God's Love

 


God’s Love

By Connie Hawkins 

Divine love is that love that belongs to or is part of God. It is different than the love you have for your spouse or your children; it’s different than the love you have for friends and neighbors; that is natural love.

Four Greek words for love are essential for Christians to know. They are agape, phileo, storge, and eros. The first three appear in the Bible. The fourth is the “erotic” kind. The Greek word that refers to the love of God or the spiritual kind, one of the kinds of love we are to have for people, is agape. Agape is the very nature of God, for God is love (1 John 4:7-12, 16b).

We are accustomed to thinking of love as a feeling, but that is not necessarily the case with agape love. Agape is love because of what it does, not because of how it feels. Agape is an exercise of the will, a deliberate choice. This is why God can command us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44; Exodus 23:1-5). He is not commanding us to “have a good feeling” for our enemies but to act lovingly toward them.  God so loved us that He gave His son to die for our sins. (John 3:16) He did not want to die, but He loved us, so He did what was required to save us from death. What a display of ‘agape’ love.

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