The Agapé Love of God
If a person did not make it to heaven he could blame a lot of people or circumstances, but there is one Person he will never be able to blame, and that is God.
Someone might say, “It’s the church’s fault—I tried the church but it just didn’t do anything for me.”
He might blame some poor example of Christianity that he saw: “Well, he said he was a Christian; but I saw the way he lived, and I decided I wanted nothing to do with that.” ut one Person you can never blame is God. When I think of all that God has done to bring us salvation, I realize what a fight it is not to be saved.
The Bible says, “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, and then God sent His Spirit into the world to convict us of our sins and to draw us to Jesus Christ. He points out our own helplessness, and then points to Jesus Christ as the Answer—the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Starting the Real Work
Once we have been brought to this point of coming to Jesus, and we say, “Okay, Lord, take over my life”—the moment we surrender ourselves to God—the Holy Spirit begins His work in us in earnest.
The moment the door of our heart is open to receive salvation, the Holy Spirit comes into our life, and He begins to make those necessary changes within, conforming us into the image of Christ and empowering us to be the kind of person the Lord would have us to be. He gives us knowledge and understanding in the things of God, so that suddenly the Bible becomes a totally new book to us. As we start to read, it begins to come alive, because the Spirit begins to open up our understanding and fill our heart with God’s agapé love.
But it first takes our coming to Jesus and submitting our life to Him. Jesus said in Revelation 3:20, “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.” It actually means “eat supper with him.” In the Orient, the greatest method of communion with a person was to eat with him. In eating together with a person, you have created a unity or a bond. Since you have partaken of the same food, it now becomes part of both of you, and so you become part of each other.
The people of the Orient placed great significance on the breaking of bread together and the drinking from the same cup, because it created an affinity, a unity.
It is interesting to note that Jesus always liked to eat supper with people. He enjoyed that oneness,
that identity with people. It is significant that Jesus says, “I’m standing at the door knocking; if you will open the door, I will come in and eat supper with you.” He will come into your life and you can begin that beautiful, intimate relationship with Him in which you become a part of each other.
This is all done through the work of the Holy Spirit.
The moment I open thedoor and believe on Jesus, the Spirit does a marvelous work for me and in me. In Ephesians 1:13 and following, we read about this work of the Holy Spirit in sealing the believer. Paul describes for us all the fantastic blessings that we have as children of God. He begins in 1:3 by saying, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with all spiritual blessings.”
Then he begins to list some of those glorious blessings with which God has blessed us.
Blessed Beyond Description
The Christian is actually the most blessed person in the world. God has just blessed us until we cannot take any more. And after He is all through blessing us here, He is going to receive us into the eternal glory, where He is going to bless us forever.
Paul talks about the blessings of God:
He has chosen us, predestined us, accepted us, redeemed
us, forgiven us, made known to us the mystery of His will,
and given us an inheritance. In Ephesians 1:13 Paul says,
“In whom ye also trusted after ye heard the word of truth,
the gospel of your salvation: in whom also after that ye
believed.”
It all begins with hearing “the word of truth, the gospel
of your salvation.” Paul said, “How can they believe on
Him whom they have not heard?” It is necessary for faith
that you first hear the message that God loves you with an
everlasting love, and that because He loves you He sent His
Son to take your sin and die in your place, so that which
kept you from God could be put aside and nothing would
hinder your fellowship with God.
God said through the prophet Isaiah, “The LORD’s hand is not shortened, that he cannot save; neither is his ear heavy, that he cannot hear: but your sins have separated between you and your God” (Isaiah 59:1–2).
That is always the tragic by-product of sin—separation from God. Sin in my life separates me from God. God did not want that separation, but sin had to be dealt with, so God sent His Son to take my sins—to die in my place—so that I would not have to be separated, and could come back into fellowship with God.
If you are born again, you heard God’s good news for you, and you trusted after you heard. First there was the hearing and then the believing of what God said. Then, after you believed, after you opened the door, you were “sealed with that Holy Spirit of promise.”
God ’s Seal of Ownership
Then they would seal those goods with their signet ring in wax. When the ship arrived at Puteoli (the port where they would land the goods going to Rome), the merchant would claim his goods, proving his ownership by his own personal seal.
