ReFOCUS with Jim Daly

Announcer: The film Amazing Grace from Walden Media has been remastered for its 20th anniversary and is now available to stream in the Focus on the Family app. You’ll also find a discussion guide. Be inspired today at focusonthefamily.com/amazinggrace.

Chip Ingram: The fact of the matter is that if everyone is made in the image of God and Christ died for them, I am commanded to love them. And the whole point of the Good Samaritan and the entire story is: who's your neighbor? Your neighbor is a person in need.

Jim Daly: That's Pastor Chip Ingram talking about the kind of love our world so desperately needs. Not a love that simply happens to us, but a love we choose to live out because Christ first loved us. Welcome to ReFOCUS with Jim Daly, a podcast production from Focus on the Family.

In this conversation, I talk with Chip about some great ideas in his book, I Choose Love: How to Love Your Neighbor as Yourself. Chip will help us understand agape love, the love God shows us, and how that love gives, serves, obeys, and cares in practical ways, especially in a culture that is divided, lonely, and hungry for something real.

He also shares personal stories about learning humility, serving others, obeying God in everyday moments, and showing up for people in pain when it costs us something. The goal of this podcast is to equip you to engage the culture for Christ with both conviction and compassion.

And today's episode will help you do just that, not by winning arguments first, but by reflecting the heart of Jesus through chosen, intentional love for others. Chip is the founder and CEO of Living on the Edge. And as a pastor for over 35 years, he has served in a variety of churches. Here's my conversation with Pastor Chip Ingram on ReFOCUS with Jim Daly.

Chip, welcome to ReFOCUS. So good to have you on board today.

Chip Ingram: It's great to be with you, Jim. Thank you.

Jim Daly: I have read your books. I've watched you from afar. I really do appreciate the way you interact with culture, and that's one of the purposes here on ReFOCUS is just to learn from those who are doing it well in the faith, how to engage people that don't think the way we think. Again, I think you're a great example. Your life's been led that way, and I appreciate it.

Why do you believe this message of choosing love—that's a good way to say it—is so important for Christians in our culture today?

Chip Ingram: I think because love has been completely or almost completely reframed by the culture. When we think about it, just recently, it's been about a couple hundred years where the word love has become so infused with emotion, with romance, with the Hallmark type of thinking.

Love's a very powerful word, but when you see it that way, then you are always waiting for love to happen to you, for that right person, that right circumstance. The truth is we can choose to love. The scripture's so true that when you choose to love, grace is empowered and love doesn't fail.

It doesn't mean everything goes your way, but you're an active agent in your world. You're not a victim of, "Well, I guess the right person hasn't come or that one didn't work out." So that's sort of the heart of choosing it.

Jim Daly: Yeah, which is so good. One of the things I'm not a Greek scholar or a Latin scholar—I think back to the founding fathers, those guys speaking Latin at fourth grade. Wow, what has happened to humanity?

But in that regard, one of the things I've been more curious about or fascinated by is the Greek language. They don't have one word for love. English is pretty specific. Love is used for so many ways to describe love. But in Greek, there's agape love, there's other words to define different types of love. Are you familiar enough to describe that? And then let's get to agape.

Chip Ingram: Absolutely. In fact, I actually have a little chart in the book on that that defines each one. For those that want to go further, I think C.S. Lewis's book, The Four Loves.

There's agape love, which is God's love. It's a volitional, not without emotion, but it's volitional, other-centered, sacrificial. There's storge love, which is more family type love. That's a devotion. There's bloodlines where we have each other's back.

And then there's phileo love, which is built around friendships and a common cause, and we've built relationships with one another. And then there's erotic love or eros love, which is the sexual, passionate love.

My thesis of this book, and I think it's pretty accurate in scripture, is agape love needs to be at the foundation, if you will. And then you learn how to put that into practice in families and then friendships.

And then God's desire is that eros love actually is this amazing physical expression and passion built on these other-centered family friendship devotions. Because in a marriage, you want all those. And so it's not an either/or, like everything has to be spiritual, but it is a kind of love that really provides the fuel and the energy for all the others.

Jim Daly: With our lack of dimension, if I could say it that way, that we don't have these four walls of love to describe it, it feels like the culture, particularly media culture, what our teens are exposed to, our 20-somethings, what we were exposed to at that age, it's eros that is taking the foundational position in our culture. Like it's about this physical love.

You rightly are saying agape love gives you the best foundation to experience the other three loves, because agape love is God's form of love to us. And the others are finite in what their job is, if I could say it that way, when it comes to love.

That agape love, you describe it in the book as a sacrificial choice. I was at a church, I gave a sermon a couple of Sundays ago. In this particular case, the pastor's wife had just been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

So there was a pall on the believers there. I came in to do something fun and lighthearted, and I had to rework the whole thing on a Saturday before speaking on Sunday. But one of the things I learned—this is what I love about sermon prep and I'm not a pastor, but I often speak in churches—but in that moment, I think it was Tim Keller I was quoting, but talking about God choosing to give his life up for his creation. That he chose to love us. That's a powerful illustration.

