AGAPE LOVE & THE ATTITUDES AND CONDUCT IT PRODUCES
All the best character assets are features for which we may strive with our natural affections and versions of love but we invariably fall short or come shy of a consistent intense display of them because the truth is that only agape love accomplishes this ‘perfection’ to which you have alluded. Ours at the moment is the immature, unfinished, as yet imperfect versions of these traits, a kind of reflection or likeness of that which will come when we are complete and God’s perfect love fully owns us. -- is that some of what you are saying?
1 Corinthians 13: 4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always persev
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (NIV)
