The Love of God: A Look at Agape and the Love That Surpasses All

Digging Deeper

God’s Love

The most profound statement about God’s love is found in 1 John 4:8, 16: “God is love.”  God not only loves, but is love in the deepest essence of His being.  His love is unconditional, sacrificial, enduring, patient yet pursuing, transforming and beyond full comprehension.  The Bible is the story of God’s love and His desire for you to experience that love without the corruption of sin and brokenness.  He loves because that is fundamentally who He is.

The New Testament uses the Greek word agape to describe God’s love in order to distinguish it from romantic love (eros) or the brotherly love (phileo) of friendship.  God’s love is not contingent on your wanting it, deserving it, or being entitled to it.  He loves the unlovable, the unlovely and the unloving without limit or boundaries.  True to His nature, God’s love is both a mystery and a marvel.

The Apostle Paul describes God’s love in Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”   Scripture’s most famous declaration of God’s love is found in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”  Even while you were His enemy, rebelling against His authority, indifferent or hostile toward Him, His love moved toward you in your worst condition. 

You didn’t seek Him; He sought you.  You didn’t love first; He loved first.  God’s love isn’t reactive or responsive but proactive and pursuing.  1 John 4:9-10 describes both: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” 

This undeserved love is not fleeting but is eternal and unchanging.  Jeremiah 31:3 records God’s declaration “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.”   Psalms 136 repeats the refrain 26 times: “His steadfast love endures forever.”   Even when circumstances appear otherwise, God’s love is fresh each day.  Jeremiah wrote, during Jerusalem’s destruction: “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” Lamentations 3:22-23  

Romans 8:38-39 provides one of Scriptures most comforting assurances: ”For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”   This assurance is strengthened further as a believer, adopted as a child of God: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.”  1 John 3:1   Such is the right of those found in Christ Jesus.

The moment you surrender your life to Jesus as your Lord and Savior, God’s transforming love indwells within you.  Romans 5:5 declares: “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”  Ephesians 3:17-19 reveals Paul’s prayer that believers being “rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” 

This indwelling radically transforms how you live as a believer.  Rather than obedience being a begrudging duty, it becomes a joyful delight.  Even the Lord’s discipline is received with thanksgiving.  Hebrews 12:6 explains, “My son, do not make light of the Lord’s discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you, because the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son.”  He cares for you too much to leave you in our destructive patterns.  His corrective discipline produces repentance and restoration – an expression of love, not a contradiction to it.

Hardship and suffering take on a new perspective. They become purposeful instruments of growth rather than punitive events.  Endurance is strengthened through hope found in God’s unchanging love.  Romans 8:28 declares: “the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.  And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

As you experience this unconditional love, it flows through you to extend to others.  Fear and guilt gives way to joyful devotion.   Your value is found in God’s love for you rather than worldly accomplishment, appearance or others’ opinions.  You come to understand that God loves the lost just as He loved you when you were lost.  The profound freedom of this internalized truth produces an overflowing desire to share this “good news” with all around you.  You not only model it for others, but you cannot help but be a witness to its power and freedom. 

God’s love, as exemplified in Christ Jesus, is the source, the sustaining power and the ultimate purpose of your faith journey.  You are to become that which He has so lavishly anointed you. You are being transformed into the likeness of Christ – the image of God’s love.