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The French call it l’esprit d’escalier—which means something like ‘the wit of the staircase’. It’s that clever thing you wished you’d said but only thought of after the conversation was over. 

After last week’s post on faith, I had two of these moments—one I thought of myself and one pointed out by a friend. After a comment from a friend, I really wished I’d made more of the fact that ‘faith in a word of promise’ is the character of the Christian life because it is the character of the God we relate to. He is the covenant-making, promising, speaking God, and so the primary way we relate to him is by accepting and trusting his word. I kind of implied this at various points in last week’s post, but never actually came out and said it (which leaves me shaking my head on the staircase).

Making the connection between God as a speaker and our response of faith is important because it helps us discern false versions of how the Christian life unfolds. It helps us see, for example, that Christian experience is not mystical (where we feel our way towards a wordless force or power); nor is the Christian life lived by sight (neither in the need to see miraculous signs, nor in representing God visually); nor is it a prosperity cult (where God is a capricious non-communicative power that you have to please in order to be blessed). 

The God of the Bible is personal and verbal, and that’s why the primary way we relate to him is by trusting what he says. 

And by talking to him. 

That’s the second thing I wish I’d included in last week’s post—and thought of almost immediately after I pressed ‘Publish Now’. Possibly the most important implication of ‘faith’ as the foundational virtue of the Christian life is prayer. Prayer is faith put into words. It’s our trust in God verbalized in the midst of life—as we call on him, make our requests to him, cast our cares on him, and generally express the fact that we depend upon him for everything. And so faith is strengthened as we hear the word of God and as we exercise our faith in prayer. 

(I’m hoping to turn these posts into a little book about the Christian life in due course, and so these staircase thoughts won’t be completely wasted.) 

But enough apologies about last week. Time to think about the second virtue of the three—love. And because love is more complicated than it first appears, it’s going to take two Payneful Truths to cover it even moderately well. Here’s part 1.

The two loves

I’m lovin’ it. Love your work. Love what you’ve done to your hair. I love my wife. I love golf and lazy Saturday mornings. What’s love, but a second-hand emotion? 

If ‘faith’ is a saggy, middle-aged word that has put on too much weight around the middle,  what are we going to say about ‘love’? It’s so bloated with meanings, associations and cliched usages, we hardly recognise it any more.  

Perhaps this is why we don’t talk as much these days about ‘love’ as the summary and capstone of Christian living—even though the Bible does repeatedly. Maybe it just feels too vague and soppy, like a soft-focus picture of puppies on a 1 Corinthians 13 poster. 

In fact, even if we do want to be biblical and talk more about love, 1 Corinthians 13 illustrates our problem. Just what is ‘love’ in this passage? 

We’re given lots of adjectives—that love is patient and kind, and not arrogant or rude or resentful. We’re told what love does (rejoices with the truth, bears all things, and so on) and what it doesn’t do (boast or insist on its own way). 

But what sort of thing is love itself? 

We’re fond of saying that love is an action, not a feeling—and given the general romanticisation of love in our culture, that’s a fair enough corrective. But love is not really reduc