Agape, as Jada Edwards defines it, is a worth the one who loves assigns to another person. It is not a payment that person earns by behaving well. That definition answers most of the question. Love that rises and falls with how someone treats you will keep running out around difficult people, because they control it. Assigned worth stays put. But you can only keep assigning it if you are receiving it from God first. When you look to people for what only God can give, you walk into every relationship hungry, and hungry people make bad choices.
Two ideas are packed into that answer. The first is about what love is. The second is about where it comes from. Technique without either of them fades, so both need to be in place before anything practical makes sense.
Why trying harder does not hold
The usual response to a hard relationship is effort. Be more patient. Bite your tongue. Pray before the phone call. None of that is wrong. Edwards’s point is that effort without a foundation has a predictable end:
if you start from the behavior end of, oh, let me try to be better in my relationships, you will inevitably grow fatigued and probably fail with just those efforts not anchored to something.
The diagnosis is not a lack of willpower. It is starting at the wrong end. If love is something you produce on the spot in response to a person, then a difficult person drains you every time you meet, and you refill from your own reserves. Nobody’s reserves are that deep.
Edwards came to this through her own life. During the stress of the pandemic years, she sensed God telling her she had a love problem. She objected that she loved her husband, her kids and everyone else. The answer she heard was that she loved her way. She loved what she wanted God to do more than she loved him, and if she loved him fully she would trust him fully. Love on your own terms looks like love, but it carries a hidden condition. Conditions are exactly what difficult people keep failing to meet.
What an assigned value means
Here is her definition in her own words:
Love means an assigned value, a value that’s been assigned by the beholder.
The key word is beholder. Every act of love involves two people: the one who loves and the one who is loved. Edwards places the source of value with the first. The worth is set by the giver. It is not discovered in the receiver, and it is not earned by the receiver.
She applies this to God first. God, as the giver of love, has settled what she is worth. “He has decided what my value’s gonna be,” she says, and the reasons for that decision are beyond full understanding. He loves her on the basis of what he decided, not on the basis of her performance.
Carry that over to human relationships and the reader’s experience comes into focus:
if you don’t realize that the assigned value is separate from the person and their behavior and their choices and how they respond to you, then your love will fluctuate with them.
Love that fluctuates with the other person is love they hold. Assigned worth moves the control back to the giver, where it belongs. You decide what this person is worth before you know how today’s conversation will go.
Does the Greek word prove this?
A common mistake creeps in here. People sometimes talk as if the word agape carries a special divine meaning by itself, so that naming the word settles the argument. It does not. The New Testament uses the same family of words for ordinary and even misdirected love. John 3:19 says that “men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.” That is not holy, self-giving love. It is love pointed at the wrong thing.
So Edwards’s definition works as a teaching summary, not a dictionary entry. What holds it up is the way Scripture describes God’s love in action. Romans 5:8 is the clearest case: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Commendeth is older English for “shows” or “proves.” Paul’s argument turns on timing. God’s love was demonstrated before anyone responded to it, while its recipients were still opposed to him. That is assigned worth. It did not wait for good behavior.
Jesus then makes that love the pattern for his followers. John 13:34 reads, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” The phrase “as I have loved you” sets both the measure and the source. Edwards notes that the next verse is what started her thinking: Jesus says this is how people will know his disciples. Not by Bible knowledge or church attendance, but by the way they love.
The KJV’s word for this love in 1 Corinthians 13 is charity, and 1 Corinthians 13:4 begins, “Charity suffereth long, and is kind.” Suffering long only means something if there is something to suffer. The description assumes other people will be hard to love. That is not a flaw in the plan. It is where this love shows what it is.
The double standard
Edwards admits this is counterintuitive. Everything in us says, act right first, and then I will love you. Even parents, who come closer than most to unconditional love, attach strings. I took you to church. I paid for college. We may not stop loving our kids, but we might make them feel it when they do not perform.
Her sharpest observation concerns what we want from God compared to what we offer others. We want him to be patient with us and wait as long as it takes. Then we give other people a narrow window and threaten to cancel them if they miss it. “That is not the love we wanna give,” she says. The result is a love that flows one way. “You’re keeping all of God’s love to yourself.” We thank God for forgiving us again and keep a separate set of rules for everyone else.
Read this way, being loved is not only comfort. It is a kind of wealth, and wealth carries obligation. A person rich in God’s love has something to give to those who never received much of it.
