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I want to share with you a list of some of the things I love: Pizza, mexican food, ice cream, running, my dogs Tate and Gracie, my wife, my kids, football on a Saturday afternoon, the show Survivor, Waffle House, classic rock and bourbon. If you think about it, love is perhaps the most unusual word in the English language because one word expresses such a wide range of feelings and emotions for such a wide range of things. For instance, I use the same word to express the way I feel about my wife as I do to express the way I feel about a pepperoni pizza. I use the same word to express how I feel about watching Survivor as I do to express affection for my kids. I’d like to think that the love I have for my wife and kids is qualitatively different than the love I have for hash browns at Waffle House and Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, but you’d never know based on the word choice. One word is used to convey so many different things. It’s up to us to discern which kind of love we’re talking about.
Which leads me to wonder, when the Bible says we’re supposed to “love one another”, exactly which kind of love are we talking about. Does that mean I’m supposed to love you like I love a Chicken burrito? When 1 John 4:16 says “God is love”, does that mean God loves me in the same way I love an ice cream Sundae? I don’t think so; and yet the Bible isn’t very clear; or is it?
Thankfully the Greeks understood the many different nuances of the word love. They were much more precise with their language. They had a word to express the kind of love we feel for friend “philos”; another word to express the kind of love we feel for a significant other “eros”; and another to express the kind of love we feel for a family member “storge”. But the word for “love” that shows up 27 times in 1 John 4:7-21 is none of these. Every one of those 27 uses in 1st John uses the Greek word Agape. The Greeks used the word Agape when they wanted to describe a sacrificial kind of love; the kind of love that says I will give up some of what I want for some of what you need. Agape love persists regardless of the circumstances, the way we feel or the way something tastes. Agape love is the highest order of love and it endures all things, believes all things, hopes all things. Agape love is used to describe God’s love for us and it’s used to describe how we’re called to love one another.
Christian author Bob Goff wrote a book called “Love Does” in which he says “we become in our lives what we do with our love”. Agape love is a doing love- not simply a feeling or emotional love. It’s an active, sacrificial, giving, living, breathing thing that we do every day. So, this week, may we Agape love one another, finding ways not just to feel love but to live love, show love and do love to the people with whom we come in contact.
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