AGAPE LOVE

It all begins, I suppose, with “God is love”, the vantage point from which we see God’s heart. Now this is not to say God is an emotion or virtue, the Greek is very clear on that point. God is, as to his nature, loving. This love is not the natural human kind of affection for someone, with varying degrees of tenderness and passion. God’s love is unnatural to the human mind, beyond the capacity of the unaided human heart to know or experience. It will take all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength just to express God’s love back to Him, and it will surpass one’s love for oneself when expressing this love toward others. The Apostle Paul wrote eloquently about this never failing eternal love in 1 Corinthians 13, the same love our Father expressed toward the world in the “giving” of His only begotten Son, the same love our Savior demonstrated at Golgotha.

From the human perspective God’s love is indescribable with the human tongue, although we attempt to none the less, and scandalous to the natural mind which can neither comprehend nor duplicate it. The Holy Spirit of God moved upon the writers of the New Testament to use the Greek agape/agapao to carry the translation of God’s loving nature to mankind, a word belonging exclusively to the family of God being virtually unknown to writers outside of the New Testament. Agape is a deep word describing a love that is passionate, sacrificial, and unconditional, unconquerable in its disposition to do good, and undefeatable in its kindness, loving by choice... an act of the will. To fulfill one’s joy in the object loved, loving for loves sake without recompense or expectation, is to love as God loves. Agape love is a perfect love... an everlasting love... a relentless love... an unquenchable, insatiable, immeasurable, inexhaustible, irrepressible, irrational, unshakeable, inescapable, unmovable, constantly constant unchanging love. This is what it means to say “God is love.” This is how we are loved by God... indescribable!

And with this understanding of the God kind of love comes the rub: Jesus... God the Son, commands that we love God and other people with this very same agape love. Agape love is not a gift of the Spirit or a ministry gifting for the select few. The command to love given in our Lord’s first and second “Great Commandments” is given to all who follow Him. And one does not get agape love through some divine osmosis resulting from salvation. The dilemma we face is one of opposing natures; the lower carnal nature we were born with is in opposition to the higher spiritual nature of the Godhead. Both natures carry the same virtues, love, joy, peace... and so on, but the reality to which each duplicate virtue is attached in each nature is as different as Jesus is from man, as earth-life is from Eternal-Life. Beyond sharing a name the virtues of the higher spiritual nature of the Godhead bear no resemblance to the virtues of our lower carnal nature. It is a great error to assume the human virtue of love resembles or approaches the agape love of the Godhead... a great error! Our Savior’s love commandments can only be satisfied with agape love produced by the heart of God. The love produced by the carnal heart of man falls far short and simply won’t do. To produce Agape love we need the DNA of God’s nature transplanted in our heart. We need transformation.

God became man for no other purpose then to draw men into Christ... into Himself, to make them little Christ’s; the whole universe was created for this very purpose. Jesus commanded: “Therefore you shall be perfect, just as your Father in heaven is perfect.” It is our conformance into the likeness of Christ... our transformation, which is at issue in this command, our spiritual maturation. The “Consuming Fire”, the Love that made the worlds, will never rest... or let us rest, until we are literally perfect, the perfect reflection of our perfect Daddy. God’s purpose is not to torment our natural Self but to kill it. No half measures will do, the whole of Self must die to make way for the spiritual nature of Christ to flourish in us. This is the whole enchilada, the whole of Christianity, the foundation on which Kingdom life is built. It is easy to muddy this up with religious works and doubtful disputations of doctrine, while missing the singular focus of the Godhead: We are to be re-born, re-made, conformed, transformed, renewed, sanctified, crucified, resurrected... in a word, changed. Our lower carnal nature must be swallowed up with the spiritual nature of the Godhead. This metamorphosis is a spiritual process paced by our willingness. As we “will to do His will”, the Holy Spirit is unleashed to work in us, “willing and doing of His good pleasure.” Jesus would explain it this way: “I will give you a new Self instead; in fact, I will give you My-Self. My own will shall become yours.” (C.S. Lewis) And with His will comes His heart... the Father’s heart, His nature... His DNA, and His resurrected life.

The grace to love as God loves comes only through transformation... comes only from beholding His love... soaking in His love... submitting to His Lordship... dying daily to Self and Self’s interests... renewing our mind... setting our minds on things above, all willful, purposeful acts. But our carnal nature... Self, will not die easily: Our desires for the world and this life are strong, our will is weak, and the dying process will at times be painful. God has established the way back to Himself: “Narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life.” We must “strive to enter”; the whole journey will be as difficult as the first step, “For we have become partakers of Christ.” God’s grace compels us with difficulties to compel us to Him: God never wastes adversity, but uses it as divine opportunities to work good out of the bad of life, while changing us in the process. Transformation is a piece meal process; every piece of Self offered as a living sacrifice on the Cross of Christ releases a piece of Christ’s nature within. And with the release of the nature of the Godhead comes agape love poured out lavishly in our heart by the Holy Spirit, poured out that it might pour forth as a river of living love to God and to others. This delights our Daddy who is easy to please but hard to satisfy: “You shall be perfect”... it’s a process.                                                                                         

FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST COMPELS US