The Way of Agape
Agape love involves
faithfulness, commitment, and an
act of the will.
Agape love is displayed most clearly
At the Cross
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love,
I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
And if I have a prophetic powers, and understand all Mysteries
and all knowledge, and if I have all faith,
so as to remove mountains,
but have not love, I am nothing.
If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,
but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices
with the
Truth
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.
As for prophecies, they will pass away;
as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge,
it will pass away.
For we know in Part and we prophesy In Part,
but when the perfect comes, the
partial will pass away
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.
Now I know in part; then I shall know fully,
even as I have been
Fully Known
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;
but the greatest of these is love.
The Greek word Agape
is often translated “love” in the
New Testament.
How is “agape love” different from other types of love?
The essence of agape love is goodwill, benevolence, and
willful delight in the object of love.
Unlike our English word love, agape is not used in
the New Testament to refer to romantic or sexual love.
Nor does it refer to close friendship or brotherly love,
for which the Greek word philia is used.
Agape Love involves
Faithfulness, Commitment, and an
Act of the Will
It is distinguished from the other types of love by its
lofty moral nature and strong character.
Agape love is beautifully described in 1 Corinthians 13.
Outside of the New Testament, the word agape is used
in a variety of contexts, but in the vast majority of
instances in the New Testament
It Carries distinct Meaning.
Agape is almost always used to describe the love
that is of and from God, whose very nature is love itself:
The Sacrificial Cross
“God is love”
(1 John 4:8).
God does not merely love; He is love.
Everything God does flows from His love.
Agape is also used
to describe
Our love for God
(Luke 10:27),
A Servant’s faithful respect
to his master
(Matthew 6:24),
and a man’s attachment to things (John 3:19).
The type of love that characterizes God is not a sappy,
sentimental feeling such as we often hear portrayed.
God loves because that is His nature and the expression of His being.
He loves the unlovable and the unlovely,
not because we deserve to be loved
or because of any excellence we possess,
but because it is His nature to love and
He must be True to His nature.
Agape love is always shown by what it does.
God’s love is displayed
most clearly at the
Cross
“God, being Rich in Mercy, because
of the great love
with which he loved us,
even when
we were dead in our trespasses,
made us Alive together
with Christ--
by Grace you have been Saved”
(Ephesians 2:4–5, ESV).
We did not deserve such a sacrifice,
“but God demonstrates his own love
for us in this:
While we were still sinners,
Christ died for us”
(Romans 5:8)
If God Loves Sinners enough to die for them, I can at least try
God’s agape love is unmerited, gracious, and
constantly seeking the benefit of the ones He loves.
The Bible says we are the
undeserving recipients of His lavish agape love
(1 John 3:1).
God’s demonstration of agape love
led to the sacrifice
of the Son of God for those He loves.
We are to love others with agape love, whether they are fellow believers (John 13:34) or bitter enemies (Matthew 5:44).
Jesus gave the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of sacrifice for the sake of others, even for those who may care nothing at all for us.
Agape love as modeled by Christ is
not based on a feeling; rather,
it is a determined act of the will, a joyful resolve
to put the welfare of others above our own.
If we are to love as God loves, that love—that agape--
can only come from
its Source.
This is the love that
“has been poured out into our hearts
through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us”
(Romans 5:5; cf. Galatians 5:22).
“This is how we know what love is:
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
And we ought to
lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters”
(1 John 3:16).
Because of God’s love toward us, we are able to love one another.
It is often said that
love conquers all,
that love is the
greatest force in the universe.
It is the force
that
gives healing and life,
binds souls together,
and whispers to us that all will be well.
We can see
throughout the Bible that
love conquers
fear, evil, and sins.
But the power of love
comes from its source
It is not a thing in and of itself. When love becomes the force
we honor or worship, its power vaporizes.
But if we let the radiance of love beckon
us back to its source,
we find the true reason as to why
love conquers all;
Christ at the Cross
We find there is a God behind love, and that Love is
committed to conquering all that is not love
That Lover is God Himself, the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,
whose life together is always one of mutual love.
Love conquers all because God is love and
God has already won.
John makes the powerful assertion that
“we love Him because He first loved us”
(1 John 4:19)
in a section in which he is writing about how we should be expressing
the love of God to others. He says a bit earlier in the letter that,
“if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:11).
John explains that we have come to know (experientially) and believe the agape love that God has for us (1 John 4:16),
and because of that there is an expectation that we should act on that love.
