What does the New Testament teach us about what that kind of love actually looks like?

In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus has a discussion which was no doubt a shocking, subversive bombshell for those who first heard it, where Jesus says, you have heard that it's been said that you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.

But I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you and despitefully use you, so forth and so on.

And then he begins to talk to us about God's ways and providence to exemplify the commandment, God sends rain on the just and the unjust.

And what Jesus is saying to us is, that no human being is exempt from our love.

So this is the starting point.

No human being is exempt from our love.

Dr. Neely, as we wrap this up, if you were sitting across the table from someone who is listening to this right now, and she said, okay, I want to become more of a loving Christian, where would you tell her to start?

Is agape love at times tough love? If so, what does that look like?

Yes, at times agape love has to be tough because... we can enable people.

I have a chapter in the book devoted to that topic.

I entitled that chapter Prayerfully and Wisely Directed Love.

You know, for example, what if one of your friends has fallen upon drug addiction.

That happens, unfortunately.

And they want to bring you into it.

Now, that's a pretty radical vision of love, isn't it? I mean, you don't hear that in non-Christian circles.

How do we live in that tension?

Well, intention it is indeed.

I have 10 grandchildren.

One of our granddaughters and her mother, my oldest daughter, were with us last week.

So how do I navigate that? Well, I'm going to get involved in the schools.

What are our safety measures? What do we have in place? What mechanisms do we have in place to make sure that our children are cared for and protected? I remember Pastor Charlie Dates saying once that when he was growing up, his mother would drop him off for school and she would pray for him, you know, and extend her hands to protect her boy because she realized that I've done everything that I can do.

It's up to other measures that we have in place and pray that God will bless our efforts.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

But I thought that...

But, so I, I wanna use the term, uh, agape to communicate, uh, the love of God, and, and again, the noun agape in the New Testament is used only for the love of God.

And again, it's God himself that gives agape its meaning.

The Spirit of God takes up this, this term agape and literally fills it with, with infinite content that, that, as A.W. Tozer said, the word is really, really collapsing under the weight of meaning now, that it's been taken up by the Spirit of God to talk to us about the love of God and, uh, the love that is reproduced in our hearts and minds toward one another as we yield to the power of the Spirit.

Yeah.

But, uh, uh, uh, and so the...

W- we are to, to, um, love all people, including our enemies.