What is True Love?

True Love, God's essence and the origin of creation, is absolute, unique, eternal, and unchanging. The human Fall led to selfish love and a loss of humanity's original capacity for True Love. Restoration involves a path of indemnity to overcome fallen nature—envy, pride, domination, and multiplying evil—by loving others from God's perspective, respecting central figures, cooperating, and multiplying goodness. This process re-establishes God's ideal of selfless giving for the sake of others.

Understanding True Love is paramount, as it reveals God's nature and humanity's purpose. While the Bible introduces divine love, Divine Principle offers a profound framework, clarifying its essence, attributes, and application for establishing an ideal world.

The Biblical Foundation of Love

The Bible declares, "God is love" (1 John 4:8), making love His very essence, exemplified by agape—selfless, unconditional, and sacrificial. Jesus Christ's life and sacrifice are its ultimate embodiment: "Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13). Jesus commanded, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37-39).

The Apostle Paul further describes agape: "Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:4-7). While the Bible powerfully conveys God's love and its ethical imperatives, it primarily focuses on its manifestation in human conduct and divine acts. It establishes God as the source of love. The human Fall means humanity lost its ability to love with God's original love, creating the need for a path of restoration (Genesis 3).

Divine Principle's Clarification of True Love

The Divine Principle systematically clarifies True Love as God's fundamental attribute and the origin of all existence. God, as an absolute being, created the universe out of His overflowing True Love to experience joy through giving and receiving with His children. This love is characterized by giving for the sake of others, where the giver finds more joy in giving than the receiver in receiving, creating a perpetual cycle. This establishes the Four Position Foundation: God, subject partner, object partner, and the union created by their love.

True Love is defined as absolute, unique, eternal, and unchanging. It is an intrinsic property of God's nature, the ultimate motivator, and the foundation for the ideal world, where humanity cares for all creation with love (Genesis 1:28). The human Fall introduced selfish love, centered on taking, perverting human nature and leading to suffering—a stark contrast to God's original ideal. Adam and Eve lost faith in God's Word and their ability to love with God's original love, meaning they lost both faith and substance. The path to restoration requires establishing conditions of faith and substance, taking them away from Satan and centering them on God. This restoration of relationships with God and each other, through true sacrificial love, allows for forgiveness and resurrection.

Restoring True Love

The restoration process is fundamentally about regaining True Love and establishing ideal relationships centered on God's heart. This involves separating from selfish love and establishing conditions of indemnity to overcome fallen nature, which includes envy, jealousy, hatred, pride, the inclination to dominate, and the tendency to multiply evil. To restore True Love, we must take a path opposite to what led to the Fall.

From the perspective of a person in the Archangel's position (like us in relation to central figures), this means: 1. Loving people from God's point of view: Overcoming envy and jealousy by loving the central person as God loves them. 2. Respecting and receiving God's love through them: Overcoming pride by learning from and receiving God's love through those closer to God. 3. Cooperating with them: Overcoming the desire to dominate by making a strong, positive relationship with the central person. 4. Multiplying goodness: Receiving good words through the central person and spreading good, not evil.

This process enables us to restore our original nature of goodness, sacrifice, charity, and compassion, aligning with God's purpose for creation. True Love is the force connecting all beings in harmonious give-and-take relationships, leading to a world where all people serve God as parents and consider all humanity as brothers and sisters.

Why True Love Must Begin With Giving

True love is defined by the direction it flows, and there is a reason for that rather than a preference. God created because he wanted an object of love, and in creating he gave existence, substance, and freedom to beings who had nothing to offer him first. Creation was therefore an act of pure investment, and since love has its origin in God, every genuine expression of it carries the same shape: it gives before it receives, and it gives without calculating the return. This is why love that begins with a demand is not a weaker version of love but a different thing altogether, and why Scripture defines it by what it does not do — it "seeketh not her own" (1 Corinthians 13:5) — and roots it in God's initiative: "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us" (1 John 4:10).

A second reason follows from how love multiplies. Physical goods diminish when shared, but love increases, because giving it enlarges the capacity of the one who gives. That is why the person who has loved most has the most to give, and why the promise that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35) is a statement of fact rather than of etiquette. It is also why true love cannot be extracted: the moment it is compelled, the giving stops being giving, and the thing itself vanishes.

What Follows From It

Three consequences make this practical. First, true love is measured by cost rather than by feeling, which is why its highest demonstration is to lay down one's life for others (John 15:13) and why it is possible to love someone whose company gives us no pleasure. Second, true love has an order: it matures through the family — as a child, a sibling, a spouse, and a parent — because each of those relationships teaches a kind of giving the others cannot. Someone who skips that schooling may be capable of warm feelings but not of the full range of love. Third, true love determines destiny, not merely reputation. Since the spirit world responds to what a person has become, the capacity built by a lifetime of giving is the capacity to enjoy God's presence, which is why Paul could say that without love even faith that moves mountains amounts to nothing (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Living the Principle

Embodying True Love is a transformative journey, expanding outward from self to family and world.

1. Cultivate a heart centered on "living for the sake of others" in daily interactions, striving to love others from God's perspective. 2. Practice altruism in family, where parents selflessly nurture children, spouses strive for mutual spiritual growth, and siblings unite. 3. Extend unconditional love to all, transcending cultural, racial, and national barriers, seeing God's love in others and cooperating with them. 4. Seek justice and contribute to the well-being of society through service and ethical conduct, multiplying goodness in the world.

These answers explain the Bible in the light of the Divine Principle, the teachings of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. .

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