E. DuBose Post 9: Choice Topic 2

18APR12

Agape

Agape is a word to describe unconditional love.  A self sacrificial love that is almost altruistic.  Agape is always a positive and never a negative thing.  Lewis says that agape is the most natural of the loves, but I disagree.  For me, agape was embodied in Jesus.  Agape, to me, is a perfect love.  As humans, we are inherently sinful, so how is it that we can have true agape -- the perfect love?  We aim and strive for it but by no means is it natural.  Our natural tendencies are often malicious and evil due to our natural tendency to sin.  We are born into sin, it is a human condition that no one gets out of.  We are saved from being bound by sin and we are forgiven by the grace of God but it still isn't a natural tendency to have true and consistent agape for others.  Agape is loving your worst enemy.  Agape is dying so that your worst enemy could live.  I was just thinking about this sort of agape love with my fiance. The two of us decided to give a friend something of significant worth -- and it was hard to do it because we are sometimes selfish.  But we did it because we knew it was an act of love and we were doing it for her and not ourselves.  Then we both commented on "what if."  "What if," this friend of ours, wasn't a friend.  What if she was just a casual acquaintance or even someone we disliked or even worse couldn't stand to be around?  Would we have still given the gift?  I honestly, would love to say yes but I couldn't.  And that was just a gift -- what if it was my life or something much more costly to myself?  It revealed our unnatural state of loving in a pure and simplistic way -- without condition like Jesus did.

Friendship to me is the most natural because it has benefits.  We are selfish creatures so we strive for things that benefit us.  We are not loners, as humans, but social.  We need the affection of others.  We need the approval of others.  We need others to keep us in line.  We need companionship.  Unfortunately, due to our selfish natures as sinful human beings, we strive for friendships -- normally -- to benefit ourselves.  So that we have someone to talk to and to affirm us and to love us.  And all of those things should be satisfied within our relationship with God.  Ideally, we should obtain friendships for the benefit of others.  We learn to do this, we learn to be a "friend."  Of course, some people never really learn what it means to be a friend -- they have friends, and need their friends, but they are not truly "friends" back to the other person.

After all, love for humans, is "devouring."  So, inherently we have the tendency to love others for selfish gain and we need God to constantly change and soften our hearts in order to love people in the agape way.