Love Life

I love life.   

I love the life that God has created you and me to live life to the fullest.   My life is not perfect but it is full of God’s love, peace and joy.  I am starting a 31 day commitment to write every day 500 words. 

Today I will write about LOVE.  There are several kinds of love.  

We are all familiar with the Eros love.  That love that is promoted on commercials, movies and everywhere we look these days.  It is a love of sexual attraction.  The love between a man and woman that brings forth marriage and children (or not).  

While this Eros love may be the beginning of a relationship, it will not sustain the relationship through the think and thin of life.  It will not be the glue that holds you together and committed to each other.  

Then there is the Philia love. It is the love of friends.  This is where Philadelphia gets it name, City of Brotherly Love.  Friends love is important in our lives.  Proverbs 17:17 says that a friend loves at all times and they are there to help when trouble comes.  It is also said that you have to be friendly to have friends.  The love of friends is a love that all people need in their lives.

  

Eros and Philia love can be looking for the return of that love as a means of keeping it alive.  We need a higher powerful love to be that glue to hold us together when the going gets tough.  Human love falls short of this quality.

The love that brings the most peace in your life is the Agape love. It is a selfless love.  Agape is the love that loves at all times no matter what.  It is God’s kind of love.  Love that is patient and kind, love that sticks it out when others quit, love that doesn’t go tell others the mess that was made and how someone has failed. 

C.S. Lewis referred to Agape as "gift love," the highest form of Christian love.  

This is the love of God toward man.  He loved us even when were were very unlovely, even when we reject him.  He still loved us.  His love is so great that He sent His son to live on earth.  Jesus so loved us so much that he left the comfort of heaven to live in this miserable world.  And under the Roman Empire life was truly miserable for the Jewish people.  That is the people group God chose to be where His son would be born.  This love invites us to him.  Invites us in to live a life full of peace, joy and love in His Spirit.  When we live out of the Agape love that God supplies to our hearts we can be the friend at all times.  We can have a lasting marriage.  We can live positive in a negative world.

Once we have received this Agape love into our hearts from God then we have to learn to live with it.  Learn to live with others in mind instead of ourselves.  Agape love looks out of others more and trusts God to look out for us.  This is a selfless love.  One that doesn’t have to have the last word in a disagreement.  One that doesn’t push to get their way but wants what is best for the other person.  Just think if we could live life in this Agape love with our spouses we would have stronger marriages and less divorce.  Because if both parties would be living in Agape love toward one another we would be looking out for the the best for each other.