Agape Love
Agape. If you’ve spent much time in Christian circles, you’ve heard this word in a sermon or two, I’m sure. If you haven’t, that’s fine too – previous exposure won’t help much here anyways. Agape is one of the Greek words for love. It’s the highest form of love, an unselfish love, a giving without any expectation of return.
Likely the most widely known Bible verse in the world, John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life.” This love is agape love. God loves because He loves. Friend, there is nothing you can do to make Him love you any more or any less.
If you’re anything like me, this is incredibly challenging to comprehend even on an imaginative scale, let alone a love that’s truly real. How can there be a love that’s completely free of strings or expectations?
I have to confess – this isn’t how I love. I am much more selfish than I’d ever fully care to admit. That selfishness carries over to affections and relationships. Loving with a complete selflessness, boy, that’s a craft I’ve largely left untried.
One of the most important things for us to understand about God is this – He’s not like us. He is completely other. He’s outside. He’s different. The Biblical word is holy. Therefore, just because we may struggle to grasp the reality of an agape type of love, does not mean it doesn’t exist. It may mean, apart from God, we are unable to emulate it ourselves, but our deficiencies are not sticky or in any way synonymous with the character and nature of God.
See, in order for us to begin to understand what God is like, we must let go of expecting Him to look like us. Paul prays this, “(that) you may have the power to understand, as all God’s people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep His love is. May you experience the love of Christ, though it is too great to understand fully” (Ephesians 3:18-19).
There’s a level of who God is that is centered around how He loves us that we will never fully understand. It’s a love so great and so pure that it’s actually confusing and un-understandable. In large part because we just don’t love that way. It’s kind of like why I have such a hard time remembering Hawaiian words with all their vowels and apostrophes. Their words are so unlike any other words I’ve seen before. I don’t have a parallel to another experience to help me learn them.
God’s love is like this. It’s so different from our personal experiences. Here’s the challenge: just because it’s different and we fail to love this way, does not mean it’s not real or how God truly does love.
“We love because God first loved us” (1 John 4:19). God’s audacious love for you actually has the power to teach you to love more like Him. And the way God set it up was not for us to take a class, or go through drills. No, it was for us to experience His agape love first – for ourselves – and then our hearts can begin to love God back a little more like that. To love others a little more like that. And to love ourselves a little more like that.
As Paul says, we ought all to experience the greatness of God’s love, and regardless of whether you’re on decade five or minute five of your walk with God – full understanding of His love won’t happen here on earth. I want to challenge you today to ask for an experience of His love. “Lord, I ask for eyes to see how You love me, today. In Jesus’ Name.” Allow yourself to experience and to learn the true nature of agape love.
