Can Love exist with out choice?

[Isaiah 6:8]

I belive that Love is a choice. Love with out a choice cannot exist.

I believe that the reason there was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to provide a choice on weather to obey or disobey. Having a choice also includes give us the choice to choose God, to choose to love him.

If I made a robot, and programmed it to love me, would it really be love?

I'm glad for this thread. Is Love a choice? God is Love, scripture says, to abide in Him is to abide in Love. Can I deny Him? Certainly there are those who claim they can and consider it their prerogative. I however, after seeing the Love of God endure the cross cannot. I would be a liar to say I can. Tell me, where is this choice? To whom shall I give my love, that is more worthy than my maker? I am not saying God programmed us to love Him. I am saying He has designed it so that the children of God are born out of corruption, out of darkness, so that we may grow unto Him forever. I know Love. I cannot today choose to love my wife and tommorrow choose not to. If this makes me a robot, so be it. Even Isaiah counted us as things, saying, "shall the thing made say why have you made me thus?" This is why I esteem God as creator and myself as creation. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is a whole other subject, I would be glad to discuss it somewhere else lest I write too long a post om this thread. I however would love to see how you can disagree with what I've said concerning Love. For those who say God cannot force someone to love Him who created us , might as well say he chooses to love his Mother or Father. In essence they are in fact incapable of Love. To say Love does not exist without choice is like saying God will not exist if you cease to believe in Him.

So your saying that the only obvious choice is love. There for being the only obvious choice its the only choice but yet we can choose not to choose the only choice?...

??? you contradict yourself.

Also many people choose not to love there spouse the "fall out of love" as if love is something that is beyond there power.

I have had times in my marriage where I did not like my wife, but yet I chose to love her, to push through the hard times.

You make no sense. you play word games but they wind up going in circles.

It is clear you are lost in semantics. Being alive we must make choices, this does not mean the choices we make are of a "freewill". Ignorance precedes ignorant choices, wisdom precedes wise choices. I do not contradict myself. I am not saying we won't choose as you imply I do. I'm saying the will is governed by reasoning, and reasoning is governed by what you believe to be true. The Holy Spirit of Truth therefore is a force over reasoning revealing how things are and giving light to those who would otherwise be in darkness. The Holy Spirit is of God and not conjured by our wills. The love you speak of falling out of, is not true love. True Love is eternal.

You are still playing the semantics game. The beauty of claiming semantics is this. You can make words mean what ever you want to, and twist the truth to what you think it should be.

How many times have I seen otherwise, wise people, make foolish choices? How many times have I seen smart people do drugs, because they can find a reason for it? They make the wrong choice because they choose to find a pure and logical reason. One person I know, who was and is a wise man, choose to do cocaine, as an alternative to coffee. He did not see it as any more dangerous then caffeine. He wound up in jail for a large part of his little boys life. He knew it was not a wise choice but he convinced himself otherwise.

You can see the wise choice clearly and choose not to. Your logic does not hold up

Say when you see the truth you MUST choose it. This is a fallacy of logic.

Semantics exist because there are two directions relative to God in the moral sense. Hence all semantics are binary. There is away from God or towards God. Going towards God is toi be headed into the light, guided by Truth. Away from God and you are headed towards darkness and guided by lies. He who is guided by lies believes he is following Truth but is in fact lost. Therefore to one who is headed away from God, he believes what he is following is good even though it is bad. He believes he will find success when in fact it is failure. He believes he is free when in fact he is a slave. Hence semantics exist though the terms are only correct if one sees the Truth and is headed towards the light. There also exists the subjective and objective points of view so that the contexts of the terms change accordingly. While there ever exists a choice in the context that there are different directions, yet there remains only one True direction. Truth and lies existed prior to man's existence and the event of choosing between them is only inevitable for the one who is lost. For he who knows the Truth is not lost. Note Sauls about face into Paul. Pure evidence of the power of God to turn a man around. He first willed with complete conviction he was doing right before God, and stoned Stephen. After gaining sight however, he was willing with all conviction he was doing right before God, to preach the gospel he had stoned Stephen for preaching. The carnal mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God.