Why the love runs dry
This is the second idea, and it speaks most directly to the reader’s exhaustion. Every person needs God’s love, because we are his creation. If you have not received it from him, the need does not disappear. You go looking for substitutes, and you hand another person a job they cannot do:
if I am expecting another person to provide something, only God can provide. Even if they’re great, I’m setting them up to fail.
Follow the reasoning. If the other person is good, you will still be disappointed, because no human being can fill a need that belongs to God. If the other person is not good, you will not see it clearly, because you need them too much to judge them honestly. Either way, the relationship becomes a source of supply instead of a place to give. A difficult person then feels unbearable, because they keep failing to supply what you came to them hungry for.
Edwards’s picture is hunger, and she puts it this way: “the choices you make when you’re hungry are not the same choices you make when you’re satisfied.” A starving person grabs whatever is closest. A well-fed person can turn down the box of donuts, or enjoy one without mistaking it for a meal. A hungry soul makes decisions about friendships, dating, marriage and work out of immediate need. A full soul can let a slow text, a careless comment or someone’s bad day pass without being devastated. Compliments and approval are still welcome. “Those things are nice to have, but they are not necessities when I’m full in the Lord.”
The hunger can be old. Someone who is thirty may have been hungry since seven. Many people learned that love came with good grades, obedience or achievement, sometimes from parents who loved God and still prized success. That is not a reason to blame them. It is a reason to be honest about the script you carry. “You don’t have to be bound by your past, but you cannot be blind to your past.” Decades of hunger produce unstable choices until the appetite itself changes, and being filled by God is not a rushed five-minute exercise.
The picture has limits, and Edwards names them. A full stomach does not guarantee you will refuse the donut. Being nourished by God does not make you immune to pain. “People hurt my feelings,” she says. She still gets sad and disappointed. What changes is how much an offense can take. Her own illustration is money: if you have a trillion dollars, a thousand-dollar loss leaves you fine, but if you have twenty dollars, a three-hundred-dollar loss puts you in debt.
Job shows what fullness does to a relationship with people who hurt you. His friends spent chapter after chapter accusing him. Then, before anything is restored, Job says to God in Job 42:5, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.” A man who has seen God no longer needs his friends’ verdict on him. That frees him for what comes next. Job 42:10 records, “And the LORD turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends.” The accused becomes the intercessor for his accusers. He could only do that once his standing rested on God and not on them.
Doesn’t this mean putting up with anything?
This is the strongest objection. If love assigns worth regardless of behavior, must you stay close to people who harm you? Edwards says no, plainly: “it’s not about going into abusive and unsafe scenarios.” Boundaries, she adds, need to happen at the right time and with God’s direction. If you are in an abusive relationship, getting safe is not a failure of love. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
The distinction is useful. Assigned worth governs how you regard a person: as someone God values. It does not, by itself, decide how much access that person has to your life. You can refuse to treat someone as worthless and still refuse to let them keep hurting you.
Where Edwards pushes back is on the far more common case. A culture trained to leave any relationship that no longer serves you will eventually see biblical love itself as toxic. Most of what gets called toxic, she says, just means uncomfortable, or someone who does not cheer you on. Her warning is blunt: “if you get rid of every hard relationship, you just won’t have anybody in your life.” Jesus brought three flawed men into his most vulnerable hour in Gethsemane. They failed him more than once, and he stayed with them.
What fullness changes
The first change is in how you read other people. Nobody wakes up planning how to get on your nerves. People are living their own lives with their own struggles, and you happen to be in the way. Of the driver who cuts you off or the friend who forgets your birthday, Edwards says, “It wasn’t personal.” A hungry person takes everything personally because every slight is a loss. A full person can see that the other person is in a deficit and give from what they have.
The second change is in how you see yourself. Hurt makes people feel like pure victims, never villains, and quietly superior to whoever wounded them. Edwards answers that the Holy Spirit is quick with a flashback. “We’ve all been betrayers,” she says. We have broken confidences, spoken harshly and been unkind, whether we meant to or not. She ties this to Jesus’s teaching about the speck and the log in Matthew 7:3-5. Hurt distorts perspective, and that is exactly when we feel most entitled to stop loving.
Put the pieces together and the reader’s question changes shape. Your love for a difficult person was never supposed to be generated by you in the moment, and it was never supposed to depend on them. It was supposed to be received and passed on. 1 John 4:19 states the order: “We love him, because he first loved us.” Someone who knows they were loved before they deserved it has lost the right to require that anyone else deserve it first. That loss is also a release. You no longer have to wait for the difficult person to change before you can love them. The worth was assigned to you without waiting, and you are free to assign it the same way.