How Studying Doctrine Is an Act of Love

Question 20.

How is studying doctrine an act of love? Many people assume the opposite, that studying doctrine is a cold and bookish thing, the hobby of people who would rather be right than be kind. I want to overturn that assumption completely, because I am persuaded that studying doctrine is one of the most loving things a Christian can do, both toward God and toward other people. Far from being the enemy of love, careful study of the truth is one of love’s truest expressions. Let me show you why from Scripture, and let me name the false choice that has done so much damage.

The short answer runs along two lines. Studying doctrine is love for God, because we love a person by wanting to know them truly. And studying doctrine is love for our neighbour, because the truth we learn is the very thing our neighbour most needs from us. Pull those two threads and the whole tapestry holds together.

Studying doctrine is loving God with your mind

When a lawyer asked Jesus for the greatest commandment, He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). Notice that the mind is named alongside the heart and the soul. We are commanded to love God with our minds, not only with our feelings. And how do you love someone with your mind, if not by giving yourself to know them as they truly are? Studying doctrine is simply the obedient form that loving God with the mind takes.

Think about how love works between people. When you love someone, you want to know them, the real them, not a flattering sketch you have made up. A husband who could not be bothered to learn anything about his wife, who preferred his own comfortable image of her to the woman herself, would not be loving her well. He would be loving a figment. It is the same with God. To say we love Him while refusing to learn who He has revealed Himself to be is to love an idol of our own making. Studying doctrine is how we make sure the God we love is the God who actually is.

This is why I cannot accept the idea that doctrine and devotion are rivals. The deeper I study who God is, the more there is to adore. Every true doctrine is a fresh window onto His character. Studying doctrine has never cooled my love for God; it has fuelled it, because you cannot worship what you do not know, and the more clearly you see Him, the more your heart is moved. Cold study is a danger, yes, but the cure is not less knowledge. It is knowledge pursued on its knees.

Love rejoices in the truth

Paul’s great chapter on love makes a statement that we often rush past. Love “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth” (1 Corinthians 13:6). Love and truth are bound together at the deepest level. Real love delights in what is true and grieves over what is false. So a love that is indifferent to truth, that shrugs and says it does not matter what you believe as long as you are sincere, is not the love the Bible commends. It is a sentimental counterfeit. Studying doctrine is how love does its rejoicing in the truth.

This reframes the whole enterprise. When I sit down with my Bible to understand the atonement, or the person of the Spirit, or the return of the Lord, I am not retreating from love into abstraction. I am exercising love by rejoicing in the truth God has revealed. The pursuit of sound doctrine is love at work, refusing to be content with error because it cares too much about what is real.

And this guards us from a trap on the other side. Some pursue doctrine in a way that puffs up rather than builds up, and Paul warns about that too when he says knowledge puffs up while love builds up. But the answer to puffed-up knowledge is not ignorance. It is knowledge held in love, studying doctrine with a heart that wants God to be glorified and people to be helped rather than a heart that wants to win. The problem with the proud theologian is not that he studied too much. It is that he loved too little while he did it.

Studying doctrine is loving your neighbour

Now turn outward. Paul tells the Ephesians that the goal of growing up into Christ involves “speaking the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). You cannot speak truth you have never learned. The mother who teaches her child the gospel, the friend who answers a hard question about suffering, the believer who gently corrects a brother drifting into error, all of them are loving their neighbour with truth they once had to study. Studying doctrine is how you stock the storehouse from which you will one day feed someone who is hungry or hurting.

Consider how this works at a deathbed, where I have stood many times. The person who has studied what the Bible says about death, resurrection, and the presence of the Lord has something solid and true to give to a dying friend. The person who never bothered has only platitudes. In that moment, studying doctrine reveals itself for what it always was, an act of love that prepared you to comfort with truth when comfort was most needed. Sound doctrine is not a luxury for the dying. It is their lifeline, and someone has to have learned it in order to hand it over.

This is also why Paul charges Timothy to “keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching,” promising that by doing so he will save both himself and his hearers (1 Timothy 4:16). Watching your doctrine is presented as a way of loving the people who listen to you. False teaching wounds people. True teaching heals them. To study so that you teach truly is to love those you teach, and to neglect study while teaching is to put them at risk.

The false choice between truth and love

The great lie I keep running into is that we must choose between being loving and being doctrinally careful, as if every degree of conviction cost us a degree of warmth. The Bible refuses that trade. It binds truth and love together so tightly that you cannot have the genuine article of either without the other. A love without truth is flattery. A truth without love is a weapon. The mature Christian holds them together, and studying doctrine in a spirit of love is how that union is forged.

I will grant the critics their best point. There are people who use doctrine as a club, who study in order to dominate, who care more about winning the argument than winning the person. That is real, and it is ugly. But the existence of loveless theologians no more discredits the study of doctrine than the existence of bad doctors discredits medicine. The answer is to study harder and love better, not to study less. I have written about this connection from another angle in my answer on why right belief leads to right behaviour, and on the basic question of what doctrine is and why it matters.