Saul thought he was wise and loved God, but Paul gave glory to God for his wisdom and to the Holy Spirit for his Godly Love, as well he should. So shall I. Therefore I preach that men cannot choose to Love God unless they know God. It is the revelation of Him that brings men to their knees. They cannot choose not to Love Him after knowing Him or in reality they never Loved Him in the first place, nor did they know Him. Love does not work this way, for Love is forever faithful and trustworthy. While it remains a possibility that there is some stubborn pride that would refuse to Love God or deny love, it must exist only as an evidence of what the absence of God produces, a spiritual depravity that forms an abomination of vile affections. For me, I cannot consider this a viable option. There are semantics here, but I'd rather be free from Satan and a slave to God, than a slave to Satan and free from God. Oh but is it my choice? For God is like a billionaire and everyone says they love Him, but perhaps they love His money. How can doubt be erased? By sacrificing your flesh for the cause of Love, only then do you Love Him. And to do this you must first believe. It is faith, not freewill that decides ones course, and the scripture says He has chosen the lowly things rich in faith to put to naught the High things. God's reason is to not allow a man to boast saying, "I chose it of my own freewill". Ask Saul and ask Paul, he knows.

That is not in the scriptures at all.

Ephesians 2:8-9

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.

It is not by works, the Bible speaks of, not of freewill.

matter of fact the only time it mentions the word freewill are in sacrifices which were given up from our own free will.

Which to do a free will offering one must have free will to begin with.

[Isaiah 6:8]

[Isaiah 6:8]

I understand accidents, I have them all the time. No problem here. Why sit down if it is not comforting, more restful? Please, let's be loving and forthright with one another. I have no wish to belittle you even as I'm sure you have no wish to belittle me. Tell me honestly why it is so important to you that Love be a choice?

It is important for me on a few levels, First off, you have tried to prove your point by twisting what the Bible states. I do not pass on lightly on twisting of the word of God.

Second is this, If Love is not a choice then the God I worship must not exist. You see I refuse to belive that we are all robots programmed to love God whether we want to or not. This seems in contrary to the Bible.

now since you like semantics maybe I can help clarify. We can not choose attraction. Which is the initial spark that drives the emotion of love. How ever, yes love is a choice, and yes you can choose to harden your heart and not love.

You see if love was not a choice then I would fall in love with every pretty girl that caught my fancy. Yet I do not. I love my wife. You see once the choice has been made, the feelings follow and can be very strong. They are given strength by my continued

relationship with her. By spending time with her, bye being loving and choosing not to love others, do I keep loving her.

Same with God, if I kept my love of God to the emotional feelings then I would have been a Christian for 3.5 seconds before I gave that up, as the world with sin is so much more fun.

You See once we make the choice to love, the feelings follow and gain strength. However I also know that you can choose to no longer love. I have seen it many times in marriages and relationships and with people with God. They fall out of Love with God, with there spouse or other someone.

So if you can fall out of love with God then is that a choice as well?

Again Love is important, as we see in 1:cor 13 but It is something we must choose.

[Guest SDGS]

To say that you sit down and it doesn't involve pain, just your brain registering that you did indeed sit, is good. you are fortunate. some of us live with chronic pain, and for me, i don't know what pain free is. how does that make me love it? or not love it if you will? it just is a fact of life for me.

i have a phobia of spiders. i seriously panic if i see one. i moved from an apartment once after two wolf spiders invaded my apartment. it will never matter how many words, or how the words are used, that can make me "decide" to love spiders. love is, in my opinion, not a choice. it cannot be turned on and off just because one wants to believe it can.

[childeye]

Wait inevitable? Again, if it is inevitable is it really a choice? Again you go in circles. You say that we have choices but we do not have the choose to chose our choices...Round and round we go.

I have to laugh at this. Actually you said this pretty good. We have to choose a direction to go even if we choose to stand still. It is inevitable we choose. Our choice however are preceded by our knowledge. One does not put his hand on a hot burner knowing it burns. Hence pain is bad and pleasure good according to the flesh.

Then you say Satan is the reason for all our evil choices. So by your logic all evil no mater how heinous is not our fault its Satan's, the old "the devil made me do it" defense. So again, our choices are not ours?...

