What is the Disinterested Love of Christ? | The Whole Counsel

The Meaning of Disinterested Love

This love is a disinterested love. What does that mean, John, disinterested?

Yeah, that doesn't sound like a compliment, does it? Like, I love you, but I'm not really interested in you. It's not that. Disinterested is the old 17th and 18th century way of saying that the love that I'm offering you is not interested in what you can give me back.

Disinterested is what we would call unconditional. God loves us simply because in the mystery of His perfection, He has chosen to love what is unlovely. And He doesn't do it because He's going to get something back from you.

God Is Not Needy or Using Us

So that really answers, I think, one of the great lies that I hear a lot, and that is something like this. God loves you, but it's because He intends to use you. So you're going to work in His kingdom.

You're going to serve in His army. You're going to worship Him, and at the end of this life of service, you haven't really given God that much. But it is a little, and you've scratched His back, and now eternity He scratches your back.

He gives you heaven, you know, and so it's almost like, okay, He's very generous, but He is using me, and that's why He loves me. And that's the way the enemy presents Him to us, but that is as far from the truth as possible.

It also tends to present God in a view that says He's needy. He needs us. We need to accomplish these things for Him, or they don't get done kind of idea, and that's also far from the truth. He doesn't need us.

God’s Glory Cannot Be Increased by Creation

He's not using us. It is not a, He doesn't love us with the condition that we meet those things, as you said. Witherspoon, in making this point, says, It was giving to those from whom He could receive nothing, and emptying Himself of that glory to which the whole creation could not make any addition.

And not just any one individual of creation, but the whole of creation could not add anything to His glory. And so how foolish it is to think that it's a return. He's looking for the return, the benefit, like we do.

Loving Without Expecting a Return

Yeah, even at our best, we do expect some benefit, some return from pouring out our life, loving someone. Even if it's just the kind of the deep satisfaction that, well, at least I'm the kind of person that was willing to sacrifice.

You know, with your family, with your kids, you would like to, when you die, you would like them to want to put something nice on the tombstone. Like, He was a great dad. You know, He was patient with me.

He loved us. And you think, well, look, can I at least have that? You know, okay, you're not going to pay me back for all the diapers, but can you give me that? But what if our love simply was fueled by love and not the thought of, well, I love you, and I'm going to benefit a little bit from you.

I mean, I joke with my kids all the time. Chuck knows my kids are all getting out of college age and doing some further education and about to finish that. And I say to them, I want you to get out and get a really good job.

And I want my Christmas present to represent this new job. So I'm a good picture of an interested father.