Agape Love: The Transformative Power of Divine Love

Without agape, even the most impressive spiritual gifts and acts of sacrifice are rendered meaningless. Agape love is patient, kind, and devoid of envy or pride. It is not self-seeking or easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. This love rejoices with the truth and always protects, trusts, hopes, and perseveres. [00:05:38]

Agape is divine life; it is divine power. It isn't that you have to choose between agape and the other things. Double things are fine if they are under the control of agape. Now then, here comes agape: love suffers long and is kind. Now, for many of us folks in our religious circles, that's enough to get us off the train right there. [00:06:03]

Love is like that. You take love into your life, and you allow it to penetrate your mind and your body and your social setting. You subject your will to love. That's the center of it. We should have said that's the Executive Center. But as you do this and you live with it, it takes over your whole life. [00:11:50]

You have to become the kind of person who would not find it interesting, and you're not going to do that by deciding one day, "I'm not going to be interested in that." You do that by coming to think in a different way about yourself. I mean, what are you thinking about yourself when you engage in pornography? [00:13:26]

Love comes in and seeks what is good, not what you want. That in itself is a great shift because you seek what is good and not what you want. And now then, once you get settled in seeking what is good, you can go back in many cases to ones that are legitimate and subordinate them. [00:17:49]

Salvation is a life. It is a life that is tied into God's life. You are born from above. That's how you enter. That's one of Jesus's descriptions of entering the kingdom. You have to be born from above. That means that now you take on a different life. [00:33:13]

Life is self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining activity. Life always occurs in an environment from which the living thing takes in nourishment. Now, just briefly illustrate it in ways that you can fill out. A child soon learns what it is for their goldfish to die, and that goldfish, when it dies, that's the end of its self-initiating, self-directing, self-sustaining activity. [00:34:12]

You are taking in life from above, and that is absolutely crucial now if you are going to live the life of love in the kingdom of God. And then when you are going to teach others to do the things that Jesus said, you're going to teach them how to do the same thing. [00:52:32]

I have set the Lord always before me. He is at my right hand; I shall not be moved. See, that's another one of those great verses like Joshua 1:8 that just says volumes. How did you set the Lord all you all before you? Well, there's something to be learned there. [00:50:17]

When you do that, when you set the Lord always before you, you are consuming the fuel of a godly life. That's what you're doing. You are refueling in flight. You know, some years ago, they invented these with robots that, when their batteries were running down, they would just go plug themselves in until they got recharged. [00:50:17]

The Psalms are full of that, of course. The first Psalm, "Blessed is the man," and he goes on to say essentially what is said in Joshua 1:8. But now my point in all of this, don't please don't lose it, is you are taking in life. You are taking in life from above. [00:52:32]

You have to have a vision to do that. You have to have a body that's not already cursed them before you start thinking about it too. But you're probably okay on that. And so if one has a problem, I mean, take a case where you're really injured, like what someone has done. [00:56:59]