Chip Ingram: Yes, it is. And I think for those that are overwhelmed and you look at all the anxiety that we see—and it's not just in teenage girls and midlife—when the world is all about how I feel because that's the instrument of whether I'm in love or out of love or whether I belong or whether people care about me.

When I can shift that to understand that if I'm deeply loved by God and there's a power and a supernatural love available, I can actually choose to treat people and begin to enter into every level of relationship with a choice and a power that doesn't make me a victim of the trauma I've been through, the family that I grew up in.

It doesn't mean you dismiss those things, but we actually have the power, like God, we're made in his image, he chose to love us, and he's given us the ability to choose to love as well.

Jim Daly: I love that so much. Let me ask you this. Again, the culture, and we're going to talk about the four loves through our time together. We're on agape right now, the foundation as you said, God's form of love to us.

Young women today, and boys too, 15, 13-year-olds. We talk in the church about helping your children develop identity in Christ. Here's why this is so critical, and I'd say it starts with this idea of agape love.

Understanding that God loves you unconditionally, sacrificially, and what that relationship looks like so you can build healthy eros love. Yet I think that identity problem today, even within the church, young people within the church, is so saturated with the sexual eros love descriptor that—and I'm thinking of so many of my friends that have daughters—this is where they're getting their identity.

That if I'm attractive, if I've got the right body, if I have the right figure, if I've got the right smile, if I look right, then I will get boys to love me. You don't want to build your foundation on that, correct?

Chip Ingram: Absolutely correct. We're seeing the results of when you do that. Those of us that have daughters or granddaughters those ages understand that it's like watching Mount Everest to Death Valley from day to day as they see other people's world that seems so perfect and things go up and down with them.

It's easy to articulate that, but it's a real challenge for all of us, but especially a young woman, to not look at that and come to the grips with, "I'm not beautiful. I'm not lovable. I don't belong."

Jim Daly: The depression that sets in, the anxiety, all of it we're seeing, I think. So the encouragement, for perhaps the young person listening or certainly the parents that are listening: get that foundation right, however you might. Focus on the Family has lots of help in this regard. That is critically important to the person's well-being overall.

Continuing with agape, you write that the church can sometimes be nearly as divided as the surrounding culture. I'd say, yeah, it's true. Not nearly, it can be as divided.

What do Christians lose when we let political, theological, social differences kind of creep into our relationships and kind of keep us from loving the way we should love in a way that the Lord can use that attraction to reach the lost person that you're talking with?

Chip Ingram: I think at the heart of how we've treated and respond to one another, we have so undermined the gospel. I mean, if there's ever an event in world history in the last 100 years, COVID revealed that the greatest mission opportunity that ever happened in our lifetime.

People are hurting, they're needing, they're afraid, there's uncertainty. Now's the opportunity for the church to reach out. And if you have this picture of all the churches and God taking the roof off and looking down and saying, "So how are my children doing?"

We argued about masks, we argued about open the church, close the church, we argued about red state and blue state. And I think we so missed, and we just were mature baby toddlers.

And Jesus chose disciples who fundamentally wouldn't like each other naturally speaking. A tax collector and a good Jewish boy, that doesn't—he's got a radical Al-Qaeda on his team. He recruited people so that their relationship with one another, where he and their love for him and one another, was the testimony that what he was saying is real.

And so I think we need to go full court press, Jim, among leaders, among churches and say, there's lots of secondary things. And you have opinions on them, I have, but none of those come remotely close to our commitment to Jesus and our love—not just words, our love for one another where we sacrifice for those who disagree in the body of Christ around things that we can't agree on and help one another.

Jim Daly: So often when I talk to people, especially in these arenas where there's theological or political, the response that I often get—we'll talk about the fruit of the spirit and I mention it's important for us to love, to love our neighbor, we're going to get to that topic in a minute.

But this idea: love. And I get the battle zone. I've been in the battle zone. I've sat in the meetings. I've been in the seats of power. I've met with presidents and senators and congresspeople and heard the sourness, deep division that is within that community. And they're trying to work out differences and hopefully provide policy for the country that takes us in a healthier place, right? But the acrimony in that community is the worst it's ever been from those that are there that have told me that.

But people will often say, Christians in that arena or pastors: "Yeah, I get love. Yeah, I get love. But we need to stand on God's righteousness." And it's a true statement. But we're constantly battling these balances between "love your neighbor" and "set them straight."

I don't know why the Lord—I guess there could be more clarification to that. What he does say, kind of love is at the pinnacle. I remember engaging some of these hardcore Christian political activists and I get it, I'm glad they're there, making the point in culture, etc.

But I remember thinking for myself, standing before the Lord after I take that last breath—which by the way, everyone's going to have, right? Nobody gets away from dying. Not at this point and I don't think there'll ever be that pill.

The point being you're going to stand before the Lord. You got a chance to say one of two things in my opinion. "Lord, I held those people to your standard of righteousness. I hope you're pleased." Or the other thing I think you're going to say, "Lord, I loved people as best as I could from the instruction you gave me. I tried to love my neighbor as myself."