If love originates with God, then the one who is walking with
God should be demonstrating love (1 John 4:17).
But what kind of love should we be expressing, and with what kind of love do “we love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19)?
His love is completed (or perfected) in us,
in that we have confidence in the day of judgment.
His love has kept us
by His grace through faith in Jesus Christ
from condemnation--
that kind of life-saving love is what
He has showed us
and is what we are expected to show each other.
That kind of love is free from fear, because there is
no punishment in our futures (1 John 4:18).
His love has given us great confidence,
because
He has removed our fear.
“We love Him because He first loved us”
(1 John 4:19).
Love made the first move;
our love for God is simply
a response
to His love for us.
We have the capacity to love, now understanding
what love really is and how we can express that
without fear because He first loved us—because
He modeled for us what love looks like.
As John said a bit earlier,
we have come to know and believe His love
(1 John 4:16),
loving our brother is not only an expectation; it is an imperative.
If we aren’t loving our brother, we aren’t loving God. John goes further, reminding his readers of Jesus’ commandment that we love our brother
(1 John 4:21). John adds to the logic of love when he asserts that
the believer in Jesus is born of God,
and anyone who loves the Father should obviously love
the child born of the Father (1 John 5:1).
John explains it from a different angle as well:
when we are loving God and observing His commandments,
we can know we are loving the brethren
(1 John 5:2).
To love God means to obey Him, especially considering that His commandments are not burdensome (1 John 5:3). John reminds us that our love should be a sincere love—like the love the Father has for us.
We should not love simply with words, but with sincerity in our deeds
(1 John 3:18).
Loving in truth and sincerity
is so important that John lists it as a logical
next step after believing in Jesus--
“This is His commandment, that we
believe in the name of his Son
Jesus Christ and love one another,
just as He has commanded us”
(1 John 3:23, ESV).
There is no fear in love, but
perfect love casts out fear
(1 John 4:18).
And we fear God because of
His greatness, worthiness, and awesomeness.
It is because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of
knowledge, wisdom, and understanding
(Proverbs 1:7; 9:10)
that we can understand what a
gift His love truly is
To be loved by One so incredible and great
means that
His love is stronger than
anything we can imagine
If God is for us, then who can be against us (Romans 8:31)?
There is a massive war being fought between
the kingdom of God and the kingdom of this world.
The history of the human race and of each individual is
marked by the struggle between these two sides.
On one side, we have the Holy Trinity,
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
On the other, we have the Unholy Trinity, the world
with its structures opposed to God, the sin that corrupts us,
called the flesh, and Satan himself.
This Unholy Trinity seeks to dominate by hatred, deception, manipulation, and power struggles.
But God doesn’t fight with any of those weapons.
The weapon He has chosen
is revealed
through
His Word to us
The Father gave His only Son and then the
gift of His Holy Spirit, all out of sacrificial love.
This tactic may appear foolish and weak in the
face of such a titanic war.
But we underestimate the
power of love to conquer.
We underestimate
God and His wisdom.
In all these things we are more than conquerors
through him who loved us. – Romans 8:37
Paul has just mentioned all the hardships a believer may face.
Yet none of these in the end
keep us from experiencing God’s love.
In fact, through His conquering love for us,
we become super-conquerors over those hardships and are able
to personally know, express and extend his
love and grace for us more sincerely
Love bears all things, believes all things,
hopes all things, endures all things. –
1 Corinthians 13:7
Paul is delivering a tribute to the
supremacy of love
when he makes this amazing statement.
Love bears and endures whatever wrongs or irritations come.
It also
believes and hopes the best for
others, seeing with the
eyes of faith all that they could be.
In this sense,
love truly conquers.
In the world
you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome
the world.– John 16:33
Jesus is teaching His disciples for the last time before His death. The last words of that teaching are: “I have overcome the world.” And how does
He overcome it? By submitting Himself to the horror of the cross. He does all this because He loves us.
His love
Conquers the World
But let’s get a little more practical. How exactly does love conquer all?
We all have those habits of behavior and thinking that seem resistant to change. You can call it a character defect, or a thorn in the flesh
(to use Paul’s term).
Whatever you call it, the result is the same.
We feel stuck
We are in bondage
Enter God’s love
To open our hearts and receive
His love
precisely at the place
we feel stuck is to
open the door out of this prison.
Once you have tasted God’s love, there is a desire to offer that love to others. It starts by
choosing to forgive those who have wounded us.