If someone else started to claim the goods, the merchant could say, “Those are mine. That’s my stamp of ownership.”
The beautiful biblical truth is that, once I believed, God sealed me with His own personal stamp of ownership. He actually claimed me as His own possession, so that when the enemy would try to claim me, God would say, “Keep your hands off—he’s mine!”
That seal of God’s ownership is the Holy Spirit.
When you believe in Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit comes into your life, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in your life is God’s seal, God’s mark of ownership by which He claims you as His own.
Treasured by God
I do not understand why God prizes me so highly, but He does. In Ephesians 1:18 Paul says, “…that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints.” He’s saying, in other words, “May God open up your eyes to realize how much He treasures you!” I pray that God would open my eyes by the Spirit so that I might find how much God treasures me.
That to me is glorious—that God would treasure me. For His own reasons God treasures us, and He has placed His seal on us. The Holy Spirit within us is God’s seal. We are also told this in 2 Corinthians 1:22: “Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.” In Ephesians 4:30 we are commanded, “Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.”
The Future Claim
God has put his stamp of ownership on you at this point because He is claiming you as His own, even though
your redemption is not yet complete. That is why the merchants put their stamp of ownership on their merchandise— because they had not yet claimed their goods in the home port. So wherever these goods went they were marked; they had the seal of ownership. In the same way God has put His seal of ownership on you, though He has not yet claimed His purchased possession. Our redemption is not yet complete, but the Holy Spirit is that seal and “the earnest.”
In Ephesians 1:14 Paul declares, “Which is the earnest of our inheritance until the redemption of the purchased possession, unto the praise of his glory.” The Holy Spirit is not only the seal of God’s ownership, but He is also the earnest, which means a deposit or down payment. God has every intention of completing your redemption. He has made the deposit or down payment—the Holy Spirit. God is declaring His intention of completing His transaction for you.
This redemption will not be complete until we are freed from this body. This body is the thing that is still dragging us down. Paul said, “We who are in this body do groan.” In Romans 8:22 he describes how we “groan and travail.”
All of creation is actually groaning and travailing together until now. Romans 8:23 says, “And not only they, but ourselves also, which have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption [literally being placed as sons], …the redemption of our body.”
The End of the Old Body
Robert Service, in his poem “The Cremation of Sam Magee,” speaks of hurrying on “with a corpse half hid that he couldn’t get rid.” It was lashed to the sleigh, but he couldn’t get rid of it because he had made this promise on Christmas Eve.
That is the way we Christians are. We have a redeemed spirit which is alive unto God, but we have to carry around this old corpse of our body. It hangs on wherever we go, until someday we finally get rid of our load.
Paul said, “We who are in this body do groan, earnestly desiring to be delivered, not that we would be unclothed, but that we might be clothed with that body which is from heaven” (see 2 Corinthians 5:1–4).
That will be the completion of our redemption. That is what I am waiting for.
Some people are troubled to think they are going to get rid of this body. It doesn’t trouble me. The apostle Paul said, “We know that when the earthly body of this tent is dissolved, we have a building of God not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”
This body that I now possess has been passed down to me through my ancestry; all the gene factors have been passed down the line, so I am a composite of my ancestry. I have picked up all the inherited characteristics of man’s failure, and so here I am in my groaning body.
The New Body from Heaven
The new body that I am going to have will not be passed down through failing man; it will be given to me directly from God.
It is not going to be subject to pain or fatigue or gimpy football knees or so many of the other things I have experienced in this body. It is going to be coming to me directly from God. Paul calls this present body a “tent” in 2 Corinthians 5:4. You never think of a tent as a permanent place to live. If you have to live in a tent, it is all right for a few weeks in the mountains on vacation, but you do not like to think of it as a permanent place to live. It is so much better to move out of the tent into a real house.
God is planning to redeem us completely.
The redemption includes not just a redeemed body, but a new body. With my mind I want to do the will of God. With my mind I want to turn it all over to God. Completely and fully I want to live the kind of life that God wants me to live. There is no problem with my heart and my mind.
