When this book reaches your hand and you are unwilling to send a simple “Thank you” note, what kind of love do you have for me? NONE! This book may have reached your hand, but it had not reached your heart. And even if it reached your heart, it found no love therein. The new Commandment whereby we are commanded by Our Lord to “love one another as He loved us” (Jn. 13:34) is being ignored or broken by the whole Church continually and we are not even ashamed of ourselves. We keep stuffing our heads continually with biblical knowledge and understanding, but the Lord can find NO TRUE LOVE in our hearts! Can you truly SEE this fact? NO! Unless you have had the same living experiences as I have, you cannot.
I have many experiences where the believers to whom I ministered personally, expressed their “love”, appreciation and thankfulness to me. But when the truth concerning the fruit of their life was later on declared and it did not please them, they all left me, stopped communicating with me and then they were gone for good. (2Tim. 4:14-16?) Many others repaid evil for my good and accused me of terrible things. Their SIN, selfishness, pride, stubbornness and darkness showed up. The unrestricted power of their great selfishness, and lust for their self-satisfaction, and an absolute disregard even for the basic warnings and Commandments of God in His Word, was for me, without exaggeration, astonishing and unimaginable! They desired THEIR KIND of Christianity, not their own cross. But the Cross is the only thing that unites because it destroys SIN – the chief and most powerful enemy of Love!
We must return to the New Commandment where Our Lord says to us “… love one another AS I HAVE LOVED YOU…” NOT AS YOU LOVE ONE ANOTHER with your selfish human love. His love for us was LOVE FROM HIS CROSS. Our love for one another must be from our cross! It must be the fruit that grows from our spirit and not from our flesh. Our Lord is the Master in showing us the kind of love that we have and display in our life by putting us into conflicts, problems, misunderstandings, painful situations, distress, pressures, etc. He points out our errors, our lack of spiritual seeing, sends us His corrections, His discipline, His rebuke… IN HIS LOVE! (Rev. 3:19) How do we handle His corrections, discipline or rebukes? Do we receive them? NO! Do we behold them with a great suspicion or contempt? Do we reject them off hand without even pausing and pondering them before Him? Are we immediately offended and pricked? Do we leave the “battlefield”, seek a shelter or look for allies for our self-defense? Do we become silent and do not respond? Do we hide behind our walls of Jericho? What do we do? How do we perform? Can you tell? My reply to this question is one word: MISERABLY! Why? Because…
A VAST MAJORITY OF BELIEVERS NEVER RECOGNIZES HIS CORRECTIONS, DISCIPLINE OR REBUKES AS HIS LOVE AND GRACE FOR THEM! DO WE SEE THIS? NO, WE DON’T!
I have a mountain of living experiences concerning this issue and the Lord is my Living Witness because He prepared those experiences and sufferings also for me to test me and my own heart.
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I am constrained by the Spirit of the Lord to insert the following facts concerning TRUE LOVE, its depth and significance as viewed in the spiritual world.
First, let us consider the AWESOME LOVE between the Father and His Son, Jesus Christ. The Father loved His Son with an unconditional, unlimited, eternal Love because He had unconditional, unlimited and eternal trust and confidence in His Son. And the Son Jesus Christ loved His Father with the same unconditional, unlimited, eternal Love and had the same unconditional, unlimited, eternal trust and confidence in His Father and displayed an unlimited, unconditional and eternal obedience unto His Father!
THIS UNCONDITIONAL, UNLIMITED, ETERNAL AND MUTUAL TRUE LOVE BETWEEN THE SON AND THE FATHER IS THE BASIS OF OUR SALVATION AND THE TRUE PURPOSE OF IT!
