When Love Came Down: Understanding God's Agape

As we reach the final week of Advent, we arrive at perhaps the most profound theme of all: love. Not the fleeting, feeling-based love our culture celebrates, but something far deeper—the self-sacrificing agape love that brought God himself into our world as a vulnerable infant.

The Heart of Christmas

Christmas isn't just a heartwarming story about a baby in a manger. It's the moment when divine love broke into human history in the most unexpected way. The writer of 1 John captures this beautifully: "This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only son into the world that we might live through him."

This passage reveals something essential about God's nature—not just that God loves, but that God is love. It's at the core of his being. And when we want to understand what this love looks like with skin on, we look at Jesus.

A Different Kind of Love

The challenge we face when talking about love is that English uses one word to describe vastly different experiences. We say we love both our family members and our favorite foods. But the New Testament writers were more precise. When describing God's love, they used the Greek word agape—a self-sacrificing love that seeks the well-being of others regardless of the cost or response.

This stands in stark contrast to the self-focused love that dominates our world. During the Reformation, Martin Luther used a Latin term to describe what happens when love turns inward: incurvatus—love collapsed in on itself. Before the fall, humanity was "exalted and noble and generous," but sin caused us to shrink inward, falling under what one theologian called "the tyranny of self-love."

Our culture often operates on what might be called "enlightened self-interest"—we love others because it benefits us, because it feels good, because we hope to get something in return. But this kind of love isn't sufficient. It won't sustain us through decades of marriage, through caring for aging parents, through loving difficult neighbors, or through forgiving those who hurt us.

Love That Pursues

God's agape love does three transformative things. First, it pursues. Christmas demonstrates that love moved Jesus out of the safety of heaven into the battleground of our world. God didn't wait for us to get our act together. He took the first step toward us when we couldn't move toward him. He literally put skin in the game, entering our mess and brokenness.

This is what real love does—it moves toward, it risks, it shows up. Not for personal gain, but for the benefit of the one pursued, no matter the cost.

Love That Sacrifices

Second, God's love sacrifices and redeems. John reminds us: "This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."

Love doesn't operate from a distance. God came close to deal with our greatest problems—sin, death, and evil spiritual powers. Through Jesus' sacrificial work on the cross, these enemies have been defeated and our redemption secured. The kingdom doesn't triumph through violence or force, but through sacrificial love.

The cross doesn't exist without the cradle. The king moved toward us first by becoming a baby, then by inaugurating his kingdom through compassion and healing, before ultimately giving himself to defeat our enemies once and for all.

Love That Transforms

Finally, God's agape love transforms. John writes: "Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."

This is the vision Jesus had for his followers—that we would be a loved people who become a loving people. He commanded his disciples: "Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

An ancient church father observed what marked early Christians in the eyes of their enemies: "Only look, they say, look how they love one another." For thousands of years, God has been doing this transforming work in his people, putting himself on display through their unusual capacity to love.

Opening Ourselves to Transformation

This kind of love isn't something we can manufacture through human effort. Our natural loves aren't self-sufficient. We need something outside ourselves to break into our insufficient human loves and turn us outward from ourselves.

Agape love only grows in us as we trust Jesus with our lives and open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit. When we're born again of God, we receive his love and it begins to grow in us. The Spirit transforms our selfishness into selfless love that we can display in our relationships.

This requires honest self-examination. Is there anyone God has been asking you to pursue or sacrifice for, but you're not willing? Is something in you resisting God's desire to pour selfless love out through you?

Living as Instruments of Love

When we partner with the Holy Spirit, we become instruments through which God loves the world. We pray for healing because God's love restores. We show compassion because God's love sees. We practice generosity because God's love gives. We seek justice because God's love sets things right. We share the gospel because God's love saves.

When we forgive, serve, bless, welcome the outsider, love our neighbors, and care for the poor, we're not just doing religious activities. We're expressing the agape nature of the God who first came to us and for us.

The Profound Truth of Christmas

Underneath every Christmas celebration is this profound truth: love came down. Costly love. Life-giving love. The kind of love that pursues us when we're running, redeems us when we're broken, and transforms us from the inside out.

This is who God is. This is what his kingdom looks like. And this is how we are called to love—not with sentimental feelings or enlightened self-interest, but with the self-sacrificing agape that only comes from knowing the God who is love himself.



As we celebrate Christmas this year, may we open ourselves afresh to this transforming love, receiving it deeply and allowing it to flow through us to a world desperate to see what real love looks like.

Understanding God’s Agape Love at Christmas

Hit play to listen to the sermon this blog is based on