Love, Love, Love, Love
In various places throughout the Bible, but especially in the original New Testament Greek, we find four differing types of love, usually in different contexts.
However, within our marriages all can be given and experienced. As an example, with our spouse, we can experience the philia love of friendship, eros erotic sexual love, and agape sacrificial love. In fact, healthy marriages should exhibit all these forms of love.
Here’s a brief summary of the four different types of love in the Greek:
- Eros: Within marriage, is an exclusive mutually romantic, physical and sensual love accompanied with a sense of intimate sharing, affection and the wholly giving of oneself to your spouse
- Philia: Brotherly love that is characterized by strong and close friendship
- Storge: Natural affection, like a mother towards a child, or love for a sibling
- Agape: The sacrificial love towards another and is love’s highest form
It is important to realize that there exists an all too common erroneous belief that, as the marriage relationship matures, friendship will greatly replace romance, sexual love, or intimacy. No form of love should replace any other. All forms of love originate with God and are part of His plan for our lives and marriages.
Contentment and security in your marriage exists only when love is balanced. The absence of one form of love will usually be accompanied by one partner’s dissatisfaction with the state of their marriage and can lead to emotional withdrawal or even divorce.
One of the four forms of love, even though it does not replace or diminish another type of love, casts a much longer shadow of importance on our marriages. Without learning to love in this way, your marriage will flounder and never reach the heights that our Creator expects.
To love with agape (sacrificial love) is the eternal and divine calling to love as God loves. This love requires us to be in daily relationship with God so that we can allow God’s Holy Spirit within us to motivate, empower, and provide us with a desire to love unselfishly. The ultimate example of agape was demonstrated in the suffering and death of our Savior on Calvary.
Jesus, recognizing our human inability to love in this way, instructed His followers to wait to be baptized in the Holy Spirit before they were to take the Gospel to the lost peoples of the world. He knew the kind of agape love they would need through the power of the Holy Spirit – so they would be willing to pay the sacrificial cost of becoming martyrs.
For John baptized with water, but in a few days, you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.
Acts 1:5, New International Version (NIV)
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Acts 1:8 (NIV)
The Holy Spirit, which dwells in us, is our source of this same very special form of love that we must bring into our marriages. Agape in our marriages should enable us to “have the very best marriages on the planet.”** All God requires of us is to acknowledge our inability to love as He loves, and to ask for the Holy Spirit’s empowerment to fulfill our call: to love our wife or husband “as Christ loves the church and gave himself up for her.” (Ephesians 5:25)
Ask now, He is listening!
Love, Ted and Esther
**As quoted in The Fulfilled Marriage: The Three Doors, Ted Dean, Amazon, 2020 (click link for more information)
