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Tag: God

  • My Love – 7 – Love never ends…

    My Love – 7 – Love never ends…

    1 Corinthians 13

    The Way of Love (agape)

    7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

    8 Love never ends.

    Once again, the ‘love‘ we proclaim though scripture from this letter of Paul to the church at Corinth is the agape love of God. Christ’s love and perfect earthly example should permeate every kind of love relationship we have with others, including of course, the love of a husband for his wife and a wife for her husband.

    You can never love too much.

    You can love in the wrong way,

    but never too much.

    Suppose we take the famous scripture of the ‘love chapter’ and put it into the context of ‘The Four Loves’ described by C.S. Lewis of the four Greek words for love. And let’s take this a step further for a moment and begin with the way the world first thinks when the word love is mentioned:

    Eros bears all things, Eros believes all things, Eros hopes all things, Eros endures all things.  Eros love never ends.

    Is this true?

    I can testify by my own divorces that eros love (romantic love) often bears little, believes only at first, hopes less and less and indeed Eros love does end. This, of course, is why our vows before God are so important to our Christian marriages.

    The same could be said of friendship love or affectionate love. Friendships certainly end and so all-too-often does the affectionate love of a parent for a child or child for parent. These tragic endings fill counseling offices and psychiatrist couches.

    Love frequently does end; the other loves fail.

    Therefore I caution us that we can indeed love in the wrong way. We often do not, as sinful and unfaithful human souls, look at love from the perspective of God.

    We think that we have only so much love we can give – only so much friendship we can give – only so much love for one child or for our mom or for our dad to give – only so much we can endure and hope and believe for the love of our life, the wife or husband of our vows. After all, ‘we are only human.’ We are limited in the flesh; we are limited in our love for one another.

    All this would be true, except for the one love for which we were created by God – agape love, which permeates our very being and relationships to every other.

    You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind. (Sound familiar?)

    Other loves only become timeless in the overflowing love of Jesus Christ when the deep well of God’s love pours forth from our sinful hearts into the love-starved souls of others.

    We are made for Him and we are made for each other. We are created to love each and all; but only in the right way and with the love of God pouring from us.

    When we are empty, God will give us more.

    When we have given all, God will give us more.

    When we cannot bear this soul, God will give us more.

    When we can no longer believe, God will give us more.

    When we have lost all hope, God will give us more.

    When we cannot endure, God will give us more.

    When we think our Eros romance

    or our Philia friendship 

    or our Storge affection

    will end;

    God will give us more.

    For Agape love is not only unconditional,

    the Agape love of God is eternal.

    Agape love never ends.

    The King James English actually encourages us in God by assuring:

    Charity never faileth.

    And the NASB & other versions translate agape: Love never fails.

    Yes, Paul points out that other signs of God working in the lives of the church may fail at times. (We are just a gathering of His imperfect sinners.)

    God gives us His gifts to use in His way in our mortal time.

    Pour forth the unfailing love of Christ Jesus. Embrace every soul in His love.

    (Love one another, as I have loved you, our Lord commands.)

    The love of the church may be evident through varying gifts to different saints (Christians) as different times. Yet Love never fails. God’s own love and charity towards us never fails His purpose.

    It is appropriate reminder to us as I conclude this 7-part series on My Love, to remind us of the love of God for me, a sinner, and for you.

    God has not failed us.

    The Cross of Christ Jesus never fails.

    We are saved by the grace of the sacrifice of our Lord, Christ Jesus.

    As we near the end of these last days I appeal once more to your faithfulness to the Lord Who IS faithful to those who love Him. Be faithful to God in every kind of love God so richly gives to you from the deep spring of His eternal love.

    Have you failed in your love? Have you failed God? Have you failed your beloved to whom you are wed? Have you failed a friend? Have you failed a parent or a child who needs your unconditional love?

    ekpiptō – to fall out of, to fall down from, to fall off; to fall from a thing, to lose it; to perish, to fall: from a place from which one cannot keep,  from a position, to fall powerless, to fall to the ground, be without effect of the divine promise of salvation

    In Christ Jesus, we have God’s unfailing love. By grace we cannot fall. God’s love never fails.

    Peter reminds the faithful of the importance of us not failing Christ Jesus, if indeed He IS our LORD.

    2 Peter 3: NKJV

    10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. 11 Therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be in holy conduct and godliness, 12 looking for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be dissolved, being on fire, and the elements will melt with fervent heat?

