Agape Love From Four Angles

What if the most powerful love you’ll ever know doesn’t start with your resolve, but with God moving toward you? We dive into agape—love sourced in God, not manufactured by willpower—and trace how it actually works: it bears what’s heavy, believes when faith feels thin, hopes when the future looks dim, and endures when quitting seems reasonable. Anchored in 1 John 4 and the heart of the gospel, we unpack the big word that changes everything—propitiation—and why it means God isn’t angry at you in Christ. That assurance isn’t theory; it’s fuel. It frees you to cover faults instead of broadcasting them, to carry burdens rather than count them, and to trust that grace can reach the person you’ve quietly given up on.

Along the way, we challenge performative love and show why white-knuckled niceness fails where Spirit-grown fruit flourishes. If love is a fruit, then abiding is the soil: Scripture, prayer, honest worship, and a life that keeps saying yes. We share how to hold a generous view of others without being naive, how to pray for enemies with a straight face, and how costly presence turns conflict into a place for grace. You’ll hear practical stories, Spurgeon’s sharp wisdom on covering faults, and a reframing of “love never fails” that avoids clichés and lands in everyday choices—at the table, in the text thread, and in the moments you’d rather walk away.

If you’re weary of trying harder and ready to receive deeper, this is for you. Come discover how being loved by Jesus becomes the only way to truly love like Jesus—bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things. If it helps you breathe and believe again, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a review so more people can find this conversation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Alright, so today we're gonna study. We're gonna look at agape love from four angles. And you have to be careful when you're spelling that because when I first spelled it, it was from four angels. But it's angles, agape love from four angles. So let's let's begin by reading a verse not from 1 Corinthians, but from 1 John. In 1 John chapter 4, verses 7 through 11, it says he says, Beloved, let us love one another. For love is from God. Now last week we studied the four different words of love in Greek. Alright, I'm about to hand out some Jesus points. So who who knows one of those four words of love?

unknown 1:13

Agape.