I just can't envision the Lord being hard on that person, saying, "Thank you, faithful and good servant." I think the other one he's going to say, "Didn't you read where that's my job? I'll hold people to that standard. It's good to proclaim. But when we go steps further to say with aggression or with an angry attitude, 'the Lord demands you to do this,' I don't know that that's where he wants us to be."

Chip Ingram: Well, I don't think we can ask unbelievers who don't have the spirit to behave in Christ-like ways. And I think sometimes we do that and impose—we do live in America, and that means that everyone can have an opinion.

And I think what we have the great thing is you never compromise the truth. I've done almost all my ministry in the most liberal portion of the United States. And when you have a board of education, when you have a city that won't give you permits, when you have a mayor who's almost always a homosexual in our time in Santa Cruz, first gay pride parade, you are viewed as narrow, bigoted, anti-intellectual.

And candidly, they have some good evidence for that. And what we found was we gathered together as churches and we served the community. We held to scripture, they picketed when I spoke on various different things.

But we partnered together and we drove HIV patients to the doctor and to the grocery store. We solved the runaway teen problem. We did the food drives. We came together as churches and we remodeled the schools when they didn't have money to do it.

It got to the point where San Jose gave our church and a group of churches an award for citizenship as we helped solve their biggest problems. It was amazing how the walls came down. We didn't compromise. But instead of those narrow, anti-intellectual evangelicals, it was like every time that there was a problem, "Hey, we need to talk to those pastors. These are the people that really care about our community."

So my point is, I don't think it's either/or. I think we bring both those things.

Jim Daly: Yeah, and I agree. And I think unfortunately so many of our human experiences, we tend to be on a light switch, not a dimmer switch. So we're either on or we're off, those more extremes, rather than living in the culture in a way that as Paul says, be all things to all people.

Now he's not meaning be a sinner. He's just saying, be what you need to be in the moment to connect to someone's heart. That's how I read that. But that is so true.

Jean and I had the privilege last summer to go to Ephesus. It's probably one of the best biblical ruins that have been and are in the process of being discovered. They've got probably a mile of marble road with the shops that were there. And I think with pretty good accuracy, they describe the marketplace.

And it's not a large spot. It'd be maybe the size of a basketball court where Paul would have been as a tentmaker in Ephesus selling his product. And the teacher there talked about the city, kind of the mayor of the city, to put it in our vernacular, when the person was accusing Paul of taking money out of their pockets because of the images that were being made and Paul railed against it, you know, "Don't worship these things that humans make, worship the God that made you," kind of that thing. Dionysius, I think.

And it was the mayor of Santa Cruz, it was the mayor of Ephesus who ran to protect Paul from the mob. And it gives you a great insight as to how Paul was working in the culture that didn't embrace him. There were quiet Christians, but they did not embrace him. They believed in multiple gods and if you did the wrong thing...

So there's Paul giving us an example of how to befriend and know the city officials so that they came to his aid in his moment of difficulty. Even your observation of those things, what do you think? Some Christians have this hardline feeling like, "Oh, then you're, if you're a friend of the mayor, if you're a friend of the governor," let's just put it in our context, "if you're a friend of that Democrat, then you've given up, you've sold out as a Christian."

Chip Ingram: I would say that's a very unhealthy perspective and a very unbiblical one. The fact of the matter is that if everyone is made in the image of God and Christ died for them, I am commanded to love them.

And the whole point of the Good Samaritan and the entire story is: who's your neighbor? Your neighbor is a person in need. And if they're made in the image of God, then my job is to build a bridge and try and identify in any way possible without compromising the truth.

And the fact of the matter is that no one is willing to listen to the truth until they know you care. And I think my word, because of where I live and I've seen God do amazing things in places where "Oh, that's terrible and how do you do ministry there and there's all those big tech companies and everything is evil."

Proximity. I asked someone, "Who do you know in the tech world personally? Who do you know in the LGBTQ world personally? Who do you know someone that is a hardline Democrat that you actually, you know them and their kids and their issues and you befriend them?" And that doesn't mean you agree.

But I mean, Jesus hung out with people that most Christians would never get near. And the fact of the matter is he modeled for us that's how you build bridges to lost people, not talking to one another and posting stuff about other people that you don't even know. Proximity is so important.

Jim Daly: Yeah, and I think even in the scripture where it claims Jesus hung out with the drunkards, that's an interesting observation to your point. Like he was hanging out somewhere where they're drinking fermented fruit juice or something harder and he was comfortable there and they claimed he was one of them.

But it's interesting that he hung out with the people the religious people would not associate with. And again, it's a good reminder.

Before we get off this idea of what I call orthopraxy, the doing of the word. You have orthodoxy, the speaking of truth. And we are good at that. We're very good at that. We have what we call Christian talk radio. That is speaking the truth to the culture.

Then you have orthopraxis, which is the doing of the word, the things that you said that you did in Santa Cruz and the way that people responded to that. It's so critically important to be...