Love: God’s Gift and Our Calling

BibleProject

BibleProject Podcast

Old Testament, Demons, Christianity, Bible Study, God, Torah, Jesus, Angels, Bible, Satan, Spirit, Theology, New Testament, Jon Collins, Tim Mackie, Spiritual Beings, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 18.5K Ratings

🗓️ 22 December 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Advent E4 — We’re ending our short Advent series with a reflection on love. In the Hebrew Bible, the word “ahavah” involves faithfulness to God and living by his wisdom, but it also means showing practical care to others—especially the vulnerable. Jesus views this love for God and neighbor as the greatest command, and he expands it to be indiscriminate, radical kindness and generosity even toward our enemies. The New Testament authors were so blown away by this kind of love that they adopted an obscure Greek word for love, “agape,” and redefined it to be a self-giving, sacrificial love that Jesus demonstrates in his life, teaching, death, and resurrection. In this episode, Jon and Tim explore the main biblical words for love, showing how the story of Advent characterizes agape as God’s own essence and our calling.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Tim.
0:07.3	Hi, John Collins.
0:08.9	Hello.
0:09.9	And this is our fourth and final conversation in the Advent series.
0:14.6	Yeah.
0:15.4	Hope, peace, joy, and love.
0:18.5	These are four words typically connected to, and have been for centuries, connected
0:23.4	to the four Sundays of Advent that are the four weeks leading up to the celebration of Jesus'
0:30.9	birth and Christmas. Yeah. Advent means arrival. These four weeks are about anticipating the
0:36.7	arrival of the king.
0:37.8	You got it.
0:38.6	And these four words became four different ways to think about that anticipation.
0:46.1	Yeah, really, each one of them is kind of like a Christian virtue, a character trait that's worth aiming at and thinking about how can I structure my life, focus on
0:58.2	these so that I can cultivate these character traits more in my life.
1:01.5	Yeah.
1:02.2	And all of them are connected with anticipating, waiting for the arrival of God's Messiah.
1:10.1	So we have done conversations on hope and on peace and on joy.
1:16.6	And here we're at number four.
1:18.6	And there's got to be a reason why number four in most traditions that celebrate Advent is love.
1:24.6	And we're talking about the Hebrew word ahav is the verb, ahav.
1:28.7	Okay.
1:29.2	And then ahava is the noun.
	...

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