God As Source Of Love

Propitiation And God’s Wrath Explained

Mission: Forgiveness Proclaimed To All

Love Bears All Things

Covering Faults, Not Broadcasting Them

Believes All Things: Hope For Anyone

Faith Of Friends And Radical Mercy

Hopes All Things: Future Confidence

Endures All Things: Costly Love

Fruit Of The Spirit: How Love Grows

New Commandment: Loved, Then Loving

Identity, Cleansing, And Assurance

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Alright, you get seven Jesus points. It's his favorite number. Alright. Okay, now these ones are worth more Jesus points because they're harder. What? Yeah, Philly, Filio, Filio, which is like brotherly love. Okay, now we're getting into the harder ones. Arrows. Yeah. Figured you would say, no, I was kidding. It's the that's the romantic lovey dovey love, you know. And then what was the last one? Storg. Storg, storgy, however you want to pronounce it. And that's like the parent, child, and brother, sister love, but mainly the parent, the family, familial love. So those are the four different types of love. Um, the but the one that's used in this verse that we're studying right now, let us love one another for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God, for God is love, it says. All the all all of those are agape. And last week we talked about what love is patient, love is kind, and then we talked about eight things. Love is not, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud, is not self-seeking, and all the other things. So we looked at what that agape love looked at last week, but now we're gonna look even closer at what agape love is. So he says, Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, or literally it means sourced from God, sourced from God. So if you're gonna love, it has to be sourced from God. This kind of agape love, you can't make it. You can't do it. It's like when I go into the kitchen, I am not going to produce muffins. I can't bake, I can't cook, I cannot do those things. You're not gonna get something tasty if you send me into the kitchen to it's not gonna happen. But God is the only one that can produce agape love in our lives. It says, Everyone who loves is born of God. Everyone who has this agape love is from him and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. And then it says this in this is in this the love of God was manifested toward us. This is how we God showed his love. That God sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him. Now you might have thought that that he would have said that Jesus died for you. That proved his love. But actually, the bigger proof of his love is that he would cleanse you from all your dirty, rotten sin, he'd make you pure and holy, and then he would choose willingly to come and live inside you and live through you. That, he says, is the greatest manifestation of his love. That is the greatest part of his love. That's the greatest revelation of his love. Because he doesn't just love you because he loves you, he loves you also to love other people through you. But then he says this in this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation. We'll talk about that word in a minute, for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. Again, this isn't a law that you have to love one another. This is an identity. You will love one another. So we talked about him living in you, but how can he do that? How can he live in you? Because he loved you first. When you were unlovable, he was your propitiation. That's a big$10 Bible word for it means that he satisfied the wrath of God towards sin. That means sin makes God angry. Okay? And you might be like, ooh, are we are we here in vengeful God preacher? You know, fire and brimstone preaching. Well, the truth is, sin breaks God's world. He made a perfect world and sin just messes it up. It's like throwing mud on a Rembrandt. It's like God's like, no, don't do that. My world was perfect. My people, you were perfect, and sin came in and jacked it all up. We're where you we learn all sickness comes from sin. That's that's the sort, that's the reason why people get sick. It's the reason why people do terrible things. All the things people are angry at God at about this world, God's like, I didn't do that. I made a perfect world, you guys messed it up. Yeah. And and so he had this propitiate, this anger towards sin. It it meant and sin hurts people. So he hates that his people get hurt. He hates the pain that we go through because he loves you so much. So what happens is because he didn't want to hate you, he sent Jesus to die on the cross. God punished Jesus for all of our sin. And and literally he poured out his wrath and his anger on Jesus so that God will never be angry at any of us for our sins. He's not angry with you. That's the application here. He shows how much he loves you by dealing with your sin, by punishing Jesus for it, so that you can walk free and just know that you're a child of God if you choose to put your faith in Jesus. It's salvation. It is the gospel. The gospel is that God loves you enough to punish Jesus for you. So if you say, Jesus, I accept your free gift of forgiveness and love, you will be saved forever and eternity. Your sin is washed away, and Jesus will come live inside you and through you. So propitiation means God satisfied the wrath of anger. He is not angry at anyone's sins anymore. Does that mean everyone is going to heaven? No. Because if you don't accept his free gift of forgiveness, there's no other place for you to go except being separated from him and his love. So there's there's another place that you have to go if you don't accept it. But he wants to freely forgive all sins. God is out there saying, Go tell everyone I will forgive their sins. He literally, Jesus said, just go into the whole world, tell everyone you can be forgiven, just believe in Jesus. And we've pretty much told most of the people in the world to the people have gone out, many people have heard, most of the world has heard. And if you're like, well, what about this tribe? Then it sounds like God wants you to go there. Maybe. I don't know. We'll see. God invites us to partner with him in this mission of spreading this amazing grace that God will forgive your sins and then he will come live inside you and live through you. And that's that's how God shows his love for us. Being loving in everything we do is what it looks like when Jesus lives through you. When you've accepted this grace, you will be loving in everything you do. You will have agape love dripping out of you. You'll sweat agape love. Everything you do will be agape love. Wow, that sounds a lot like what Jesus does. When Jesus lived, everything he did was loving. He says, In this is love. The love of God was manifest