I can’t help it but since last night I was humming this song that became so popular in the ‘90’s by Kathy Troccoli titled Stubborn Love”. In which, part of the lyrics goes like this:
It’s Your stubborn love that never lets go of me;
I don’t understand how You can stay;
Perfect love embracing the worst in me;
And You never let me go, I believe I finally know;
I can’t live without Your stubborn love.
What a way to describe a love that is so pure and perfect – STUBBORN. An adjective that has no known origin, showing a dogged determination not to change especially in spite of good reasons to do so. But, when used to describe God’s love, this adjective never negates the noun it is describing – because obviously there is no word that will make justice on loving the unlovely before they become loveable.
This is what Paul writes in Romans: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly … . God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son.
Unlovely things must be deeply loved before they become loveable. Spirituality somehow severed from this crowning virtue of love – loving the unlovable. John says, “We love because he first loved us.” We know we’ve passed from death to life, we know we’ve made that enormous leap, we know we’ve actually crossed over, if we love each other. Paul talks about putting on love over every other virtue that you can add—like a robe that wraps around them, put on love. In 1 Peter, Peter says, “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” He says love is the crowning virtue.
The word that Peter uses for love is agape, a word the New Testament writers made famous. It wasn’t really used and didn’t even have a particularly positive connotation until the biblical writers got a hold of it and used it, in numerous contexts, to describe the love of God and the love we’re to show as we grow in our knowledge and experience of God.
When you think about it, most love that operates in the human realm is conditional. It’s an if/then. If you love me back or if you do nothing to forfeit my love, or if you’re beautiful or attractive, if you’re something, then I will love or continue to love. The way human love (and most love) tends to operate is that there is a feeling of attraction, thankfulness, or some kind of emotion, and the fruit of that emotion is a decision: “Because I feel this way, I will love you.” The decision can transcend the emotion, but it’s never very far from that emotion. It’s the “if” thing: “I feel attraction; therefore I choose to love you. If I stop feeling attraction, my love will maybe shrink in proportion to that.”
What agape does is completely reverse the terms of that. Agape is not emotionless; it’s just that the emotion follows the decision. In other words, the emotion is a fruit of the decision. There’s a choice that’s been made: I choose to love. On the basis of that choice, emotion rises. But the choice is fundamental. The choice is a thing that’s in place regardless of the emotion. The emotion rides on the decision.
Now here’s where agape gets very interesting: It’s far more STUBBORN than simply that I choose to love and therefore feel loving. It actually pursues the object of its love. It is LOVING even in the face of resistance, even in the face of behavior where another emotion might be more expected. So agape will love in the face of rebellion, in the face of rejection, in the face of rank badness. It’s this amazing form of love that has made a decision, and the decision is final. It’s set. On the basis of that decision, whether it’s met with loving, good behavior or not, it continues to pursue in love.
That’s how we normally talk about agape, and that’s a good way to talk about it. But here’s something that I think is an even a simpler way to understand it: Agape is unprovoked love. Normally, when we hear of something unprovoked, we think of anger, attack, aggression, or violence. Agape works on the same principle—just in the opposite direction. As with unprovoked violence, when we seek to understand unprovoked love, we look for the explanation not in the object of love, but in the one who is loving. We say there must be something going on in them, something deep down, that accounts for this kind of act.
What I want to help us understand is that there are three contexts where this love—agape, loving as God loves—has to be present in us or else we default to mere human love. The three groups of people for whom we need agape love are the losers, the winners, and the enemies. If you don’t understand what agape love is, and you don’t allow the love of Jesus Christ to flow into and through you, then you will be fine as long as everything is copasetic. As long as love’s coming back to you, as long as you can find beautiful creatures to love, you’ll do just fine. But the minute you bang up against a winner, a loser, or an enemy, you’re in trouble. You don’t have agape.
I think one of the most remarkable biblical stories we have of agape love is the story of David and Jonathan. Saul, the father of Jonathan, was David’s rival. He was feeling eclipsed; he was feeling in the shadows. He does what you do when you have a most of these in your presence—you try to throw a spear at them, in some metaphorical or real way. You try to destroy the beauty and the giftedness of the David in your midst, because he makes you feel inferior. That was Saul.
Jonathan, Saul’s son, had more to lose than Saul did. He was the prince. He was the one who was actually going to be supplanted by David; he would not inherit the throne because of David’s greatness. And Jonathan did everything that David did: he knew the art of war; he knew the art of wooing; he knew the art of leadership. Everywhere that David was good, Jonathan was good and had aspirations. It’s just that David was better.
David did it better, yet Jonathan became David’s biggest champion. He actually made enormous sacrifices for the sake of advancing David’s cause. I’ll tell you why: because he saw it as God’s cause.
You know what the opposite of love is? It is not hate. It’s fear. John says this in 1 John 4:18: ” … Perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” Fear will block the love of God infusing you and coming out of you. Fear has to do with punishment. Fear has to do with: “You don’t measure up. You’re not worth it. If we really knew you, we wouldn’t like you.” That’s fear. Yet the reality is: “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” Jesus Christ went to Calvary: “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly … . God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