I do believe I've answered this with scripture already as in Romans 7:17. It is not my logic however. It is the gospel of Christ that blew my logic, which used to be the same as yours, out of the water. John 8:42-45,

42 Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me. I came from God, and now I am here. I have not come on my own. He sent me.

43 "Why aren't my words clear to you? Because you can't really hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil. You want to obey your father's wishes.

"From the beginning, the devil was a murderer. He has never obeyed the truth. There is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his natural language. He does this because he is a liar. He is the father of lies.

45 "But because I tell the truth, you don't believe me!

And you confuse feelings with Love, notice the afore mentioned Love chapter. Not one of those things were a feeling.

Love is compassion and empathy, the ability to put yourself in someone elses shoes and feel their pain or pleasure. Love makes us care for others. How is caring not a feeling?

So your saying that our feelings of love are uncontrolled and wild, you have watched way to many movies. You see many say they simply fell in love with another, thats why they left there wife. Because your talking about carnal love. You are also saying that if you Force someone to love you, it is indeed love. You see love is not just a feeling, its the actions you do, and it is something you choose.

I agree a carnal love is not a Godly Love. I don't agree with your paraphrasing however. Yes, Love without actions is dead for all intensive purposes, and I do not deny that Godly Love will cause you to sacrifice a carnal love. When you say force, you mean like beating someone with a stck into loving you. When I say force, I mean by benevolence and beauty of Character. Let us not confuse the two. You say Love is something you choose because you could choose not to act upon it. I say, you could not choose to have it so as to deny acting upon it. We were in God's graces from the beginning. We were duped into distrusting Him who was ever faithful. Now it appears men wish to claim they knowingly chose to deny God instead of apologizing for making a terrible mistake, just so they can say they now chose to Love God out of their good graces. I hate that line of reasoning.

[Isaiah 6:8]

I think, as SDGS pointed out that perhaps our conflict lies in the defiinition of the word Love.

The Greeks had 4 words for love, so lets go with that, this is taken yes from wikipedia, but I since I know the book it is speaking of well I know that its accurate enough.

This is from the book "The Four Loves" by C.S. Lewis.

Storge - Affection

Affection (storge, στοργή)

is fondness through familiarity, especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed "valuable" or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors. Ironically, its strength is also what makes it vulnerable. Affection has the appearance of being "built-in" or "ready made", says Lewis, and as a result people come to expect, even to demand, its presence

[Believer112]

I believe in our spirit we have God's kind of Love. We have the ability to to love just as Jesus did, but it takes God's help thru prayer and the Word, to transform our natural minds. Love isn't automatic and there are different levels love. Someone who has never known love would love differently than someone who has been loved. Loving your neighbor is a CHOICE especially the ones at work. When I'm offended here, or at work, at the store, anywhere, it is my choice to react in love or sin. This is something that has to be learned by transforming the mind. Praise God for His loving kindness!

[childeye]

I understand accidents, I have them all the time. No problem here. Why sit down if it is not comforting, more restful? Please, let's be loving and forthright with one another. I have no wish to belittle you even as I'm sure you have no wish to belittle me. Tell me honestly why it is so important to you that Love be a choice?

It is important for me on a few levels, First off, you have tried to prove your point by twisting what the Bible states. I do not pass on lightly on twisting of the word of God.

How do you know you aren't the one in error?

Second is this, If Love is not a choice then the God I worship must not exist. You see I refuse to belive that we are all robots programmed to love God whether we want to or not. This seems in contrary to the Bible.

Why not give God the absolute power to do what He wills with men? I find nothing unbiblical to taking a back seat to God. Why must you be His equal to take Him or leave Him? He doesn't do that to you. He loves us when we were yet dead in our sins, stinky, ugly, and unworthy.

now since you like semantics maybe I can help clarify. We can not choose attraction. Which is the initial spark that drives the emotion of love. How ever, yes love is a choice, and yes you can choose to harden your heart and not love.

I hate semantics. This analogy of physical attraction is not a good comparison to that Love that is empathy for the poor. Of course you can say no to God. How many times before God removes Himself so that you no longer can?

You see if love was not a choice then I would fall in love with every pretty girl that caught my fancy. Yet I do not. I love my wife. You see once the choice has been made, the feelings follow and can be very strong. They are given strength by my continued

relationship with her. By spending time with her, bye being loving and choosing not to love others, do I keep loving her.

