Last Five Concepts of Agape Love

Protects

Question 3. God will help us accomplish the last five concepts of Agape love: protects, trusts, hopes, perseveres and never fails. These are something entirely new. They show us the gift that God gives us. He enables us to be these things. We cannot do these on our own ability and strength. They all come literally from the person of the living God within us. This Christlikeness is God giving us these abilities, because of who God is. One of the strengths is the ability to offer protection. When I think of protection, I think of the duties I do around the house, taking care of the car, and doing maintenance. That's only half of it, though. Let me read you what the lexical definition is: protects means a thatch, a deck of a building or a roof. A thatch is a thick roof that's not made out of plywood. It's most often in different types of environments where that's all they have. The New Testament definition means to preserve or protect by covering, hence, to keep off of another something which threatens. This concept means to hold out against, or to endure or to bear or forbear for another. As I mentioned, these last five elements of agape love are often misunderstood. This basic assumption often is that we're supposed to be good enough, strong enough, smart enough to offer protection, to be trustworthy, to provide hope, to for to persevere, and absolutely never fail another person, if we really love them. The reality here is that because we're all sinners depraved and selfish, we need God. We need His righteousness and His person. That's what protection is about. It's the reality that if I allow God to live within me, then I will offer protection. 

 Because I like Harley Davidson motorcycles so much, one of the ways that God within me protects my wife, is that I don't take the thousands of dollars to buy the Harley that I'd like to buy. Instead of that money going to a local Harley Davidson dealer, it goes to the utility company, the grocery store, mortgage, clothing stores, and health care so that she is healthy, well fed and clothed. That's one form of protection. It's whatever I do in order to provide for the needs of those that I love: my family, my children, and others. 

There's another side to protection, and that side is the spiritual side. See if this makes sense to you, something needs to protect my wife from my rudeness that previously I've modeled for you. I have gotten the sarcastic tone in my voice. I've played the victim. You see I am still capable of those things in my humanness. But there is a restriction that I have voluntarily placed upon my soul controlling my mouth, my emotions and my mind. It’s a restriction for the protection, the roof, the deck of the building over those I love. The restraint is my submission to God. That's my wife’s protection: her spiritual protection from my rudeness, pride and boasting. If they're gone in the sense that the restrictions are there, the work of God's going on, then she's safe. Because I'm not perfect. Obviously, I am not in heaven where I will be perfect through the glorification that God will give me. While I’m still human and learning, she still needs protection. I promise to stay under that submission. I promise to allow God to continue to work that through me towards others. It also means that I believe that God will offer that protection through me. That requires me to be in an active relationship with Him, depending on the Holy Spirit, God’s word, and prayer regularly. My wife depends on my active relationship to God. I likewise believe the same thing about her. The closer I'm going to get to a person, the more there must be a relationship between God and that person. 

And I want to give you another example that occurred in a counseling session. A man who was very insecure who had a very protective mother who was dominating and controlling. His father was verbally abusive. He grew up angry, yet passive. He never really rebelled or told his mother to leave him alone. In his adult life, he took on that aggressive role from his mother and married a woman that was quiet, withdrawn, and passive. His pattern of being dominant, loud, and aggressive, caused his wife so many problems that they had separated twice, seen a psychiatrist and another counselor before coming to me for counseling. He was so aggressive with me, and so dictatorial and dominating towards her, I had to ask them to separate again, in order to stop fighting. 

This was getting absolutely nowhere. They weren't concentrating on any of the things discussed in counseling. They did agree to separate, though he did so reluctantly. She was glad for the relief. I took them through the process of what love is, and went through their questionnaire results. We finally got to the point in the marriage counseling to talk about their problems. I had them each make a list so that we could go through them using the process of Patience you learned earlier. Basically, state the facts, emotions and the spiritual perceptions that you have. He didn't get into that at all. He got to his issue, and in a loud voice said about three words. His wife just locked up tighter than a drum, put her hands on the arms of the chair, white knuckles and face drained out white as a sheet. Tears welled up in her eyes. And her basic thoughts, I'm sure, this will happen again. But he protected her. He said three words, stopped, dropped his gaze, lowered his head and got quiet. After about four or five seconds, he let out a shout of pain and raised his eyes up to meet mine, and it shocked me. Out of the corners of his mouth, blood began to trickle. This is an extreme situation. It's the same principle of protection, but obviously this was a really intense situation. The crisis point for this man boiled down to either scream and yell or submit to God. And in his case, he chose to submit to God and bit his tongue.

