I currently have three amazing teenage daughters, and the topic of love pops up in conversation a fair amount. We chat about romantic love in fiction as well as real-life drama played out in their social circles. It is fun and heart-warming and sad sometimes too.  

I recently discovered that the Greek word for romantic love, eros, appears zero times in the New Testament. On the other hand, agape, the Greek word used to describe the love of God, is found 259 times in the New Testament.* I think a logical conclusion here is that our priority as believers is to pursue agape in our relationships, not eros. We are meant to know God’s agape love and then exemplify it to those around us. 

One of my favorite passages on this is 1 John 4:7-21 where we find 27 forms of the word agape. Simply put, God is love, and He loved us first. As a result, we experience love for God and love for others. How do we know what agape love is like? We look to Jesus, God’s Son, whom God sent to die for our sins so that we might live through Him. And as we love others sacrificially, God’s love is evident in our lives. God’s agape love also gives us eternal security diminishing the role of fear in our lives. How can we fear One who agape loves us and abides in us? 

So when I sit with my teenage daughters discussing the latest romantic tales, I will sometimes remind them that the love we should pursue is God’s love. Agape is an action not a feeling, and when we find our security in God’s agape love, we can love others no matter how we feel about them. We can love others who are not like us, who disagree with us, and who even hate us. And as we do this, we show our “cancel culture” world what God’s love looks like, and hopefully they, too, will want to know this agape loving God. 

*In His Image, Jen Wilkin, page 34