Please forgive me when I say, stop talking this way. I hope I can be frank with you. This is what I hear you saying. You Love your wife and because you don't want to hurt her, you stay with her. This is God , not you. That's why the devil is able to tempt you. Start thanking God for His Love in you, instead of counting it your graciousness towards your wife that you're not with someone else. It's condescending to her and you're demeaning yourself in the process. Believe me, it is Satan that says it's our choice.

Same with God, if I kept my love of God to the emotional feelings then I would have been a Christian for 3.5 seconds before I gave that up, as the world with sin is so much more fun.

If you will only but see that it is God that keeps you from being without goodness and makes you whole, not like a robot but as a vessel of spirit, you will not consider there is a choice. You will pray He not leave you.

You See once we make the choice to love, the feelings follow and gain strength. However I also know that you can choose to no longer love. I have seen it many times in marriages and relationships and with people with God. They fall out of Love with God, with there spouse or other someone. So if you can fall out of love with God then is that a choice as well? Again Love is important, as we see in 1:cor 13 but It is something we must choose.

You are comparing romance with Godly Love, they of course are not the same. One is hormonal, the other spiritual. You say sin is so much more fun, an illusion, a deception. Like a new toy, such things lose their luster. How do you fall out of Love with God? Look at Job. If anyone had reason to denounce God, certainly he did, but yet he said what was undeniable according to the proper esteem of God. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away. Naked I came into this world and naked I shall leave. This whole world is geared to deceive men into giving up on Love and following our flesh. You must not view this as a choice but as Satan trying to get you to trade in your gold for a shined up piece of dung.

[childeye]

I belive that Love is a choice. Love with out a choice cannot exist.

I believe that the reason there was a tree of the knowledge of good and evil was to provide a choice on weather to obey or disobey. Having a choice also includes give us the choice to choose God, to choose to love him.

If I made a robot, and programmed it to love me, would it really be love?

I'm glad for this thread. Is Love a choice? God is Love, scripture says, to abide in Him is to abide in Love. Can I deny Him? Certainly there are those who claim they can and consider it their prerogative. I however, after seeing the Love of God endure the cross cannot. I would be a liar to say I can. Tell me, where is this choice? To whom shall I give my love, that is more worthy than my maker? I am not saying God programmed us to love Him. I am saying He has designed it so that the children of God are born out of corruption, out of darkness, so that we may grow unto Him forever. I know Love. I cannot today choose to love my wife and tommorrow choose not to. If this makes me a robot, so be it. Even Isaiah counted us as things, saying, "shall the thing made say why have you made me thus?" This is why I esteem God as creator and myself as creation. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is a whole other subject, I would be glad to discuss it somewhere else lest I write too long a post om this thread. I however would love to see how you can disagree with what I've said concerning Love. For those who say God cannot force someone to love Him who created us , might as well say he chooses to love his Mother or Father. In essence they are in fact incapable of Love. To say Love does not exist without choice is like saying God will not exist if you cease to believe in Him.

So your saying that the only obvious choice is love. There for being the only obvious choice its the only choice but yet we can choose not to choose the only choice?...

??? you contradict yourself.

Also many people choose not to love there spouse the "fall out of love" as if love is something that is beyond there power.

I have had times in my marriage where I did not like my wife, but yet I chose to love her, to push through the hard times.

You make no sense. you play word games but they wind up going in circles.

It is clear you are lost in semantics. Being alive we must make choices, this does not mean the choices we make are of a "freewill". Ignorance precedes ignorant choices, wisdom precedes wise choices. I do not contradict myself. I am not saying we won't choose as you imply I do. I'm saying the will is governed by reasoning, and reasoning is governed by what you believe to be true. The Holy Spirit of Truth therefore is a force over reasoning revealing how things are and giving light to those who would otherwise be in darkness. The Holy Spirit is of God and not conjured by our wills. The love you speak of falling out of, is not true love. True Love is eternal.

You are still playing the semantics game. The beauty of claiming semantics is this. You can make words mean what ever you want to, and twist the truth to what you think it should be.

