transactional approach feels more like captivity than freedom.

Lie #3: Love is Selfish Desire

Love partly consists of desire, but far too often, love is reduced only to desire. Our culture, hypersexualized by pornography and hookups, often equates lust with love. This is to say that love is simply the desire for something. If I desire it, if I want it, then I love it.

Another distortion is to say love equals affirmation—that the only loving response is to affirm whatever someone chooses to do. Yet love without truth can affirm someone right into their own destruction.

The Destructive Consequence

Love as mere desire consumes rather than gives. It objectifies people, and though temporary cravings may be satisfied, it leaves a profound emptiness behind. Deep down, we long for intimacy and faithfulness—not to be consumed.

The Truth: What the Bible Says God’s Love Is

So how does Scripture shatter these distortions? In 1 John 4:8 we read, “God is love.” This does not mean God has loving feelings; it means love is His very being and character.

• God’s Love is Unchanging: Unlike feelings, God’s love is not fickle because His character does not change (Malachi 3:6).
• God’s Love is a Choice: In Ephesians 1:4-5, we read that God chooses us. Romans 5:8 says that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. His love is not a transaction dependent on our actions; it is freely given because we are inherently valuable as his creation.
• God’s Love is Sacrificial: My dad taught me, “love is an act of my will for the betterment of someone else, regardless of the cost.” Jesus states in John 15:13 that “greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friend.”

While culture’s distorted love produces fragile and fleeting relationships, God’s love is true, faithful, freeing, and forever. Love is not simply what you feel, use, or want—it’s who God is, best represented by the Son of God dying on a cross for you.