I asked his wife what he just did, and she said, “Well, it's obvious he bit his tongue, but I'm not sure why.” He spoke up and explained, “I've come to the point where I'm understanding what I've received. That Jesus is righteous and pure and holy, and he lives inside me. If I continue these old behaviors, then I'm going to discredit and disgrace God. It's almost like I'm going to slap him in the face, and use this body that I'm in in order to do things that he wouldn't. God showed me that last week, and I made a decision that even if I had to bite my tongue or bite my tongue off, I just was not going to continue to do the things I'd done. I asked God for the strength to stop it, when I lowered my head. I prayed for Jesus to help me with my mouth and for the strength to be quiet. I knew I had to do something on my part to offer her protection and to be godly. I just bit my tongue. I honestly would be willing to be mute, if that's what it took so that I could show her that Jesus Christ is alive in me and to protect her from my verbal abuse.” 

That's extreme, but that's really what love does. Love protects. Love places a covering over the head or a deck under their feet, so that words like rain that stings or snow don't beat up another person. So that we don't beat ourselves up, we rely on God to be our power to protect. In a relationship, when the offended spouse practices patience and says, “Forgive me, I'm sorry,” and comes back later with an explanation of her facts, feelings, and spiritual perspective, it finally clicks with the offending spouse that he just can't keep doing the junk of not demonstrating love: pride, rudeness, self-seeking, easily angered, keeping a record of wrong. The one that's willing changes, and that then gives the other person a clearer picture of self, and a second choice. You don't have to live angry. This protection is essential. This behavior shows over and over what love is, and how it is possible to do. The other person begins to have enough confidence and trust to face his or her own places of not loving. You don't force the other person to change. The presence of God in us empowers us to offer protection.

Trusts

Question 4. Love always trusts. To me trust is paying back what is borrowed, taking responsibility for breaking something I loaned you. I can believe what you tell me, and talk to you in confidence. And the lexical definition says that “love always trusts” means to be trustworthy, genuine or unadulterated. The word unadulterated can mean unadorned, not made out to be something more than what a thing is. It's just plainly consistent or the same, genuine. The New Testament definition reads like this: to believe, also to be persuaded of, and hence to place confidence in. That's very important. To place confidence in, to trust signifies reliance upon, rather than mere credence. It also cross- references to commit and in trust. Let's break down “to place confidence in, to rely upon, and not to have just mere credence”. Those encapsulate what trust is about: to believe or to be persuaded of, and hence or therefore or it makes sense to place confidence in. If I tell you I am trustworthy and you just met me, you're not going to believe that until you see it. That's not skepticism or judgment; that's discernment. Judgment is to condemn, but discernment is to observe with God confirming in your soul, mind, and consciousness, that you are correct. In other words, you seek God first and refuse to hinder God in giving you His perspectives by jumping to conclusions, being emotional or making assumptions. So, trustworthiness is built over time. The first step to being trustworthy is accepting Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I'm regenerated, born again and trustworthy because in that instant, I have become a new creation. Because God's trustworthy, I am also. In most relationships trust has not been developed, because of the lack of Agape love in the relationship. It's not something that you can automatically assume. Using the process of patience over time will build the evidence that the person is trustworthy because of God's presence. 

You also have to find your own source of being trustworthy. To rely upon something is much different than placing credence in it. The word credence means that you have a belief of the truthfulness, the reliability, the rightness, the honesty of a given thing. But to rely on it is going to demand more evidence of trust. Perhaps the best example is bungee cord diving.  Bungee cords are just stretchy cords, usually with rubber inside of them used to tie down things on a car or motorcycle rack. People wear a harness attached to a bungee cord and the cord to a bridge, and they jump off the bridge. They know how far this cord will stretch, and the distance between the bridge and the water. They are going to rely on the sturdy stretch of the bungee and that they'll bounce back up. Watching them do that, I can place credence in the safety of bungee jumping. That'll probably work. But credence is not the same as trusting enough to put on the harness, connect to the bridge and jump off! 