My problem is that my body keeps dragging me down. It keeps pulling me back and pulling me down, so that I do not always do those things that I want to do. I am pulled down by my body appetites. I cannot be all that I want to be, so I groan.
All creation around us is groaning, waiting for the day of redemption, when God lays claim to that which is His. He has His stamp of ownership on it, and one day He is going to come down and say, “This is it.” He is going to release my soul and spirit from my body and immediately incorporate it into that new body which is from heaven.
The Suffering World
The same is true of this world. Right now the whole world is suffering as the result of sin:
“All creation groans and travails.”
Every thorn, they say, is an undeveloped blossom. Thorns have come as a result of the curse. And a thorn
is just a mark of groaning creation—wanting to blossom out, but unable to. All creation suffers under the curse of sin, waiting for that day of deliverance, waiting for that day when God redeems what He has purchased. Jesus purchased the world, but He has not yet claimed it. It belongs to Him, but He has not claimed it. It is still under Satan’s control. But one of these days very soon He will come back to claim what He purchased.
We read about this in Revelation chapter 5. There is a scroll in the right hand of Him who sits upon the throne. An angel declares in a loud voice, “Who is worthy to take the scroll and loose the seals?” John responds, “I began to weep because no one was found worthy.”
The elder replies, “Don’t weep, John the Lion of the tribe of Judah has prevailed to take the scroll and to loose its seals.” So John says, “I turned and saw Him like a Lamb that had been slaughtered, and He took
the scroll out of the right hand of Him who sits upon the throne.”
This scroll is the title deed to the earth. Who is worthy to take it? Who is worthy to claim it? No one but
Jesus, for He purchased it on the cross, and He is coming back to lay claim to His purchased possession. And I am His purchased possession!
My Assurance
The work of the Holy Spirit today in my life is that of having sealed me. So His indwelling gives me real assurance. When Satan comes and begins to badger me because of the weakness of my flesh and my failures, and begins to tell me that God is not interested in me and God does not love me and is not going to save me, I say, “Satan, you are wrong! I have God’s seal; He has marked me; He has stamped me with His seal of ownership. The Holy Spirit indwells me. God has sealed me! He has given me the deposit, and He is coming to claim what He has redeemed.”
When we get to heaven (either when Jesus comes for us at the rapture or when we die), we will have our redemption complete. The work of Christ will be finished in us, and we will share forever in the glorious kingdom of God without any further hindrances of this body. We will be able to love, to share, to give, and to relate with one another without any restrictions or limitations.
What a glorious day! What a glorious work of God in sealing us and giving us the earnest of the Spirit until that day of the redemption of the purchased possession!
The Agape Love of Christ
Another work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer is to bring us the agapé love of Jesus Christ. Jesus said to His disciples, “By this sign shall men know that ye are my disciples: that ye love one another.” The word translated love is the Greek word “agapé,” which is rarely found in Greek outside the Bible.
It is a word that was used by our Lord Jesus Christ to define a quality of love above an ordinary experience of love.
The English language is restricted in some ways, and perhaps most limited in its ability to express love. The French say, “You Englishmen have one way to tell a woman you love her. We have a hundred.”
They are expressing how much freer and fuller the French language is than the English language in this respect. Within the Greek language are several words for love, but we are limited to just the word love in English.
I love peanuts, I love Cracker Jacks, and I love my wife. I have to use the same word to describe my feelings for hot fudge sundaes as my feelings for my children. Yet what I feel toward hot fudge sundaes is entirely different from what I feel toward my hildren or my wife. I am stuck with the one word “love.”
Love’s Three Words
In the Greek language there is a word for love on the physical plane—the word Eros. It is easy to see the English words that we get from this Greek word, such as “erotic.” It is love on the purely physical plane. This word has become vogue among young people today, and I guess older people, too.
They say, “Let’s make love,” and by this they are referring to an Eros experience, which does not necessarily
involve true love at all.
The Greeks have a second word for love, a love on a higher plane than the physical—the mental plane, an emotional relationship.
The word is Phileo.
This is far deeper than Eros, because this involves deeper interaction with another person. Phileo is developed by conversing and finding out that we like the same things. We have a lot in common; we appreciate each other, and through a mutual sharing we come into the Phileo experience of love.