    17 You therefore, beloved, since you know this beforehand,

    beware lest you also fall from your own steadfastness, being led away with the error of the wicked;

    18 but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

    To Him be the glory both now and forever. Amen.

  • My Love – 6 – If I have not love

    My Love – 6 – If I have not love

    ‘I’m not happy.’

    ‘I met someone’

    IF you claim to be a follower of the Bridegroom of the church, Jesus Christ and things don’t go quite your way, would you tell Jesus to ‘get out’?

    Would you look for someone better, who might make you happy in this world?

    (Did God really say, “Don’t eat of the fruit of that tree?”)

    IF you are unfaithful to Christ’s love, would it not be adultery?

    christian whoreThough you claim to be a follower of Jesus, so had Judas!

    This is the unfortunate false witness of some with a cross in front of their home, ‘christianity’ claimed before ‘friends’ as religion, their stamp of approval before the world. These claim many things by the ‘Blood of Jesus,’ yet their more bold witness of worldly sins again crucifies hope in His body and true Bride, the church.

    Some have heard the following, even at weddings, known as the ‘love chapter.’

    IF Jesus Christ is your love, listen then to true love, you adulterers of Christ!

    1 Corinthians 13

    The Way of Love

     If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.

    I have heard in churches the noisy gongs of ‘single moms,’ divorced grandmas and others clanging the noise of their own ‘higher’ worship, ‘tongues of angels,’ God’s messengers; as if we should follow these women, rather than Christ Jesus as Lord. Will they who are not bowed down to their husband or any man in Christ not lead the faith astray with their babel?

    2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

    I have heard prophesy given in the church. Is it from God? Why then did the church not record the very prediction of God given? Is the prophesy confirmed and witnessed to the glory of our Lord, Christ Jesus? Yes, sometimes; but believer beware of the wolves in our midst.

    Have you not endured some claiming such superior knowledge and understanding of mysteries who would teach us of their ‘faith to remove mountains’ in their Sunday school class or church small group?

    Did you experience the embrace of Christ’s love in their Pharisaical instruction? Did you hear love for you in their teaching or prophesy?

    I, too, have received prophesy and spoken it. The revelation of the Lord is a terrible and awesome thing!

    Some prophesy has not yet come to pass. For all I know, I may have been given some spirit of deception to accomplish the Lord’s overpowering purpose. Yet in these last days we must fear the Lord, always listening for the approaching trumpet of truth over the blaring cries of some claiming ‘understanding.’

    Read your Bible and pray for revelation by the Spirit of Truth in scripture.

    3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

    ‘And though I bestow,‘ states the King James; bestow, an interesting word more related to charity as we understand it – charity, agape love of God, used in application throughout these verses of the love chapter.

    Bestow: to feed by putting a bit or crumb (of food) into the mouth; of infants, young animals etc.; to feed, nourish to give a thing; to feed someone, feed out to

    Feed on God’s word in scripture. Nourish your spirit in prayer.

    Does this not also bring to mind the love a father and a mother, given to their child, their teen, their grown adult children, even their spouse given in marriage into your own family? Is this not also the gift of adoption given by our Heavenly Father through Christ to gentile believers (like most of us)?

    Are we not all poor and needy, dependent on our Father’s forgiving gracious love?

    Though I give to the poor, but have not love…

    Is that our charity of witness?

    Now that I have shared the seriousness of God’s love for us, allow me to share the more familiar actions of love often and appropriately shared at weddings:

    4 Love is patient and kind;

    love does not envy or boast;

    it is not arrogant 5

     or rude.

    Are you patient to your spouse, to whom you are joined to each other and God by your vows?

    Is your husband (or wife) patient with you – patient for you?

    Is your love for your beloved partner until death – kind?

    Are you, dear father, and you, dear mother, kind to your son – kind to your daughter – kind to each and all of your children (obedient and faithful, or rebellious and hateful)? Are you kind to your adopted child, your step-child, your child (even an adult child) given into your nurture by God to raise and guide in the Lord, Christ Jesus?

    Is your love patient and kind even to your prodigal teen?

    Is your love for your spouse, your children, your brothers and sisters in Christ ALWAYS patient and kind? Lord help us, impatient and unkind sinners!

    It does not insist on its own way;

    it is not irritable or resentful;

    it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.

    Are you just another ‘spoiled child’ of God in your relationships with others in your daily life?

    7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

    Lord: Convict us and forgive us, for the sake of your Son, our loving Savior, Jesus Christ. Help me – help us to love you more and more; help us, miserable saved sinners, to love those you love with your overflowing agape love.