This is The Way of Christ
But it is also
The Way our
hearts become freed
from bitterness.
Then we make that love tangible by listening.
In the
listening, enmity is healed.
Then we can be Doers.
Here is a final way love conquers all.
Our default mode as humans is to find fault with others.
We all carry on this critical tendency to one degree or another.
This is the genesis of all prejudices,
where the things
that make someone unique
become the subject of criticism.
But the way of love
is so different.
Instead of finding fault,
love believes the best in others
and seeks to build them up.
our focus is on their gifts and strengths and on
All the Good that
God
can accomplish in
YOUR Life:)
This is perhaps what Paul meant when he said that
love believes all things
and
hopes all things
In the end, love can conquer
our critical spirit
First John 4:18 says that
Perfect
love Casts out Fear
“
Those who Are in Christ know the love of God,
which drives away fear of condemnation.
The dismissal of the fear of judgment is one of the
main functions of God’s love.
once a person is in Christ, the fear of judgment is gone.
He is reconciled to God, and
“there is now no condemnation
for
those who are in Christ Jesus”
(Romans 8:1).
Part of understanding the love of God
is knowing that God’s judgment
fell on Jesus at
the cross so that we can be spared:
“The Lord has laid on him
the
iniquity of us all”
(Isaiah 53:6). Jesus’ sacrifice propitiated (appeased)
God’s justice and won His good favor (1 John 2:2, ESV).
Jesus spoke often of His mission:
“God did not send his Son into the world
To condemn the world,
But to SAVE the world THROUGH HIM”
(John 3:17).
And why I AM so passionate about sharing the
True Gospel,
and continuing to fully study and seek his word, so that others can fully know him more and more personally, and in true sincerity in the
full knowledge of revelation of Christ, his revealed
Glory to Glory
it why he sacrificed and suffered for me, he has delivered me through sufferings and each time my understanding and appreciate for who God is Grows, the weaker we are, the greater his power works in us, the more we can use his strength through us, because we experience it through him and recognize his persistent faithfulness and it amazes me how much our relationship with him grow each time he delivers us through suffering
That is what he Seeks
That is his Glory
He is the Savior
in exceeding strength and assurance, and it is what he asks of me in return for-all he has done for me
nothing can separate the believer
from the love of God in Christ
(Romans 8:38–39).
God’s love does not wax and wane;
it is not a fickle, emotional sensation.
God’s love for sinners
is why Christ died on the cross.
God’s love for those who trust in Christ is why
He holds them in
His hand
and promises never to let them go
(John 10:29).
That divine love should take away our fear:
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased
to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32).
God tells us not to be afraid of being alone, of being too weak, of not being heard in our prayers, or of being destitute of physical necessities.
The key to overcoming fear is total and complete trust in God.
Trusting God is how
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
faced the fiery furnace without fear
(Daniel 3)
Trusting God is how Stephen stood before his killers fearlessly (Acts 7)
To trust God is to refuse to give in to fear
Even in the darkest times,
we can trust in God to make things
Right
This trust comes from knowing God and knowing that
He is Good
Once we have learned to put our trust in God,
we will no longer be afraid of the things that come against us.
We will be like the psalmist who said with confidence,
“Let all who take refuge in you be glad; let them
ever sing for joy. Spread your protection over them,
that those who
Love your Name may Rejoice in You”
(Psalm 5:11).
In summary, the word perfect in 1 John 4:18 means
Complete
The Love that is referred to is God’s Selfless Agape Love
We can say with the psalmist,
“In God I Fully Trust and am not afraid”
(Psalm 56:11).
God Never Fails
A Prayer to Experience the Conquering Power of Love
Available to any of us because it’s the free
Gift of God.
He wants to use You for His Glory, you can Trust that he Will,
He is Always Good on his Word
and rewards those who faithfully
Seek and Follow
Jesus said unto him,
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second is like unto it,
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. [40]
On these two commandments
hang all
The Law and the Prophets.
Lets Pray,
Father, I long to know more of your personal love for me.
You don’t just love generic humanity.
You love me individually with all of my faults and sins.
Help me to open my heart to receive the love you have for me
through your Son.
Let that love conquer my heart. And then teach me the way of love
toward all those around me.
I want to see Your kingdom expand and watch Your love conquer.
Come do more than I could ever ask or imagine because of the
Power of Your Holy Spirit.
Amen.