towards us that God sent his only begotten son into the world that we might live through him. Yes, and we live through him, through faith in his life and his death. He also lives through us. This is the relationship of grace in the new covenant that Jesus gives us. So we've been, as we've been studying the book of 1 Corinthians, we've been putting on our grace glasses so we can see the world through grace, so we can see life through the lens of God's grace. And here's where how we're gonna focus today with these glasses on love. Again, we're gonna see how Jesus shows himself through your life. His love is just gonna flow through your life. And it's you could also look at it, this is how he's going to bear fruit in your life. The fruit of love is gonna happen in your life. So our verse that we're looking at is verse 7, which says, love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. And let me just, this is a divine mystery. In Greek, the word all means all went to two years of college for that. It's not some things, it's or most things, it's all things. What does this mean? It means love never fails. Love never fails, which will be the next verse we study next week. But um I there's a preacher from the 1800s named Charles Spurgeon, um, and he's my favorite preacher, and so uh when I quote him, I go, Spurgeon quote, Spurgeon quote. Here's a Spurgeon quote for you. Love does not ask to have an easy life. Self-love makes an easy life its aim, but true love denies herself, sacrifices herself that she may win victories for God. And I love that. True love is not about self. He says, love bears all things. In Galatians chapter 6, verse 2, he's teaching us about it, and he says, bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. The law of Christ, I thought we were free from the law. I thought Jesus set us free from the law, absolutely. But then he said, I'm giving you a new law, but it's it's not really a law law, it's a it's my law, which is love other people as I have loved you, not love because it's the right thing to do. So there's a big difference. If you think you're you're you're gonna be a Christian and you're gonna love people because God commands you to love people, you're gonna fail miserably at loving people, and you're probably gonna end up being a big jerk. But if you become a Christian because you really believe God loves you, and you look at the evidence and you look at what Jesus does, and you and you're like, man, God really loves me, and you let that become your identity, then his love will flow out of you and through you. This bears another burden, can uh another uh love bears all things, can also be translated covers. Love covers all things. And in 1 Peter 4, 8, it says, Above all thing, above all things have fervent love for one another, for love will cover a multitude of sins. Well, what about other when when other people sin? Can I be mad at them then? Can I be angry with righteous anger? Maybe it's my spiritual gift to be a sin sniffer. Maybe you can be angry and not sin, but I haven't figured that one out yet. Um Jesus tells us how to handle when other people sin. He said, take care of the log that's in your own eye before you deal with the speck that's in someone else's eye. And then after you're done doing that, just love them. Just love them. Spurgeon quote, spurge and quote number two. This is a double spurgeon quote day, a D S Q D, as I like to call them. Love covers, he says. That is, it never proclaims the errors of good men. There are busybodies abroad who never spy out a fault in a brother, but they must hurry off to their next neighbor with the savory news. And then they run up and down the street as though they had been elected common criers. It is by no means honorable to men or women to set up to be common informers. Yet I know some who are not half as so eager to publish the gospel as to publish slander. Love stands in the presence of a fault with a finger on her lip. Wow. He's got some meaningful quotes. If you think about oysters, we were up at this thing last night. Anyone like oysters? Who likes oysters? Okay, you're a little weird. I I can't do it. And I eat almost anything, but I've been like, ooh, I don't know if I can do that. Um anyway, you know how when an oyster a clam pearls come from clams, right? Oysters? Is it oysters or clams? Oysters, okay. I'm not dumb. I just haven't been around the sea that much. We don't have a lot of oysters in Colorado. So but when that when we got Rocky Mountain oysters, that's a completely different thing. That is a completely different thing. Which I have not had those either. Um wow. Okay, so oysters, when they get an irritant in them, like a little piece of sand, um, you know, they they they turn that piece of sand into a beautiful pearl, they smooth it out, and I think that's like what love does when we get irritated. When that's that's how love can process through things is just cover it with love, cover it with the life of Jesus through prayer and agape love. You can turn the irritating things people do into a beautiful pearl. All right, the next thing we see, the next um angle is love believes all things. Agape love believes all things. Love chooses to believe the best about other people. Uh, this is more than just believing that people are good or that they didn't intend to sin, right? It's believing the gospel for people when it's difficult for them to believe the gospel, when it's hard for them to believe it. Can you believe that God is able and willing to work in someone's life even when you think they're beyond all hope and you think they're so dumb or so such a jerk or just they don't have the value in your eyes, right? Can you believe that if any man will humble themselves and become and exclusively trust in Jesus, that God will meet their need, forgive them, and transform them, that that he can do that by the power of his spirit, that's love believing all things. That means I can believe that God can love the worst person in the world. Agape love will believe that there is no one beyond God's grace. No one is too far, no one is too hardened, no one is too drunk, no one is too addicted for Jesus to save. Even you. You're not past Jesus saving. They might look like mountains in your mind and in your heart, you might feel, I'm never gonna get free of this. I'm telling you, Jesus will blow your ever-loving mind. Even your husband, God can work in their life, even your wife, even your cranky parent, even your wandering child, even your sworn enemy. Agape love chooses to believe the gospel for these people. Jesus can save them, and I'm gonna love them. While there's breath in your lungs, God will absolutely save anyone who calls out to them, calls out to him in faith in Jesus Christ. God will absolutely save you. He's saying, I am so ready to save you, I'm so willing to save you, and I'm so able to save you, but it has to be through my son Jesus. It's never through any philosophy, it's not through religion, it's not through this church, that church, it has to be Jesus, my son. That's it. It's exclusive. The offer is one ticket, one way. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, the life. I'm not one of many, I am the way. Love will believe on behalf of those who can't believe that yet. They're like, I'm I'm just lost, I don't know what to do. You'll get there. God loves you. We love you. We can tell them there is hope for them because Jesus is unfailing hope. In Mark chapter 2, there's this really interesting story. It says, They came to him, bringing a paralytic who is carried by four men, and they could not come near to him because of the crowd, so they uncovered the roof where he was, and when they had broken through, they let the bed down on which the paralytic was lying. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven you. And some of the scribes were sitting there and reasoning in their hearts, saying, What does this man speak blasphemies like this? Why does he do this? Who can forgive sins but God alone? But immediately Jesus, when he perceived in their spirit that they reasoned thus within themselves, he said to them, Why do you reason about these things in your hearts? Which is easier to say to the paralytic, Your sons are forgiving you, or to say, Arise, take up your bed and walk. But that you may know that the Son of Man has power on earth to forgive sins, he said to the paralytic, I say to you, Arise, take up your bed and go to your house. Immediately he rose, took up his bed, and went out in the presence of them all. So they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, We never saw anything like this. Satan wants us to despair, to give up, to say, Well, tough tough to be you. Sorry, you're paralyzed. Sorry. They can never change. You can't change. What can change? They won't ever get saved. That person is too far gone. Who have you given up on? Jesus, soften our hearts and teach us to pray for our enemies. Jesus, fill us with your love. Jesus, help us to have a heart that believes all things and the gospel for people. All right, the next thing we see is love hopes all things. So love has confidence in the future, not pessimism, right? When hurt, it doesn't say it's gonna be this way forever, it'll probably get worse. It hopes for that best because its hope is in God. Our confidence is in God's grace that he will heal us, that he will heal others. These are his promises, this is his work. He says, I'm gonna do great things through you. So you can cheer up, you can hope. In Isaiah chapter 61, it has the job description of Jesus when he would come, or we call him the Messiah. And so this is the job description of the Messiah. So these are all the things Jesus would do, written 600 years before Jesus was even born, and it says, The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me because the Lord has anointed me to preach good things to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to open in the prison to those who are bound, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of the vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, to console all who mourn in Zion, to give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit heaviness, that they may be called trees of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified. See, Jesus says, He will give forgiveness and a new heart. And when you believe that, that is the greatest courage you can ever show. It's not, let's just get through this. This life is gonna suck. Amen. It's my God is making all things new. And someday my faith will be sight. Someday I'll be able to see how he makes all things good and all things new and all things work together for the good of those who are loved by love God and called according to his purpose. I'll see it someday. But right now, we have to live by faith in that. And when we it's love, his love for us that causes this to be real in our hearts. Sometimes we wish we could see these things happen sooner, all the things Jesus promised. But hope would be nothing if we had it happen right away. So hope needs to be real by being delayed. The answer needs to be delayed in our life for a certain amount of time. And God is glorified when we choose to live by faith here in the difficulties, in the trial, in the trash that we live in. God is glorified when we fix our eyes on Him and say, My faith, my trust is in Him alone. Alright, the last one, the last angle we're looking at is that love endures all things. Any Cowboys fans in the house? I'm just saying, just asking. You guys, an illustration of God's enduring love. I love it. I love it. In two weeks, the Broncos play the Cowboys. It'll be an epic week of trash talk. And I'll take it. It's alright. We'll take it. Let's go. Let's see. All right, love endures all things. The greatness of agape love is to keep on bearing, keep on believing, keep on hoping, not giving up. I would say this agape love destroys your enemies by turning them into your friends. It destroys your enemies by making them your friends. Don't expect it to be easy to love. Enduring all things is gonna cost you probably all things. Just ask Jesus. In 2 Corinthians 8-9 it says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that through his poverty you might become rich. Oh, how much he gave up to give you grace, to set you free. Oh, that we could give up our whole lives. Oh, that we could give all our money and all our reputation and all our comfort to just honor Him. Let's hold nothing back. Let's hold nothing back. God doesn't need it. But boy does He deserve it. Our whole heart. He doesn't care about your money, He doesn't care about your possessions, He cares about the heart. There was a rich man and he came to Jesus and said, I'll do anything to follow you, and Jesus was like, No, you won't. How did Jesus know that? Because Jesus knew he didn't have the guy's heart. So Jesus said, Yeah, why don't you go sell all you have, give it to the poor, and then your heart could be mine. But right now you're you're possessed by your possessions. They own you instead of you owning them. I'd like to own you. I'd like to have your heart. What are we holding back from the Lord? You can't endure all things if you can't let go of all things. How do we gain this love? How do we how does this gift of a loving heart, this agape love, how do we get it in our lives? In Galatians 5, 22, it says, the fruit of the Spirit is love. And then it says joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such, there is no law. But I think the the fruit of the spirit, because it's