How many times have I seen otherwise, wise people, make foolish choices? How many times have I seen smart people do drugs, because they can find a reason for it? They make the wrong choice because they choose to find a pure and logical reason. One person I know, who was and is a wise man, choose to do cocaine, as an alternative to coffee. He did not see it as any more dangerous then caffeine. He wound up in jail for a large part of his little boys life. He knew it was not a wise choice but he convinced himself otherwise.

You can see the wise choice clearly and choose not to. Your logic does not hold up

Say when you see the truth you MUST choose it. This is a fallacy of logic.

Semantics exist because there are two directions relative to God in the moral sense. Hence all semantics are binary. There is away from God or towards God. Going towards God is toi be headed into the light, guided by Truth. Away from God and you are headed towards darkness and guided by lies. He who is guided by lies believes he is following Truth but is in fact lost. Therefore to one who is headed away from God, he believes what he is following is good even though it is bad. He believes he will find success when in fact it is failure. He believes he is free when in fact he is a slave. Hence semantics exist though the terms are only correct if one sees the Truth and is headed towards the light. There also exists the subjective and objective points of view so that the contexts of the terms change accordingly. While there ever exists a choice in the context that there are different directions, yet there remains only one True direction. Truth and lies existed prior to man's existence and the event of choosing between them is only inevitable for the one who is lost. For he who knows the Truth is not lost. Note Sauls about face into Paul. Pure evidence of the power of God to turn a man around. He first willed with complete conviction he was doing right before God, and stoned Stephen. After gaining sight however, he was willing with all conviction he was doing right before God, to preach the gospel he had stoned Stephen for preaching. The carnal mind is enmity against God and cannot be subject to God.

Saul thought he was wise and loved God, but Paul gave glory to God for his wisdom and to the Holy Spirit for his Godly Love, as well he should. So shall I. Therefore I preach that men cannot choose to Love God unless they know God. It is the revelation of Him that brings men to their knees. They cannot choose not to Love Him after knowing Him or in reality they never Loved Him in the first place, nor did they know Him. Love does not work this way, for Love is forever faithful and trustworthy. While it remains a possibility that there is some stubborn pride that would refuse to Love God or deny love, it must exist only as an evidence of what the absence of God produces, a spiritual depravity that forms an abomination of vile affections. For me, I cannot consider this a viable option. There are semantics here, but I'd rather be free from Satan and a slave to God, than a slave to Satan and free from God. Oh but is it my choice? For God is like a billionaire and everyone says they love Him, but perhaps they love His money. How can doubt be erased? By sacrificing your flesh for the cause of Love, only then do you Love Him. And to do this you must first believe. It is faith, not freewill that decides ones course, and the scripture says He has chosen the lowly things rich in faith to put to naught the High things. God's reason is to not allow a man to boast saying, "I chose it of my own freewill". Ask Saul and ask Paul, he knows.

That is not in the scriptures at all.

Ephesians 2:8-9

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, 9 not of works, lest anyone should boast.

It is not by works, the Bible speaks of, not of freewill.

matter of fact the only time it mentions the word freewill are in sacrifices which were given up from our own free will.

Which to do a free will offering one must have free will to begin with.

The word you are using as freewill is in fact voluntary. You err in your interpretation therefore that the will is free, as free from desire of the flesh, or free from God, free from lies, free from Truth, etc... Therefore we have a will, but it is subject to something always. If there is no light in the vessel, there is darkness.

[childeye]

I believe in our spirit we have God's kind of Love. We have the ability to to love just as Jesus did, but it takes God's help thru prayer and the Word, to transform our natural minds. Love isn't automatic and there are different levels love. Someone who has never known love would love differently than someone who has been loved. Loving your neighbor is a CHOICE especially the ones at work. When I'm offended here, or at work, at the store, anywhere, it is my choice to react in love or sin. This is something that has to be learned by transforming the mind. Praise God for His loving kindness!

Please excuse my forwardness, but I've been here all day, debating this. God was there before us and it is His Spirit in us that feels compassion. To choose to disobey God is to deny compassion or to be ruled in our pride by falsehood and selfishness. Just because you decide to be selfish does not mean you are free in your will. Just because a man can step on a bug does not mean he has the power of life or death. Thank you and good night I'm going to bed.