God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us.  1 John 4:9-12 HCSB

Love is a little four letter word that is so often misused.  Sadly, it is also often misunderstood.  It’s a small word but it has huge meaning.  We often use it in a way that indicates that we are clueless to the vastness of its meaning.  Most people I know have probably heard me say that I love Go.  What I should say is that I really, really, really like chocolate or the taste of chocolate.  But the word love is really too strong for chocolate or a car, even though we often use it for those kinds of things.

Let’s look at the three words that the Greeks have for love.  Philia means affectionate regard, friendship, brotherly love.  The city Philadelphia is named for brotherly love.  This is the type of love shared between close friends.  Eros is a love with sexual passion or an intimate love.  Agape is used to describe God’s love for us and our love for him.  This is the type of love that a parent has for a child and hopefully a spouse has for a spouse.  It is an unconditional love that Thomas Aquinas explained as “to will the good of another”.

Now many of us have experienced Eros.  Hopefully, you have close friends and have experienced Philia.  But if you have never experienced Agape love, then we need to talk.  You see you have to receive it to give it.  But once you receive it, your whole world will change.

I can tell you of my experience.  You see I came from a good home.  I had good parents and I had no doubt that they loved me with Agape love.  Being young and naïve I mistook Eros for Agape love and that was a huge mistake.  My spouse was unfaithful and basically ended up saying that he loved me and his girlfriend, oh what is a man to do?  I have heard this from cheaters many times.  They don’t know what to do because they love their wife and don’t want to lose her but they love their girlfriends too and yes, sometimes girlfriends is plural.  Now I am not just picking on the men, I know women have the same kind of problems.  The problem is you never learned to tell the difference between Eros and Agape.  So you fall into lust with someone and you think it is love.  These people truly don’t know what love is.  Needless to say that marriage ended and off I go, still not knowing the difference between Eros and Agape love, but now I have a lot more baggage.  I trust no one.  I’m looking out for number one now.

Well, how do you fix this problem?  For me, I had to accept the love that Christ had for me before I could love someone else in that way.  You see, I have never had children, so I never realized just how much God loved me and how unconditional that love was. So before this happened I experienced several failed relationships. Now I will admit that when I met my current husband, I was physically attracted to him.  But let me tell you, we were like oil and water.  We were so different.  We still are in many ways. But through our ups and downs, I always felt that God truly put us together.  That’s a whole other blog, but perhaps someday I will share that with you.  But once we got into church together and both dedicated our lives to Christ, I began to realize something.  I realized that I loved my husband just as Christ loved me.  I realized that my Eros love had truly turned to Agape love.

You see by the time we are in our twenties, many of us have been broken.  Perhaps we have been broken by a bad home situation when we were growing up.  Maybe we were raised by broken parents who just passed their brokenness down to us.  Maybe we had a great home situation but married into a bad one.  Once we are broken, it is hard to love and it is hard to trust.  Only when we realize how awesome God’s love is for us, can we begin to heal and begin to share that love with others. Then we realize that we can trust God completely with our hearts and our love.  We can also trust God to choose that person that is right for us.  John speaks a great deal of God’s love in the bible.  In John 3:16 he tells us that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life.  In John 15:13, he tells us that no one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.

So maybe you are broken.  Perhaps you have been broken for a long time and didn’t even realize it.  I was broken for years and had no idea.  Silly me, I thought it was everyone else who had the problem. It lead me from one failed relationship to another.  You see I wasn’t choosing very well, but I also wasn’t following God’s instructions either.  Unfortunately, my relationships were doomed before they started.  Then I met my husband.  He too, had come from a loving home but had been through relationships that had left him broken.  So here we were with our tons of baggage trying to make a relationship work.  We couldn’t, but God could.  God repaired our brokenness and gave us a new lease on love.  God showed us how to love and he showed us what Agape love looked like.  So if you are reading this and you think that you are too badly broken to be put back together, let me assure you of one thing.  All things are possible with God (Matthew 19:26).  Turn to God and  open your heart to the kind of love He has for you.  Then and only then will you be able to share that love with others.  Agape love lightens your heart in a way that is hard to explain.

God will give you beauty for ashes (Isaiah 61:3).  So why not trade your rubble and ashes in to God for beauty today.  God will love you like no one has ever loved you.  He will show you what real love looks like.  It’s not too late!

Have a great day!