Jerel Law is a gifted communicator, pastor, and church planter with seventeen years experience working full-time in ministry. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Gordon-Conwell Seminary and began writing fiction as a way to express his faith and communicate God’s love to others. Law lives in North Carolina with his family.

A myth exists in our world today about love, and it goes something like this: Love is pillow-soft. It’s nice, but it’s not very strong. It gets trampled; it can’t withstand pressure; it doesn’t know what to do when life gets tough. Love is more fluff than substance, more poodle than pit bull, more marshmallow than meat.

Love is an emotion, a hug from Mom, a kiss on the cheek, a heart-shaped emoticon on your phone, and, above all, is safe.

Movies and television confirm this myth—especially for kids. Love is primarily portrayed as something romantic and flirty, between a boy and a girl. Just spend an hour or two watching the Disney Channel and you’ll see a variation of the same common theme: girl likes boy and tries to get his attention; boy flirts with girl, who ignores him; boy’s heart is broken by girl . . . and so on.

There’s nothing wrong with this kind of affection, but if we hear the Bible speak of love and our minds automatically go in the Disney direction, we’ve missed the point entirely. In our world, love tends to be soft and gooey.

But in the spiritual sense, love is an undefeatable weapon. It is strong and solid and impervious to attack. Listen to a few words Jesus said about it:

But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. (Luke 6:35, NIV)

Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. (John 15:13, NIV)

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16, NIV)

According to Jesus, love is the strongest weapon we have in the spiritual battle. And there’s something else: it is God’s weapon of choice as well.

Don’t you think the Creator of the universe could defeat Satan by matching power for power, and overcome the Evil One with brute force? Don’t you think that if He amassed all of His angels and attacked Satan’s forces that He could manage a victory?

And yet, according to these verses, that is not His way. That is not His plan. He is up to something altogether different. He brought a new order, a new Way, into this world. It is absolutely not the way of force and brute strength.

It is the way of love—ultimate, sacrificial love.

Pay attention to what He calls us to: loving our enemies; doing good to them; being kind to the ungrateful and wicked.

Look at what Jesus calls the ultimate love: sacrificing yourself for your friends.

See what one thing motivated God to give everything He had—even Himself—to die: love.

When God loves, it breaks the strongholds of Satan in our world. Love overcomes all fear, all evil, all death.

When we love, it does the same. That’s why it is the ultimate secret weapon against all the evil in our world. When we choose to love in the face of fear and hate, it flips the script. It turns rules on its head. And in the process, love invites God into the mix.

Let us teach our children to love people, and not just the lovable but all those whom God places in our way. And let’s do that by growing in love ourselves. We’ll find that it’s anything but soft, and anything but weak.

God’s love in a darkened world is the most powerful weapon we have.