| Agape Love and Reconciliation |
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Agape love, coupled with forgiveness, is the key to opening the door of reconciliation.
First, Father-God offers that agape love and reconciling forgiveness to you, as you face the painful circumstances caused by your offender’s sin.
God’s heart-and-soul work in your life prepares you for the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18).
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Please read the first five articles
in this how to forgive series
before continuing with this article.
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PREPARED
FOR
WHAT?
”Whenever someone strives to love with the love of God,
they enter into an endeavor that has more possibility of failure than any other enterprise in life.
“God calls us to love,
but love is developed over a lifetime of struggling to comprehend the personality of God who pursues us with relentless passion.
“The Lord simply asks the ill-prepared pilgrim to walk by faith in the understanding that He will provide.
“On the other hand, the journey is in itself a preparation where each experience is cumulatively used to prepare our hearts for the next
turn in the path.
“He promises we will never be given more than we are prepared to handle (1 Corinthians 10:13),
although at any one point, we might be tempted to differ.” Bold Love
Dr. Dan B. Allender
Dr. Tremper Longman III
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What is the culmination of this preparation process of learning to forgive?
His agape love and forgiveness does not give you all the answers, courage, faith, and love you think you need.
You will not…
- have confidence in yourself (Philippians 3:3).
- love perfectly, like God does. You will make mistakes! Expect that.
However, His agape love and forgiveness does prepare you for battle (Ephesians 6:11-20)!
You will…
- trust that God will provide for you what you need as you engage in this battle of learning how to forgive, the battle for restored relationship.
- proceed with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12), always evaluating your dynamic circumstances as you move forward in offering agape love and reconciling forgiveness to your offender.
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WILL
YOU
JOIN
HIM
IN
BATTLE?
Battle Against What?
As you are learning how to forgive, you will battle in two ways:
- Against your inner being (Matthew 7:5, Romans 7:21-24, Ephesians 4:22, Colossians 3:9), as God continues the sanctification process in your life.
- Against sin [and sometimes evil*] in others (Ephesians 6:12).
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*Important Note:
If you have been the victim
of childhood abuse
or cult leadership,
please see the note in the
yellow box on this page.
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Battle For What?
And you will be open for His Spirit to use you in the battle for the fallen heart (Jeremiah 17:9):
- As a minister of reconciliation to God (2 Corinthians 5:20).
- As a laborer in childbirth until Christ is formed in the life of the offender (Galatians 4:19)
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Miraculously, because you are experiencing life in the light of His agape love and forgiveness, your heart’s desire will be to offer that same love and forgiveness to others, including the one who has deeply offended you.
You will want to see the death clothes that bind them removed (John 11:44) so Christ can be formed in them.
Throughout the battle to forgive your offender, you will begin to share in the sufferings of Christ (2 Corinthians 1:4-5, Romans 8:17, Philippians 3:8-12, I Peter 4:12-19) because you will be living in the gap between the reality of what is and the hope of what could be.
Your prayer life and trust in God will grow as you intercede for those who are bound.
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Relationships are a challenge, period. We need to look beyond the present
to the hope of what God
created others to become. When our emotions well up because relationships aren't how we hoped they would be, it only reveals to us that our hope is in the right place:
in the beauty of holiness. We can direct our prayers toward that end, even toward our offender. View them in the beauty of His holiness and come alongside them
to lead them to that same hope. God will do the changing, as He gives us the vision and uses our willing and yielded hearts through His process of change. The hope of what could be once repentance occurs gives us the courage to live in the reality of what seems like desperately unchangeable circumstances.
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FORGIVING
LOVE
The first step of the two-step process to forgiveness is offering agape love or forgiving love.
What agape love, or forgiving love, is not:
- Forgiving love is not a one-time event. As you begin this journey of forgiveness, you will discover more about the depth of the offense and you will hurt more. As a result, you will need to offer forgiving love again… and again (Matthew 18:21-22). This “requirement” is impossible without abiding in the love of God for you. The battle is fiercely painful.
- Forgiving love is one-sided but forgiveness is not. Forgiving love is similar in many ways to God’s covenant with us. But forgiveness is a two-step process.
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“Biblical forgiveness is never unconditional and one-sided. It is not letting others go off scot-free, ‘forgiven,’ and enabled to do harm again without any consequence. Instead, forgiveness is an invitation to reconciliation, not the blind cheap granting of it.” Bold Love
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As Jesus was on the cross, He said, “Father, forgive them.”
He was asking Father-God to spare the unrepentant from destruction, keeping the door open to reconciliation.
But they had to repent to receive that forgiveness.
The thief who repented received redemptive forgiveness, which is what the next article in this series addresses.
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What agape love, or forgiving love, is:
- An open door to reconciliation. When you offer forgiving love, you are offering the offender an open door to reconciliation so that your broken relationship can be restored.
- A willingness to cancel a debt. (See the yellow box to your right).
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“Forgiveness involves a heart that cancels the debt but does not lend new money until repentance occurs.
Peace at any cost (cheap forgiveness) is not true forgiveness.” Bold Love
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- A commitment to overcome evil with good (Romans 12:21). Offering forgiving love also means that you are willing to pursue the one who offended you with goodness, rather than harm, so that the offender will also restore his relationship with God.
GENUINE
FORGIVING
LOVE
You may find that you do not really want to offer agape love to the one who hurt you so deeply. Take those kinds of thoughts to God and wrestle with Him.
If your forgiveness is without wrestling with your emotions and the harm caused you, it becomes robotic and passionless.
Wrestle with the harm and with the emotions caused by the harm, coupled with the hope that one day you can offer genuine forgiving or agape love to open the door to reconciliation, just as God offered you when you were yet an unrepentant sinner.
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And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for Him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ,
he is a new creation;
the old has gone,
the new has come! All this is from God,
who reconciled us to Himself
through Christ and gave us
the ministry of reconciliation:
that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them. And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf:
Be reconciled to God. God made Him who had no sin
to be sin [fn] for us,
so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. ~2 Corinthians 5:15-21
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Father-God,
Thank You for the painful circumstances in this hurting woman’s life that have caused her to turn to You.
Thank You that, by Your Spirit, You are establishing her in Your love for her as she is overwhelmed by Your forgiveness of her sin.
Continue to prepare her to forgive her offender, Lord. Thank You that You do not expect any of us to rush through this process. You are patient and longsuffering and love us more than we can imagine. Thank You, Lord!
Help this woman to see that offering agape love to her offender simply opens the door to reconciling this broken relationship.
Assure her, Lord, that she will not have to become a doormat under the offender’s sin.
Also assure her that You will continue to grow her into Christ her Head and teach her how to stand firm in truth as You journey alongside her by Your Spirit through learning how to forgive.
Renew her mind, Lord, about the difference between forgiving or agape love and reconciling forgiveness.
May Your perfect love continue to drive out all fear in her life.
We pray in the name of the One Whose life, death, and resurrection reconciles us to You, the Name of Jesus. To Him be the glory!
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Continue with the next article in this “How to Forgive” series:
Reconciling forgiveness is conditional upon repentance.
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