Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. We love because He first loved us.
Most of us know the story, but we may not have considered the love it describes. The Eighteenth Century Fairy Tale “Beauty and the Beast” tells of a handsome young Prince who was made ugly by a Fairy after he refused her hospitality during a storm. Beast was trapped in the form of a hideous looking body. He lived alone because he was desperately trying to avoid the disgust on the faces of those who would see him. Beast could only be restored to his original handsome nature if someone loved him, genuinely loved him in spite of his horrible appearance. One day Beauty appears and, ultimately, offered him this kind of forgiving, redeeming, transforming love.
G. K. Chesterton wrote that the greatest lesson of “Beauty and the Beast” is that “a thing must be loved before it is lovable.”
We are the Beast, made hideous by our sin. But God sees through who and what we’ve become, and loves us in spite of our ugliness, in spite of our own sinful self. God loves us with a different kind of love, agape.
Agape is a love of the will… Agape is a decision…Agape seeks nothing in return…Agape loves regardless of the behavior of the recipient…Agape always seeks the best for the loved. Agape is unconditional…Agape is a divine love.
Receiving God’s love into our hearts creates a reservoir of love we can draw from when loving others, even the unlovable and unlovely. We, like Beast, can now love others with this same special kind of love, agape. In fact Paul tells us that “God’s love, agape, compels us” to love likewise. Only when we understand how much God loves us will we be able to love one another as we should, as we’ve been commanded. “Therefore be imitators of God as dear children. Walk in love, as Christ also has loved us and gave Himself for us” Ephesians 5.1-2).