    8 Love never ends.

    To be continued…

  • My Love – 4 – a Love Feast

    My Love – 4 – a Love Feast

    “There is a love of God inexplicable, except by our inclusion in His love feast.

    This love of God is to be sought and treasured, though none can earn this highest of all loves. It is the upward call well-known to the world, yet rejected by the worldly.

    John 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

    God gave us Jesus Christ! His love is sacrifice for our sins – and we are ALL sinners.

    Agape – (pronounced: ag’-a-pe) The name Agape or “love-feast,” as an expression denoting the brotherly common meals of the early church… 

    Agape is much more than this, common meals and communion being just one visible evidence of God’s love in the community of the church. This “agape love” appears throughout the New Testament, again the evidence of Christ Jesus in the life of Christians as part of the lives of believers:

    • affection, good will, love, benevolence, brotherly love, charity and other Spirit-given practical application of the benefit of Christ in the lives of the body of believers, His church.

    Hear the caution of Jesus, you cautious or straying believer:

    But I know that you do not have the love of God within you.

    – John 5:42

    Agape is the word for love Jesus uses here.

    Would you have this be our Lord’s judgment on you unless you repent? Jesus continues:

    How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? – John 5:44

    God is love; but each of us must accept God’s love and be part of the love feast of Christ’s overflowing love for us shared in His Blood of the Cross.

    C.S. Lewis addresses five loves: the first being our ‘liking and loves for the sub-human:’ animals, the beauty of nature, food and the like. The other four are human loves for humans.

    I have reordered Lewis’ treatment of The Four Loves. We have already spoken of friendship (between equal humans) and affection (between humans unequal in their relationship: parent and child). I have left Eros and specifically the love between a man and a woman (man & wife) until last. Lewis concludes his book with this highest and most important of loves: agape. I cannot focus our thought here on this love any better than Lewis.

    “For most of us the true rivalry lies between the self and the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God. It is dangerous to press upon a man the duty of getting beyond earthly love when his real difficulty lies in getting so far.”

    Love one another. A familiar challenge? Yet Lewis states the difficulty of us experiencing this highest love of God when we cannot get beyond loving others as God loves all of us.

    Lewis points to the moral of a story of St. Augustine after grieving over the death of a dear friend.

    “This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away. Of course this is excellent sense. Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of.”

    Do you believe, then, in God? Why would you not trust God with the love of your soul? God IS. Christ Jesus IS. Would you not also have your love last for ever?

    Lewis concludes “The Four Loves” as follows (after which I will have a little to add):

    “Perhaps, for many of us, all experience merely defines, so to speak, the shape of that gap where our love of God ought to be. It is not enough. It is something.

    If we cannot ‘practice the presence of God’ it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep. But for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.”

    Love & Charity – Connection between God & feast in His love

    John 15:9-11 As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.

    Abide in my love.

    10 If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

    11 These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.

    Jesus commands: Abide in my love (agape).  Learn the application of living in this agape love of God by reading the linked definition and scriptures of ‘abide,’ a word falling from use in our temporal fleshly culture.

    The Greek word for love with which Jesus begins by saying the Father has it for Him and He has is for us is: agapaō. By definition: to welcome, to entertain, to be fond of, to love dearly. 

    WELCOME to the feast of GOD’S LOVE.

    We do NOT deserve an invitation. God loves Jesus. Jesus loves you. (This I know, for the Bible tells us so.) A message of love so simple and profound, yet so clearly unattainable by anyone lacking a trusting and child-like faith in Almighty God, our loving Heavenly Father.

    “IF, you keep Jesus’ Commandments” our Lord says.

    Do you keep and abide and live in the Commandments of Christ Jesus?

    In fact, it is agape love Jesus gives to the lawyer’s of “What is the greatest Commandment?”

    Matthew 22:37-38 And he said to him, “You shall love [agapaō] the Lord your God with all your heart [kardia] and with all your soul[psychē] and with all your mind [dianoia]. This is the great and first commandment.

    God loves. God provides the banquet of love.

    It is by the charity of God that we sinners saved have been invited into the joy and celebration of the love of God in Christ Jesus.

    Let us not forget to extend this love of God in Christ Jesus into our loves for all others in this brief life in the flesh and lasting joy of God’s eternal feast.

    And remembering the words of our Teacher to His learners (disciples) prior to the love feast by which He set His example and remembrance – communion:

    “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love [agapē] for one another.” – John 13:35

    O, the joy of LOVE awaiting us at the banquet table of heaven with our Lord and King, Christ Jesus!