This unfathomable Love was tested beyond our comprehension in the Son Jesus Christ. The Father did not stop loving His Son even when He was made sin and cursed for our sake (Gal. 3:13) and forsaken by His Father. And the Son did not stop loving and trusting His Father even when He was cursed and forsaken by Him, but committed His spirit to the hands of His Father! (Lk. 23:46) Man cannot possibly fathom these things except stand in awe or fall to his knees totally speechless. But in the Light of the above awesome Truth, we should finally SEE and comprehend the whole issue of LOVE, its depth and significance. We must also SEE better and deeper the reasons why the most important Commandments ever given to man by God touch LOVE AS THEIR ONLY OBJECT and why all the Law and the Prophets hang on and are fulfilled by LOVE! (Mt. 22:40)
Second, concerning believers, let us SEE and realize that lack of true LOVE has consequences that go far deeper than we might think or imagine or believe. Without LOVE we are not only nothing, but we are also cursed. Consequently, without LOVE we cannot truly and fruitfully minister Christ to anybody or expect any believer to grow up into Christ even if we speak truth to him! We may only grow up into the Head, even Christ, by speaking or preaching truth IN LOVE. (Eph. 4:15) Do we preach IN LOVE? I believe that we speak or preach because we have knowledge and it may be vast. But our vast knowledge never grows in us the fruit of love; it grows the fruit of pride. (1Cor. 8:1) Truth alone is not enough. Our natural, selfish love is not enough. Our faith is not enough! If we speak or preach truth in the spirit of pride, arrogance, fears, self-righteousness or in any other unacceptable spirit or in our intellectual prowess, nobody would grow up into Christ according to Eph. 4:15.
We cannot love anybody whom we do not know. We may never know Christ unless and until He reveals Himself to us. We cannot know Him through any amount of study, teaching, preaching or fellowshipping. HE MUST REVEAL HIMSELF TO US though He may do it during such activities. But He reveals Himself first to those that love Him with passion and in truth not to those that know or teach the doctrines, but have no love. The Word tells us significantly enough that the first person to whom the Lord revealed Himself after His Resurrection was Mary Magdalene! It was not any of the chief Apostles, but a woman. (Jn. 20:14-17// Mk. 16:9) Why? Well, there was no doubt about her truly passionate love for her Master. She had no theological knowledge, but a great love for Jesus. After she was delivered from seven devils (Mk. 16:9) and cured by Jesus, she was always where He was, even to His last breath at His Cross. She was also the first to seek Him after His death and weeping for Him while His disciples went home.
The same happened to Saul of Tarsus to whom the Lord revealed Himself because of his great love for God which produced that great zeal in him for the affairs of God as he believed them in his heart at that time. (Acts 9:1-6) His great love made it possible for the Lord to make out of him Apostle Paul, who then contributed to the New Testament that great treasure of inspired writings.
We must realize that CHRIST, being God, IS LOVE before all else. Therefore, if we have no true love before all else, we cannot truly represent Him, minister Him fruitfully to anybody or serve Him Personally to His satisfaction. If we spend time in the presence of the Living Christ, though our mind may be natural, unrenewed and dark, yet, we always “soak something from Him”; and it can be sensed. When Jesus was captured, Peter was in a horrible state of his soul when he was in the porch of the High Priest’s palace. Yet people could sense “something of Christ” in him, his speech was different and it betrayed him. (Mt. 26:73) When we spend no time with Christ, there is nothing of Him detectable in us. People cannot say: “I see… I sense… I touch Christ in you.” People may touch our religious flesh, which is spiritual death and not life.
There are many other passages in the Word of Our Lord where LOVE predominates and is the sole basis of all His actions toward us and also of His basic demands on us. Before we are allowed in our spirit and soul to start SEEING the answers from Our Father to our manifold questions, let us repeat and ponder the First and Second Commandment of God to man. It speaks about LOVE and nothing else! Let us SEE the depth of this Word and what it actually entails, where it starts and what it takes to fulfill it.
Since God IS Love (1Jn. 4:8b), His Love has its “fingers” in all His Creation and in all His Purposes. We will continue on this subject until we “exhaust” what the Father wants to give us at this time.
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To be continued next week in chapter 5 – part 6
brother Hanola
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