Catching You Up

We saw previously that God is love. Jesus always acknowledged God‘s love for Himself in prayer and conversation. We saw the enduring nature of God‘s Love. Then we talked about knowing and developing faith in this love. Lastly we looked at the failure of natural human love.

Love, scripturally speaking is a word everyone thinks they understand — until someone asks them to actually define it.
In recent times, love has been used to argue for all kinds of positions — the idea that everyone will ultimately be saved because God is love (universalism), the belief that God’s plans are open and changing (open theism), accepting sinful practices in the name of love etc . In other words, “love” gets enlisted as a support for nearly every theological agenda and every sinful social agenda.
Here’s the surprising thing: even though Christians — theologians — consider love absolutely central to their understanding of God, love is rarely actually defined. Very little attention is given to saying precisely what it is. When preachers talk about love, they tend to assume everyone already knows what it means — as though the definition were obvious.

There is a, cultural and linguistic distance that needs to be overcome before we can understand the God Kind Of Love.

It is not always obvious that the English word love in the New Testament can represent several different Greek words. Because English uses a single word where Greek uses multiple terms, important distinctions can easily be overlooked. Understanding the original Greek words helps us appreciate the richness and precision of the Bible’s teaching on love.

Lets us look at the example below:

The English Limitation

It is sometimes hard to see that the english word translated love in the NT can be originally different in the greek.

This passage uses two Greek words for love:

• Agapē / agapaō — God’s self-giving, sacrificial, unconditional love.
• Phileō — brotherly affection, deep friendship.

In the first two questions, Jesus asks Peter using agapaō (“Do you love Me with devoted, sacrificial love?”), while Peter answers with phileō (“Lord, You know I have deep affection for You.”). The third time, Jesus Himself uses phileō, meeting Peter where he is.

We are like Peter in the beginning of his spiritual walk.

We should love God and His children with the divine love, not natural human love. Peter had a natural love for Jesus and that love failed the test of selfishness denying Jesus. Later toward the end of his ministry, Peter was bold enough to tell them to crucify him upside down.

Many of today’s Christians understand the Bible in a natural, religious, or ethical ways. This is true in particular concerning the requirement to love God and our neighbour. This was never the Biblical intention.There is an emotional love, an intellectual love and a spiritual love.

When the New Testament was written, there were four common Greek words to describe the concept of “love”: 1) eros, 2) stergo, 3) phileo, and 4) agape. These four words conveyed four very different types of love. I want to talk to you about these four different types of love; then I’ll tell you which of these four is the type of love the Holy Spirit wants to produce in your life.

The Greek word translated here love is - agapē.

agapē was born in the realm of divine Revelation - This word did not occur commonly in the classical Greek before the time of Christ. When talking about love, phileō, storgē, and erōs were more common And are still common in the world today. The apostles specially chose the rarely used word agapē to describe the God kind of love.

1. Éros – Romantic or Passionate Love: the Greek term for sexual love and where we get the word erotic. In Greek culture, this word referred to sensual, carnal impulses to satisfy or gratify the sexual desires of the flesh. It shares a common root with the word erao, which means to ask, to beg, or to demand. This confirms that eros is not a giving type of love; rather, it denotes a sexual demand. It is not a love that seeks to give or to please someone else, but a carnal love that seeks the fulfillment of its own desires, attraction, desire, and physical affection. It is the love between a husband and wife in its passionate aspect.The word éros never appears in the New Testament, though the Bible certainly affirms marital love (for example, the Song of Solomon celebrates marital affection).

This love is based on attraction and desires union with the beloved. It can be either pure (within marriage) or corrupted by sin - outside marriage.

The word ἔρως (and its verb ἐράω) does not appear even once in the entire New Testament. This is a remarkable fact given that eros was one of the most common words for love in secular Greek literature. In the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint/LXX), the major love vocabulary in the Song of Songs is rendered with agapē/agapaō-related terms rather than eros

Today’s world is heavily sexualised even amongst the young people. This love is crossing boundaries into all other kinds of love leading to pervasion of the worst kind.