To rely on something, you must have ultimate confidence in the object of your trust. When you have a trust in God that's more than credence, then you rely on him to enable you to obey Him through the process of patience. For example, many marriages have one spouse who is willing to work on changing and one who is not. In one case the wife controlled him a lot. She was opposed to anything spiritual, which meant she wanted to avoid her own need to change. The husband was unwilling to trust God enough to confront her with his facts, and feelings. And he kept saying to me over and over, “If I do that, if I'd say that, she would never respond. This wouldn't work. She's not open to God. Don't talk to her about God.” He told me that is saved, but he doesn't place his reliance on God who saved him. His trust is not based in God, and because of that, he's not trustworthy to his wife. Yet he wants her to be trustworthy to him. Trust requires a relationship to God that produces enough confidence in him, to rely on him for my life and well-being. So that when I'm troubled, frightened or hopeless, I go to the place of my trust and I ask God to help me. Relying on God makes me trustworthy. When you try to get people to build trust, you must focus them on the process of patience: “Yes, you had a problem. What did you do? Did you think? Did you pray? How did you respond? What did God tell you, what did you say to the person? What did you hear from the person?”  

For example, one particular husband had been very insecure, and it had manifested itself by his anger towards me. He's one of the persons that pounded the walls, slammed the door so hard that part of my overhead lights fell out of the ceiling and shattered. His anger culminated in threats of suicide. This large man (six foot eight, 250 pounds) stood up and yelled, “I'm going to beat you to death. You've ruined my life (and many other things).” I looked up at him and I said, “Larry, you got a problem here. You either need to smack me in the face or go sit down. If I get up, you will still have a lack of trust in God. And it comes out when you throw things, scream and yell at your wife, kick down doors, threaten people and tell them you're gonna beat them to death. Now hit me or sit down.” He stood there, shook for a minute, sat down, and cried. I prayed with him, put my arm around him, and gave him some Kleenex. I said, “Wipe your eyes, brother, and turn on your brains. And let's get this problem fixed by continuing to work on why you don't trust God.” Eventually over time, his trust transferred over to God, and he ceased to be so frightened and insecure.  He learned to go to God when he'd become troubled, by stepping back from his emotions and working with God. This couple finally got to the place where they knew how to work the process of patience and communicated more effectively. They agreed to spend time together outside of counseling. They had been out shopping for several hours, and had some problem or disagreement. They both recognized that they needed to stop and work this through disagreement using the steps of patience. They told each other their facts and feelings and what they perceived in each other. They recognized the need to pray, so they walked to different ends of the parking lot from each other and prayed. Each seeking wisdom, understanding and insight from God, by asking God to help them understand. God spoke to them separately. They walked back from the corners of the lot, and in the middle of a snowbank in the middle of a winter, spoke to each other in love and said, here's what God said, and here's what God told me. I understand. You understand? Here's how I think we can fix it. What do you think? Yes, I agree. And they were so thrilled with how this had worked for the first time. And they had lived 16 or 17 years of marriage and three kids before learning to live out their love for each other. They called me, and just bubbled over with, “It worked. You're right. God is that real. He did help us. In the middle of the lot, we found answers. We feel good, we're close to each other. We're gonna make it. We're okay!” They did reconcile and have discipled a lot of people. They owned this idea of trust. If they trusted God, obeyed God, relied on God, and had confidence in God, then that trust would allow each to see that God was in charge so each was trustworthy. They could have disagreements without feeling like everything was awful, and there was no hope for the relationship. 

Hopes

Question 5. I just mentioned the word hopes. When I think of hope, I think of cliff hangers in one cartoon series in the 1960s. Rocky and Bullwinkle had a story of Pauline who had been tied to the railroad tracks by the villain, Snidely Whiplash who wore a tall silk hat, a long dark coat with tails, dark pants and a long handlebar mustache. He was rubbing his hands together and laughing at what was going to happen to Pauline. With a train coming we have no hope for her escape. But a Canadian Mounty, Dudley Do-Right rode up on his horse called Steed to the rescue. With Snidely Whiplash watching, Dudley swept Pauline off the tracks, tied up Snidely in one fell swoop, one quick action. Snidely Whiplash gives the typical response, “Curses! Foiled again!” With her arms around Dudley, she'd sigh, “My hero!”

