Daily Service – Agape (Unconditional Love)

Updated for Volume 11

Another conversation with my daughter who is helping a friend through a crisis in her relationship.  I believe she needs to get back to Jesus first before looking for a lifetime commitment with a spouse.  I copied this from a web search. The basis of this thought is that you must accept the unconditional love of God before you can have successful relationships with others because you are going to need this Agape love relationship with God in order to have successful relationships with your fellow man (including a whole lot of Agape love for your spouse).

What is Agape love?

This Greek word, agápē, and variations of it are frequently found throughout the New Testament. Agape perfectly describes the kind of love Jesus Christ has for his Father and for his followers.

Agape is the term that defines God’s immeasurable, incomparable love for humankind. It is his ongoing, outgoing, self-sacrificing concern for lost and fallen people. God gives this love without condition, unreservedly to those who are undeserving and inferior to himself. 

“Agape love,” says Anders Nygren, “Is unmotivated in the sense that it is not contingent on any value or worth in the object of love. It is spontaneous and heedless, for it does not determine beforehand whether love will be effective or appropriate in any particular case.”

A simple way to summarize agape is God’s divine love.

Agape Love in the Bible

One important aspect of agape love is that it extends beyond emotions. It’s much more than a feeling or sentiment. Agape love is active. It demonstrates love through actions.

This well-known Bible verse is the perfect example of agape love expressed through actions. The all-encompassing love of God for the entire human race caused him to send his son, Jesus Christ, to die and, thus, save every person who would believe in him:

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

Another meaning of agape in the Bible was “love feast,” a common meal in the early church expressing Christian brotherhood and fellowship:

These are hidden reefs at your love feasts, as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves; waterless clouds, swept along by winds; fruitless trees in late autumn, twice dead, uprooted; (Jude 12, ESV)

Jesus told his followers to love one another in the same way sacrificial way he loved them. This command was new because it demanded a new kind of love, a love like his own: agape love. What would be the outcome of this kind of love? People would be able to recognize them as Jesus’ disciples because of their mutual love:

A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:34-35, ESV)

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for the brothers. (1 John 3:16, ESV)

Jesus and the Father are so “at one” that according to Jesus, whoever who loves him will be loved by the Father and by Jesus, too. The idea is that any believer who initiates this relationship of love by showing obedience, Jesus and the Father simply respond. The oneness between Jesus and his followers is a mirror of the oneness between Jesus and his heavenly Father:

Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love them and show myself to them. (John 14:21, NIV)

I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. (John 17:23, ESV)

The Apostle Paul exhorted the Corinthians to remember the importance of love. He wanted them to show love in everything they did. Paul exalted love as the highest standard in this letter to the church in Corinth. Love for God and other people was to motivate everything they did:

Let all that you do be done in love. (1 Corinthians 16:14, ESV)

Love is not merely an attribute of God, love is his essence. God is fundamentally love. He alone loves in the completeness and perfection of love:

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8, ESV)

Pronunciation

uh-GAH-pay

Example

Jesus lived out agape love by sacrificing himself for the sins of the world.

Other Types of Love in the Bible

• Eros is the word for sensual or romantic love.
• Philia means brotherly love or friendship.
• Storge describes the love between family members.

Sources

• Bloesch, D. G. (2006). God, the Almighty: power, wisdom, holiness, love (p. 145). Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

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