Studying doctrine protects the people you love

There is a guarding side to love that we do not talk about enough. Part of loving people is protecting them from harm, and one of the great harms in the spiritual world is false teaching. A shepherd who loves his sheep watches for wolves. He does not do this because he enjoys conflict but because he loves the flock too much to let them be devoured. Studying doctrine is how a Christian learns to recognise the wolf at all. The believer who has never bothered to learn the truth cannot spot the lie, and the people in their care are left exposed.

Think of a parent. A mother who loves her child learns what is dangerous so she can keep the child safe. In the same way, the Christian who loves their family, their friends, their church, takes the trouble to learn sound doctrine so they can guard those they love from error. I have seen households shipwrecked because no one in them had done the work of studying doctrine well enough to see the false teaching for what it was. Love that refuses to learn is love with its eyes closed, and closed eyes are no protection at all.

This is why I press believers, gently but firmly, to keep studying. It is not so they can win debates or feel superior. It is so they are equipped to protect and to feed the people God has placed around them. Studying doctrine is one of the quiet, unglamorous ways that love does its work in the world, long before anyone is in crisis, so that when the crisis comes there is something solid to give. The labour you put in now is love stored up for someone’s hardest day.

When study grows cold, the answer is not less study

I want to be honest about the danger, because it is real and I have felt it. Study can grow cold. You can pile up knowledge while your heart shrinks, and end up the kind of person who knows much and loves little. The Bible warns about this directly, and I would be foolish to pretend it never happens. But notice what the remedy is and what it is not. The remedy for cold study is never to stop studying doctrine. It is to study on your knees, with worship as the goal and love as the motive.

When I feel my study going dry, I do not close my Bible and reach for sentiment. I slow down and turn what I am learning into prayer and praise. I ask God to let the truth move from my head to my heart, and to keep me from the pride that turns knowledge into a weapon. Studying doctrine in that spirit becomes an act of communion rather than a dry exercise of the intellect. The same study that can puff up can also, when offered to God, become the fuel of the deepest worship a soul can know.

So do not let anyone use the danger of cold orthodoxy as an excuse for warm ignorance. Both are deadly. The path of love is not to choose between a full head and a full heart, but to bring the two together, letting every truth you learn drive you toward God and toward your neighbour. Studying doctrine, done in love and on your knees, is one of the surest roads into a heart that burns for God rather than one that has only been filled with facts about Him.

Studying doctrine and the love that lasts

There is one more dimension to this that I do not want to miss, and it is the way studying doctrine sustains love over the long haul. Feelings rise and fall. The warm glow of a Sunday service fades by Tuesday. What carries a believer through the cold seasons, when love feels more like duty than delight, is the solid ground of what they know to be true about God. Studying doctrine lays that ground. It gives love something to stand on when the emotions have gone quiet, so that we keep loving and serving even when we do not feel like it.

I have watched this in marriages and I have watched it in the walk of faith. The love that lasts is not the love that depends on a constant supply of good feelings. It is the love rooted in settled commitment and deep knowledge. So it is with our love for God. The believer who has taken the trouble of studying doctrine has a love with roots, a love that can survive a dry spell because it rests on what is true rather than on how the morning happens to feel. That is no small gift to give yourself and the people who depend on you.

And here is the lovely circularity of it. Studying doctrine deepens love, and love in turn drives us back to study, because we want to know the One we love still better. The two feed each other in a rising spiral. Far from being the dry alternative to devotion, studying doctrine becomes one of the engines of a love that grows warmer and steadier with every passing year. That is why I will keep commending it to ordinary believers as long as I have breath to do so.

None of this requires you to become a scholar. It requires only that you bring your love to your learning and your learning to your love, refusing to let either one wither. Open the Book, ask God to teach you, and let what you find drive you to your knees and out to your neighbour. That, in the end, is what studying doctrine is for.

I think often of the believers in my own congregation who have grown most in love, and almost without exception they are the ones who took the trouble to know their God. Their tenderness was not the soft sentiment that evaporates under pressure. It was a sturdy, well-instructed affection that had been fed for years on the truth. Their example settles the matter for me. The most loving people I know are not the least informed. They are the ones who let their knowledge of God catch fire and warm everyone around them.

So, now what?

Let go of the idea that you have to choose between a soft heart and a furnished mind. God asks for both, and He has bound them together. The next time you open your Bible to understand something difficult, do it as an act of love, love for the God you are coming to know more truly, and love for the people you will one day feed with what you have learned. Pray before you study, and let the knowledge run downhill into worship and service.

So who in your life is going to need, one day soon, a truth that you can only give them if you take the trouble to learn it now?

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

Matthew 22:37 (ESV)

For Further Study

For those wanting to think further about the marriage of head and heart, the systematic theologies of Charles Ryrie and Millard Erickson model a devotion that grows out of careful study. Lewis Sperry Chafer wrote of theology as a means of worship rather than a substitute for it, and J. Dwight Pentecost’s pastoral works show how sound teaching serves the people of God in their living and their dying. Read them prayerfully, and let study become adoration.