It seems a lot of Christians think about hope like what is demonstrated in this cartoon. They think of hope as Jesus being Dudley, the Christian being Pauline, and Snidely being Satan in difficult life situations. They live feeling opposed by Satan, and they spend their Christian life constantly being rescued at the last minute by Jesus. Their Christianity seems to be a roller coaster ride between the worst crisis they're in at the time, and then the saving by the Lord. They go from peaks, “God saved me, praise God!” to pits, “Oh, God, what am I going to do? Everything's terrible. I'm scared to death. Here we go again.” When we look at what hopes means, what love means, what God is like, he isn't a bit like that. He doesn't work with us from crisis to crisis. We sort of do that to him, I think. But that's not his design. That's not his intent. He wants us to have consistency and balance. He doesn't want us to be peaks and pits Christians. He wants us to live in the plateaus and in the meadows and in the broad, open places where there's freedom and liberty, and we love and serve a God who’s the same yesterday, today and forever. 

The lexical definition of “Hope” says to expect or confide or to have a thing hoped for, or to trust. The New Testament Word application is going to say that hope means to have a favorable and confident expectation in regard to the unseen and the future. To hope is going to have a happy anticipation of good, or to have a ground upon which hope is based, or an object which is fixed upon; which really is Jesus. And hope does things. Hope helps a person to endure under a trial. It anchors a soul or sustains power in the midst of the storms of life. When I think of hope, I think of having this confidence, this favorable expectation in something that's unseen and unknown. In other words, the storm or problem hasn't happened yet, but hope believes that God plans to be with us through them. They're places where God's saying to us, “Let's go through this together. Let's find out what's wrong. Let me help you change, or let me use you to help somebody else change.”  Because we're born into a world where God is not being obeyed, there are all kinds of problems that we come nose to nose with. When we do that, this idea of hope is critical. 

Let's take that last example of Larry and his wife. Because their emotions were in charge they were in a mess. The situation seemed to be very difficult and almost impossible to resolve. They didn't see any solution, so their hope for resolution had to be transferred from their way of acting to asking God to show them the way to find an answer. Their hope had to be focused on the promise of God to help. Remember the lexical and New Testament definitions: to have confidence or favorable expectation in a given situation. Each had to say to God, “I have confidence in my relationship to you. You will empower me even though I don't see what's going to happen or how it's going to work out. You will empower me to be like you, to be literally, patient, kind and so on. You'll empower me to say, give me time to think and pray. My facts are, my emotions are, you're right. I'm sorry, forgive me. I'm not mad.” All those things that involve being obedient to God and loving God's way. They also had to have a hope that their anchor, which was God's power, God's love, God's grace was immovable, no matter what was done around him, said, felt, or the situation, their anchor was immovable. That's the means by which, in the work setting, working with kids, somebody takes opposition to you, or whatever, you are empowered to continue to obey God, and deal with the thing his way. Larry and his wife had that hope, because Larry found his hope, for example, the night I said, “Either smack me or sit down”. God met him in his mind and soul, and in that instant, he didn't have to continue those behaviors anymore. He still has those tendencies and personality, but the depth of the insecurity, began to be surrendered to God. He has grown progressively so that his security now is largely placed on God, and he's working on other areas as God directs day by day. And that's what hope has to be, not a tragic cliffhanger, but the reality of God, the confidence in God, the anchor of God, doing what you should do without seeing the outcome. You need to do this long enough to see it. Build a track record, in the essence of submission, even when it looks like the craziest thing in the world that you could possibly do through patience and confrontation. 

Copyright 1987, 1990, 1993 by Daniel D. Wilkinson. All rights reserved. For more information concerning this material, write to:
The Biblical Christian Counseling Ministries, Inc., 2730 Radcliffe Dr., Florissant, MO 63031.
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