Part 3: Agape Love — Freedom in Christ
Christ lived and died to set us free and heal us from fear, anxiety, addictions, anger, resentment, bitterness, unforgiveness, brokenheartedness, and all the other consequences of a life lived enslaved to the flesh, sin, and darkness – which is the normal life for most humans. Paul says:
“It is for freedom that Christ set us free. Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1 NIV).
Paul is exhorting the Galatians to stop looking to justify themselves by the law and by their behavior, because, as we have seen, our behavior has nothing to do with His agapao for us. He concludes his exhortation with these words:
“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (agape) (Galatians 5: 6 NIV).
Agape/agapao love is Kingdom love. Along with the unoffendable heart and joy, it is one of the marks of a Kingdom man or woman. This type of love is the only path to the freedom that Paul is talking about — “it is for freedom that Christ set us free”. When we love with the world’s love we say “if you meet my needs, wants, and desires, then I will love you – and paradoxically “I will love myself”. We have placed our sense of our value and self-worth in someone else’s hands. We have enslaved ourselves to them. When they no longer fulfill our needs, wants, and desires we are broken-hearted and we say “I don’t love you” — or worse, they say those words to us. This kind of love (which is really no-love) always fails. Remember Tina Turner’s lament: “who needs a heart when a heart can be broken”.
The human heart longs for completion. It is searching for the value, sense of worth, and acceptance that will bring it peace, joy, and freedom. Every human being embarks on this journey, a type of journey of exploration and discovery like Odysseus’ odyssey, a 10-year trip to ‘return home’ to Ithaca; or Christian the pilgrim in John Bunyon’s Pilgrim’s Progress, who sets out from the ‘City of Destruction’ (the world) to reach the Celestial City (the Kingdom of God). Some are thrust onto this journey, some enter it gradually. Once begun, the journey never really ends. But it does have a ‘new beginning’ when one is born again, although not everyone achieves this milestone.
The search for value and acceptance in the world usually leads down dead ends, is filled with false promises, and often is a time of bondage to the thing we believe will give us the value and worth we need. Our search leads us into unhealthy relationships, drugs and alcohol, where we medicate our pain; and the usual suspects — sex, money, power, accomplishments, relevance, performance, work, health, beauty etc. The thing we select, lets say it is ‘work’, has a force associated with it — a real supernatural power to enslave us. This force tells us “I will totally fulfill you, but you must totally surrender to me”. In other words, I am promised value and acceptance, but at what cost? Slavery. The opposite of what Paul is talking about in Galatians 5.
Out of this human condition comes a type of faith, but it is counterfeit faith. I have faith or at least belief that ‘work’ will keep its side of the bargain — I don’t have a covenant with work, I have a contract. I have no control over the outcome. I can work hard, even to the detriment of everything else in my life. But in the end, the fulfillment is not up to me. My only choice is to work harder. And if ‘work’ does not keep its side of the bargain, I have nothing or perhaps worse than nothing. I am a slave to ‘work’ and the taskmaster lies.
A type of love is also part of this condition — a counterfeit love. I have wants, needs, and desires and if work delivers what I need, want, and desire I am happy, content — in love with my work. The same is the case in a relationship. If that other person is all I have ever dreamed of, capable of meeting all my needs, wants, and desires for value and acceptance, I am in love with them. But like work, I am totally dependent on their keeping their side of the contract. I have no control over their life. Again, I am not free. If they change, grow old, lose that svelte body that attracted me to them in the first place, my love for them will cool if that love is the me-directed love that these relationships are built on.
There is the world’s faith and love, and times of happiness, but also slavery and ultimately disappointment, in these very human relationships like those we enter into with work and other people. We are searching for value, worth, and acceptance in all the wrong places. We are looking for life — we almost always get death.
God is love. He is agape love, which is not a self-serving love but a self-giving love. It is a love that is willed by God, directed to us. It comes out of His being. It is a love willed by God for you and me because of the value and worth He sees in us. Sure, we are sinners, filthy rags Paul calls us. Before the beginning of time God made a plan to deal with our condition. The plan is Jesus. He became a man, shed His blood, and represented us in a covenant with God that is unshakeable. When we say to Him “Jesus, I no longer want to find my value and worth in the world, I want to live in the value and worth that your love for me contains”, in other words, when we repent and believe, we enter into the covenant with God through Jesus. And it is lasting and unshakeable!
There is something else. There is freedom — the freedom ‘in Christ’. The value, acceptance, and worth that we desperately sought is ours ‘in Christ’, marked by God’s agape love for us. As we receive this love, we receive the Father because God is love. We receive acceptance, He calls us child; we receive value, all that He has is ours; and we receive worth, God makes His abode within us. This is our life now and it is a life of freedom. The world no longer has control over us. We are no longer living under a contract, we are living in a covenant. It is no longer “if — then”, it is “because and therefore”.
It is here, in this place we call the Kingdom of God, that living water, the agape love of God begins to fill our hearts. At some point that love will flow out of us and we will see the real manifestation of our new life in the world. I can love the other as an act of my will, my decision based on the intrinsic worth I see in them — the image of God stamped on their hearts and minds, even if it is obscured by sin. This love is not based on their behavior. I can love freely, I cannot be broken-hearted, and this love will never fail because it is living water flowing out of me — the Holy Spirit, God Himself. “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1 Corinthians 13: 13 NIV) — real faith, real hope, and real love.
As I release agape into the world, my prayer is that others will find their worth and value in my love for them. By loving them in this way, I am telling them ‘”you are valuable to me and this value I see in you has nothing to do with your behavior or performance” (even though agape might require rebuke and instruction — it is still love). If they receive my love, which is really the love of the Father channeled through me, agape can also set them free, as I was set free. Then the Kingdom of God will be released into the ‘City of Destruction’. I am not “nothing”, I am a son of God.
Agape love has power. It is more than the affirmation of the other, telling them they have value. It is the Holy Spirit flowing out of us with supernatural power to transform lives, families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and the world. It is miraculous power. But in the end, it is not enough. To truly love another person we have to tell them about the source of our love for them — we have to share Jesus, the Kingdom, the Holy Spirit, and eternal life. Not just show them, but tell them. Otherwise, how will they know, how can they choose? We can demonstrate God’s love for them through agapao, we can and should demonstrate God’s power through miracles, signs, and wonders just like Paul and the Disciples did (and Jesus commanded us to do), but at some point we have to tell them with words. Words alone are never enough, but deeds without words, without an explanation that explicitly points to Jesus, will not bring them to repentance; deeds without words will not offer them the abundant, eternal life that Christ died to give us. And without that, your agapao is ultimately pointless.
I am almost finished with what I feel called to say about agape love. There is one other unexpected aspect of agape love in Scripture that I want to present. I think it has Kingdom implications. I’ll write about that in the next post.
Praying for freedom for all of us on this 4th,
John