Having a broken heart on February 14 just doesn’t seem right. But several years ago, I wrote a blog post titled, “How to Survive a Broken Heart.” It was one of my most read posts…on Valentine’s Day. That was a wake-up call for me. This is not just a joyful day for those who are in love to receive gifts and go out on special dates. For many, it’s a sorrowful day to remember that we have lost that precious commodity we call love. Is it even possible to fall in love again? I think yes…
Read more: For the Broken Heart on Valentines Day: How to Fall Back in Love AgainWhat Kind of Love did you Fall Out Of?
First, let’s define terms. We use the word ‘love’ in many different ways.
- I love my husband
- I love coffee
- I love your haircut
- I love my kids
In English the word ‘love’ can have so many different meanings. But in Greek, which the New Testament of the Bible was written, there are four different words that can be translated ‘love.’
- Eros – the sense of falling in love, romantic or erotic love
- Phileo – brotherly love, friendship
- Storge – love of family, close-knit, kinship
- Agape – unconditional love, the love of God, unending love
When we say, ‘I love your new haircut!’ we really mean we like it. But we seem to love the word love so much in our culture we don’t mind using it inappropriately. We are in love with love!
A Broken Heart can Mean you’ve Lost Eros Love
If you are reading this blog because your heart is broken, or you have fallen out of love with your husband, think about the types of love listed above. Which one did you fall out of?
Most would say it was
God wired us to experience eros love, it’s a beautiful gift from our Creator. But eros love was never meant by God to be the only love to keep a couple together through thick and thin. Eros love is more about how the other person can meet my needs and satisfy me. It’s a selfish love, it’s me centered. It’s very much dependent on the 50-50 plan. When my partner fails me, I fall out of eros love.
Eros may Suffer for a Season but Agape Endures Forever
If Greek is well…greek to you, we pronounce agape like this: ah-GAH-peh. God’s intent is that our eros love for each other would expand into agape love; the unconditional, enduring, and unending love of God.
So, if you have fallen out of love or have suffered a broken heart, read on. All is not lost! Eros love is important, but it can come and go, and you can fall back in eros love. But agape love is so much richer and deeper and more satisfying than eros love. Agape love will endure forever when eros love suffers for a season.
We ‘fall’ into eros love, but we don’t ‘fall’ into agape love. It doesn’t just happen. It’s not hormonal. It’s not me centered, it’s not the 50-50 plan. We have to experience agape love before we can begin to understand it.
Agape Love Comes from God
Agape love originates with God. 1 John 4 describes this amazing love in detail, summarized with “God is Love (agape).” God’s agape love is far different from any other kind of love:
- It’s not based on feelings, it’s not hormonal
- It is eternal and unending
- It is based on action and decision
- It is an exercise of the heart, the soul, the mind, and the will all working together
- It is expressed through obedience and commitment
- It is, bar none, the greatest and highest expression of love
Agape love originates with God, it is expressed perfectly by God, and can only be had in a relationship with God. The passage below describes this wonderful love.
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails…And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8,13
Agape Love is a Verb
Agape love is about action, it is about an act of the will and a decision to seek the best for the one we love.
God’s perfect nature is reflected in Agape love. And His ultimate sacrifice for us, the cross of Christ illustrates that perfect love.
God the Father knew that our sin nature could only be defeated by extreme measures. He so agape-loved us. He was willing to take the shocking and unspeakable measure of sending His only Son to the cross for us as an expression of agape.
It didn’t feel good to send Jesus to the cross. God watched from Heaven when Jesus knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane to ask if He could skip the cross, sweat dripping from His face like drops of blood. It didn’t feel good to God to say no.
It didn’t feel good to watch Jesus on the cross with the sin of the world on His shoulders, crying out, “Abba, Father, why have you abandoned me?” It felt horrible for God to turn His back on His only son at the hour of His greatest need.
But God allowed it, and Jesus obediently submitted to it, because that’s how they roll. They are committed to our best. Their will is to save us because we can’t save ourselves. It took all of Jesus to accomplish this work on the cross; His heart, soul, mind and will were in perfect alignment and fully engaged at that pivotal moment that changed everything for us.
God will Never Break your Heart
Once we are the recipients of God’s incredible agape love, we enter into a relationship with Him. We begin to explore what that means by getting to know God. We can read the Bible, worship Him, pray to Him, listen to Him, obey and trust Him, and serve Him and others. Just like we spent time with our husbands when we first met them, we spend time with God to get to know Him.
As we journey through life, we will get to know God more and more as we invest our time in that relationship. And as we experience His presence in our lives and His agape love, we will begin to grow to be like Him. We will begin to understand and share agape love for others. We will be assured that He will never break our heart.
Share God’s Agape Love with Others
Our highest calling is to share agape love with others. It’s a high calling to “agape your enemy,” the difficult command given in Matthew 5:44. It doesn’t feel good to love an enemy. God isn’t asking you to have good feelings toward your enemy. He isn’t asking you to overlook your enemies faults or take the blame for what he did. He is asking you to commit to your enemy’s best. He’s asking us to display agape love to others so they begin to learn about God from watching you. That’s about as high a calling as anyone could have!
Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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 is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 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.
1 John 4:7-12
If you have never experienced agape love from God, you never really were ‘in love’ in the first place, in the Biblical sense. You’ve never fully embraced what it feels like to be so deeply loved that nothing you can ever do will make that love grow cold. It’s unconditional love, no matter how much you mess up you will always be welcomed with open arms of agape love.
How I Fell back in Love
Once I began to understand what it meant to be loved by God in this way, I began a process of learning to love Him back. I would pray and ask God to help me love Him the way He loves me – with all my heart, soul, mind, and will. That love for God is still in a process of growing, I will never ‘arrive’ until I’m in Heaven. But I can feel the agape love blossoming in me and leaking out to others.
It’s been a journey of 24 years at this point. I love the journey! It’s been an adventure of a lifetime. When I embarked on this journey, I expected it to be all about God and me. To my surprise, my relationship with God has deeply touched many other relationships in my life.
In the past, I had tried to get fulfillment from other people. I was expecting other family members and my husband to meet my needs and satisfy me as only God can do. You could say I was putting other people on a pedestal and expecting them to love me like God does. They didn’t meet my expectations and that made me mad! As I learned to get fulfilled by God alone, that freed them from the impossible task of being my little gods.
I made peace with some people that I was in conflict with. I made peace with myself and began to understand how God created me uniquely. My love for my husband grew deeper and stronger, supported by strong cords of agape love. And my eros love for my husband grew as well in the ebb and flow of life. I learned that when we fall back in love with God we also fall back in love with people.
Resources to Help Heal your Broken Heart
I wrote this post in 2019 originally, but wanted to repost it this year. Everything I wrote four years ago is still true. After 46 years of marriage, I can tell you that
I encourage you, if your broken heart is cold and devoid of eros love, to seek first the One Who Loves Your Soul. God is your key to falling back in love again. This year we have one more resource to help you know that no matter what, there is hope!
We learned first hand how incredible God’s agape love for us was in 2020. After thirty harrowing days in the ICU during the first surge of Covid, Bruce was miraculously healed of a mysterious brain bleed. He experienced two brain surgeries, uncontrollable seizures, loss of the ability to speak, write his name and move his right side. We were separated for all but one of those days when they let me into the hospital for his first surgery. When our saga was over, we wanted to honor God and use this incredible story to bless other marriages so we wrote a novel together called Love on Life Support. No matter what, there is hope!
You can find our novel, Love on Life Support, at Amazon. We hope it inspires you!
Be sure to download our free resources, created just for you.