The world especially, the film and entertainment industry heavily promotes this love, to the point it starts amongst young children in school.

This is not the love God primarily uses to describe His relationship with humanity.

In this love relationships are built on feelings rather than commitment. Marriages have broken down because attraction fades. People seek pleasure over faithfulness, resulting in loneliness, exploitation, and instability. Pornograpghy thrives in today’s world because it taps into this love.

2. Storgē – Family Affection: Storgē is the natural affection within families. E.g: Parents loving children. Children loving parents or brothers and sisters caring for one another. The simple word storgē is absent from the New Testament, but compound forms appear. For example:

• Romans 12:10 uses philostorgos (“devoted with family affection”):
  “Love one another with brotherly affection.”
• 2 Timothy 3:3 describes sinful humanity as astorgos (“without natural affection”).

This love is Instinctive, natural and family-based.This love is not unconditional. Even wicked people sometimes have this kind of love - much has been said about the love Kim the tyrant leader of North Korea and his daughter.

Even strong family affection can fail under pressure, whereas God’s love never does. Family loyalty can become unhealthy when it excuses wrongdoing. Even this natural affection can be tainted by sin.

One scholar has noted that on occasion, the word stergo portrayed the love of a nation for its ruler or even the love of a dog for its master. Consequently, the real idea of the word stergo is that of devotion.

3. Philia – Friendship Love: This is the love of friendship, companionship, loyalty, and mutual affection. Many times it is reciprocal. Friends usually love because something attractive exists in the other person. It can turn into heated hatred overnight. There is friendship even amongst the most wicked kind of people. This love only lasts as long as mutual benefit lasts. Friends also can form exclusive groups that reject outsiders.

This love is not the God kind of love.

“ So human love is based on attraction, can change, is reciprocal, can fail, depends on worthiness, seeks to receive and is emotional - it has failed because it is rooted in selfishness. ”

4. Agápē – God’s Love: This is the highest form of love in Scripture. Agápē is not merely stronger affection—it is a completely different quality of love. The New Testament overwhelmingly uses agápē to describe God’s own nature.

Agapē in the NT denotes a love that is:
• Volitional: it is a deliberate choice and commitment, not merely an emotional response. It is “the steady intention of the will to another’s highest good”.
• Initiating: God’s love precedes any worth or lovability in the object. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).
• Sacrificial: the supreme demonstration of agapē is the cross — “He loved [ēgapēsen] me and gave Himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20).
• Covenantal: rooted in God’s character and promise, not in the beloved’s performance. This distinguishes it sharply from eros, which is inherently conditional — it loves because the object is desirable.

Every other love — friendship, family, romance — finds its truest expression only when grounded by agapē - the God kind of love.

I want to remind you that these natural human types of love, fail under the test and pressure of selfishness. They are all rooted in selfishness.

A higher kind of love is needed, the love that God Himself has and that is why the Holy Spirit chose the word - agapē. Nothing less will do!

This love is rooted in God’s character rather than human emotion.

The NT writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, made deliberate lexical language choices that carry profound theological weight. For example -they chose this rarely used word agapē and made it the dominant love-vocabulary of the NT. They found the other words for love inadequate.

Conclusion

The problem is that these are human loves, weakened by humanity’s sinful nature. They fail the test of selfishness every single time. They tend to become:

• self-centred,
• conditional,
• temporary,
• and easily corrupted.

Without agapē, human love naturally bends toward self-interest.

The New Testament presents agapē not merely as a higher emotion but as the defining characteristic of God’s nature. Human loves can enrich life, but they cannot redeem humanity. Only God’s agapē transforms hearts and provides the moral foundation for a flourishing society. As Augustine of Hippo famously argued, human loves become disordered when they are not rightly ordered toward God; when God’s love governs our hearts, the other forms of love find their proper place.