Agapé love is total love. It is love in the deepest area; it is true spiritual love. Eros is not true love. If I say “I love you” in the Eros realm, what I am really saying is “I love me, and I want you because I’m in love with me, and I need you.”
If someone says, “I can’t live without you,” that does not express deep love for you—it only shows that he is thinking of himself. Eros is extremely selfish. It is self-love.
Phileo love is reciprocal: “I love you because you love me; I love you because you laugh at my jokes; I love you because we like so many of the same things; I love you because we get along well together and have a lot of fun when we’re together. I love you because you’re a pleasant person, and we have a great time together.”
The Highest Love
return. The love is so deep and so great that it just keeps on giving. In fact, that is the chief concern of agapé: giving. The word agapé is such a vast, broad word that it is difficult for us to even define it in the English language.
It is impossible for us to understand it apart from the Spirit of God and His revelation to our heart, because it is not a natural love; it is a supernatural love. The Bible says, “God is agapé.” It is a divine love, and it is probably best defined for us in 1 Corinthians 13.
First of all, Paul points out the supremacy of this agapé love. It is more important that you have this kind of love than that you have spiritual gifts.
Paul said, “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love (agapé), I am become as sounding brass or a [clanging] cymbal.”
You may have very powerful oratory; you may have a silver tongue; you may be able to express yourself
extremely well. But if you do not have agapé love, it is no more meaningful than just clanging on a cymbal. It is a meaningless sound.
Agapé is more important than the gifts of prophecy or the word of knowledge or the gift of faith, for “though I
could prophecy and understand all things, and though I had all knowledge and faith so that I could remove mountains, if I have not agapé, I am nothing.” Paul continues, “and though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor…” agapé love is even more important than sacrifice.
You may sell everything you have and feed the poor, and give your body to be burned, making the supreme sacrifice, but if you do not have agapé love, it profits you nothing.
Now Paul goes on to define this kind of love. “Love suffers long and is kind.” This means that agapé love receives abuse and suffers long. It takes and takes and at the end of the taking is still kind. You have heard people say, “All right, I’ve taken and taken, and that’s it; now I’m going to get even.” That is not agapé.
Agapé takes and takes and then is still kind.
It is not crying for vengeance. “Love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth
not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own [does not insist on its own way], is not easily provoked.” (The word easily was inserted by the translators. They could not quite understand “is not provoked.”)
Love “thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.” Agapé love “never fails.”
Love’s Two Signs
This agapé love should be working within our lives and making us one with each other, giving preference to one another, not exalting ourselves or forming cliques, but just sharing that oneness of love that makes us all one together.
We should share together with one another the goodness and grace of God, freely giving as we have freely received of God’s love and grace. As this agapé love works within our lives, it becomes the sign to the world that we are truly Christ’s disciples.
In 1 John 3:14 we read, “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren.” Again, the word agapé is used. Not only is it a sign to the world that we are Christ’s disciples, but it is a sign to us that we have passed from death to life.
As God’s love begins to work in my life, it becomes a sign to me that I have passed from death to life, because I have this love for the brethren, for those within the body of Christ.
The Source of True Love
Because this is a divine love, its source is in God.
It is not something I can generate. It is not something I can work up within myself. This has been one of the difficulties within the Christian community—knowing that we are to love all believers, but also knowing that there are those whom we do not truly love. So we try to work up an artificial love.
We try to talk ourselves into it. But agapé love does not originate with me; agapé’s origin is in God.
God is agapé.
I cannot develop it; it is something that has to come to me as a work of God within my life.
If I find that I am lacking in this love, I cannot really do anything about it myself; I must just confess this lack to God and ask Him to plant that agapé within me.
Many Christians have been totally frustrated because they have tried to produce this agapé.
They have sought so hard to love with this divine love, but they cannot do it.
Its origin is in God, and it has to come from God as a gift to you, and then it goes forth from your life. If you find yourself lacking in this agapé, the only thing you can do is to ask God to fill your heart with agapé through the Holy Spirit.
Do not browbeat yourself and become defeated in your spiritual walk because you find that you do not have
this agapé as you should; just ask the Lord for it.