singular, is love, and all those other things are descriptions of what love looks like. Love is a fruit. It's a gift, it's a fruit. Like we said last week, the spiritual love, the agape love that God wants to give us is a gift that He has already chosen to give you. But it's a living gift. It's a living gift, which means you have to abide in the living God to see his living fruit flow from your life. If I give you an apple tree, I don't like apples, peach tree, pear tree, ooh, I like pears. If I give you a pear tree and you're like, great, and you just throw it in your garage, it's never gonna produce pears, even though that's the purpose of it, and the gift was for you to have pears. But if you plant it in soil and you water it and it has sunlight and you put it in an environment for it to live, you will get living fruit from it. Yes, God has already given you an agape heart, He has given it to you. And some of us hide our agape heart in our garage of self-focused living. Instead of letting it be our life, saying, Jesus, my whole life is you, you are my whole life. I don't look to myself for anything. You can't just decide you want to love. That would be sourcing love through your flesh, and it would be a sad imitation of what this agape love we've been talking about really is. It has to be a fruit of the spirit, which means it can't be developed overnight. You're not going to become loving overnight. It's developed as you dig into your relationship with God, you read the word, you pray, and you believe the truths that God reveals to you by the spirit that lives inside you through his word. You listen at church to the message of the gospel and you believe it. This bears fruit in your life. You can't just decide I'm gonna be loving. That would be fleshly. In John 13, 34, it says, A new commandment I give you that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also love one another. See, his love to you is a gift delivered to you by his spirit, and you have to know his love before you can ever love anyone else with agape love. You have to know his agape love for you. You have to drink it before you can puke it. It's weird, but it works. In John 15, 12, he says, This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. Same thing again. This new law, this new commandment is nothing like the old law. The old law was based on what you can do. The new covenant of grace is about what Jesus has done for you and will do through you. We used to depend on ourselves to do God's will. You have to love other people. Love God, love others. That's what was the law. But the new commandment is I have loved you, so now you can love others when I live through you. You can depend on God's grace given through Jesus, and he will produce this love by his mighty power. But you can't do it by your own efforts. And then finally, in 1 John 4 12, no one has seen God at any time. But if we love one another, God abides in us, and his love has been perfected in us. Again, the only way to love one another with agape love is to receive his love for you. He abides in us because he loves us. He stays with you and he says, I'll never forsake you. I'm never gonna leave you. I won't. You screw up. Guess what? Probitiation has already happened. I'm not angry. I'm never gonna be angry at you. I'll be honest with you and I'll correct you and you'll have discipline in your life, but I'm not gonna ever do it out of anger. We never have to be afraid of our relationship with the Lord. He has washed us clean in his blood, and in the new covenant, he literally lives inside your pure body. He says he's cleansed your body. So I know that before Christ you slept with all kinds of things. Before Christ, you you did all kinds of drugs. Before Christ, you polluted your body. Jesus says, I have cleansed it. You're a virgin again in every sense. You are brand new, you are pure, you are holy, and nothing you do will change that. That is your identity. Even if you go back and mess around with the same stuff again, you're forgiven. And people are like, you can't say that because the people will just go keep sinning. And I'm like, lies. Tell them they're free. And God's love will transform their lives. When you understand that he's not angry with you, you're gonna run to him as a child will when they mess up. Agape love is the perfect expression of Jesus and the perfect proof that Jesus lives in you. So if you want proof that you're saved, you want proof that Jesus lives in you, agape love flowing out of your life is a great proof of that. But you can't produce that. You can only ask that it flows through. You can only give your body to Him. Jesus, here's my heart, here's my hands, here's my mind, here's my mouth, here's my feet, here's every part of me. I give them to you. I believe, Jesus, that you died on the cross and I was there with you. I was crucified with you, and my sin was destroyed on that cross, and you fully paid the price for it. You will never be angry with me because of the cross. And then you were died, and you died, and you were buried, and then you rose from the dead. And I believe that in your resurrection, I was raised with you, and your new life is now my new life. And so the heart that I now have is not the one I was born with, it's the new one that was your heart when you rose from the dead. That's the gospel. And you can't believe that and say, and I still want to go keep on sinning. You can't do it. It's his life becomes your life. Would you guys stand with me as we pray and as we're gonna close with a song? Jesus, there is a uh a peace for your people. There is blessings that we could never even name all the blessings. There is joy and there is love that we can show this world, but first, God, we have to accept and we have to receive that you love us and that you have done all that we could ever have needed. And you freely, freely, freely offer to forgive us and to live through us. Lord, I pray that we would choose to respond today with full surrender of our hearts. It is not about us, it is not about our reputation, it's not about our comfort, it's not about our plans, Jesus. Our lives belong completely, 100% to you, and we're gonna use every day that we have left on this earth to serve you, to glorify you, to love you, and to love the people whom you also love. And to invite as many people as we can to know that their forgiveness is real and that they can be adopted into the family of God. Jesus, fill us with your love. Jesus, we rejoice in your love. Jesus, comfort us with your love when we're going through pain and when we have things that are just terrible in our life. Love endures all things, and Jesus, you love us and you will never give up on us. We are grateful for that. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.