Talk of JESUS .com

Tag: heart

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!
February 12, 2015
Prayer List
May our Lord and Savior, Christ Jesus, who we worship with the Father and Holy Spirit, kneed our impenitent hearts of stone into soft sands of His overflowing love. Amen.

To begin, let’s not forget that God is a Person who cares about us. In Christ Jesus we have a personal relationship with the Living God!

And by our intimate relationship with the God of Heaven, a spirit to Spirit relationship the Bible describes as most like that of a wife to her husband, we have the intimacy of the love of God and the ear of His loving heart.

Who, then, do we pray for? (and to whom do we pray?)

Can we begin any relationship without attention given to the intimacy of love between the one who asks and the person we would have answer?

IF you ignore the loving question of your loved one, how is it that you ask God and expect to receive an answer? His is an even more intimate relationship, not unlike that of husband and his wife.

Did I say, ‘His wife?’

Yes. Unless we are submitted to Jesus Christ as our Lord, He cannot be the Bridegroom of our hope. What a shame that He would say to you, betrothed christian, “I never knew you.”

Prayer is most personal with the Person of God!

If we pray privately, which I pray you do and will do so even more, the intimacy will give you more understanding of His will, alongside your dedicated devotion to the scripture of God’s written and living word. (I am too often guilty of a lack of intimacy in my prayer with God, a lack of time and commitment.)

Privately, (& trying to praise and thank the lover of my soul) I ask God my Lord for what I need, showing me what I need rather than what I want which is not in His will. I guess that I would say that I NEED God to sustain me in my prayer for my own heart-felt needs.

Corporately, that is in praying as part of our church or a prayer group, I find that prayers like my deepest prayers to God are sorely neglected by most of those asking ONLY for prayers for others, not confessing our own deepest hurts, needs, and desires for God’s love and the love of our Christian community.

We border on hypocrisy in our false, hopeful faces before our brothers and sisters in Christ.

If we only ask prayer for our family, friends, loved ones and others, while hiding the depths of our brokenness from those who would, along with God, sustain us in prayer; is our prayer request not disingenuous, an easier substitute for our own heart-felt needs for love and prayer?

Our God is a God of relationships – loving relationships. We dare not neglect His expected intimacy in our prayer relationships in which we would intercede for others by our own prayers.

I pray first for my wife, then for our three (grown) children. I try to do this more than daily. This has always been my first priority of prayer.

I try also to pray for my Christian family, as if they are nearer to me than my own biological family; for through Christ in eternity, they are also adopted alongside me into His body, through the Blood of His Holy Sacrifice of love for all of our sins.

Pray first for the person. Pray then for their need.

I try to bow my head and thank God in prayer before I eat or enter into some activity of the day. (I seek to do this both privately and publicly as witness.) This is not so much about the person, as it is for our immediate need. For example, my wife once insisted on praying for our safety most times we left home in the car. Our security and safety are needs, of course. Yet the soul of a loved one is certainly more important to God and to me than any thing I might ask for a trip across town.

Is it right that one who claims Jesus as “Lord,” should pray for help in winning in the world so that they might live comfortable in Christ?

Do you pray that you or someone in your family will ‘hit the Lottery’ and help answer your unanswered prayers? Do you pray for a blessing from God, nearer than the blessing God already sent for you to have and to hold?

We know the true answer in Christ.

Yet is not forgiveness and grace so necessary in dealing with the struggles and sins of our most beloved ones as they trustingly share the concerns of their own heart?

The false face of our prayer requests (sometimes)

Some of the sins of our lives and struggles of our flesh remain even more as anathema to ‘church’ prayers. Who will hear our cries to God, a crying out for help, love, forgiveness and grace; cries from some of our beloved Christian sisters and brothers?

Dare you even mention one of these at ‘church?’

Dare your brother or sister even mention: an abortion, adultery, a homosexual experience, pornography or any other such ‘christian’ taboo?

Dare any of our Christian youth even mention the passions and indiscretions which most commonly lead to the pregnancies the church must hide? For that matter, dare one divorced, widowed or unmarried for a time ask the help of a brother (sister) in prayer for the same?

Dare any ‘grace-faced christian’ even reveal these struggles and prayers to a pastor, let alone a dear friend of the church? Again, let us be careful not to judge too harshly.

You know why you put on the mask of hypocrisy.

Do you not suspect that those you love in Christ are not threatened by the judgment of your rejection?

How difficult it is for us to not judge (for even Jesus would not judge). I am guilty. May the Lord have mercy on me, for I endure the punishment of His curse. Yet I include loved ones guilty of each or these sins just mentioned and more in my prayers to God.

If God can forgive them (should they turn to His love), how can I not also pray for their repentance and return to God through the same Blood of Christ Jesus shed for me?

David committed adultery with a woman and murdered her husband! Yet when the man after God’s own heart finally repented, David prayed:

Against you, you only, have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight,
so that you may be justified in your words
and blameless in your judgment. – Psalm 51

How difficult it is for us to reprove in love – give a Christian sinner the help for which they have asked God in their own deepest prayer. How difficult to love AND forgive those most dear to us.

Yet by the Blood of Christ, God has covered even our sins of today (in addition to those long past).

Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven,
whose sin is covered. – Psalm 32:1

The revelation of God’s love for us is in Christ Jesus, who died on the Cross and IS risen! He hears our pray. Jesus hears our plea. He is revealed to us. We are freed by his blood.

Amazingly, by his blood, we are made His Priests and His intercessors!

Revelation 1:5 … and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of kings on earth. To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood.

To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood 6 and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

Help us, God. Help us, beloved believer. We all need prayer. Allow us, as His Priests to intercede for those near and dear to our hearts and our souls.

Who is important in your life?

Are you praying for your VIP in humble humility to God and asking your loving brothers and sisters in Christ to stand by you in prayer for their needs?

Who is most import in God’s will?
- A husband to his wife &
- A wife to her husband.
- BOTH parents to every child.
- a loving father to all of his children, at home and by example in Christ,
- a nurturing mother to all of her children, at home and by example in Christ.
We all FAIL in some of these most important relationships God expects from us in His love, don’t we?

So why not ask God, with whom we have a personal relationship in prayer, to help us to do what is right in His will and not our own?

And why not ask our most intimate of friends, Christian brothers (sisters), who care for us in Christ deeply, to support us in prayer for these same relational needs for the VIP’s of our daily life? Sometimes the difficulty of these struggles of life are more appropriate for a small group of believers or even one life-minded brother (or sister) in the Lord, than for the prayer list of the entire church (often as fodder for speculation and gossip).

It seems the ‘perfect christians’ must go to some other church.

OR perhaps some we know just hide behind their masks of Christ’s perfection.

Let us, dearly beloved of Christ Jesus, love them as He has loved us.

Let us bow down before the Lord our God in great humility, with hearts overflowing in love and pouring forth forgiveness, through our prayers for for the family of Christ Jesus. Amen.

How may I pray for you, adding you to my personal prayer list?

Please comment. If you would like any of our readers to also pray for you, please share your personal prayer needs with us.

(IF you would rather have your request remain private, please begin your comment with the word, ‘Private,’ and I will not post it publicly.)

Pray also for me, that I might return to a purer committed faith in God to both hear and answer my ceaseless prayers for my most beloved.

Roger Harned, author and site administrator
February 1, 2015
A Vineyard

Now will I sing to my wellbeloved

a song of my beloved

touching his vineyard.

My wellbeloved hath a vineyard

in a very fruitful hill:

And he fenced it,

and gathered out the stones thereof,

and planted it

with the choicest vine,

and built a tower

in the midst of it,

and also made

a winepress therein:

and he looked

that it should bring forth grapes,

and it brought forth

wild grapes.

Isaiah 5:1-2 KJV

‘Ah, another song’ you say, after having just read the beautiful Song of Songs.

Perhaps the beautiful bride comes to mind and what she might say in a wedding toast of her beloved bridegroom, her husband. Yet this lyric is more than that – much more.

The preceding book of the Bible paints a seductive and loving picture of a woman seeking the love of Solomon.

Song of Songs

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

4:10 How fair is thy love, my sister, my spouse! how much better is thy love than wine! and the smell of thine ointments than all spices!

5:1 I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk: eat, O friends; drink, yea, drink abundantly, O beloved.

How the loving wife desires her husband. How the fruit of the wedding becomes the celebration of the bride and of the bridegroom!

But what has happened here in Isaiah, first of the books of the Prophets?

Hear first, a young virgin bride praising her husband.

Isaiah 5 ESV

Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:

Yes, well ought the loving bride sing a love song of the anticipation of her beloved.

My beloved had a vineyard
on a very fertile hill.
2 He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;

An idyllic photo of a bridegroom and husband-to-be. He has prepared a place for the woman of his love, the woman of his betrothal. He will live in this place with his a bride-to-be forever (‘until we are parted by death,’ say our solemn vows before witnesses).

The bridegroom planted a vineyard in the fertile place, digging it out for the day the grapes could be pressed into choice wine. It would take some time, but the bridegroom has done this for his bride. The bridegroom has set a watchtower over what he has claimed for his bride-to-be.

On the side of a hill where grapevines grow a wine vat hewn from stone testifies to the groom preparing a place of permanence for his bride.

Then (as so often happens in familiar romances) the song of love takes a tragic turn. The perspective of the groom – the bridegroom who has prepared all this for his beloved now laments over the unfaithfulness of his bride.

and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

The vineyard is the Lord’s! He has planted it. Jerusalem and Judah and the earth are His – He has planted it.

Listen now to the Groom:

3 And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
4 What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?

Isaiah continues (later) to tell of the rule of the Lord over the end of the earth.

I ask you, dear brother, dear sister in the Lord – dear church, Bride of Christ Jesus – have you become a ‘wild grapevine’ in the garden of the Lord?

Isaiah 24:

Behold, the Lord will empty the earth and make it desolate,
and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants…

7 The wine mourns,
the vine languishes,
all the merry-hearted sigh.
8 The mirth of the tambourines is stilled,
the noise of the jubilant has ceased,
the mirth of the lyre is stilled.
9 No more do they drink wine with singing;
strong drink is bitter to those who drink it.
10 The wasted city is broken down;
every house is shut up so that none can enter.
11 There is an outcry in the streets for lack of wine;
all joy has grown dark;
the gladness of the earth is banished.
12 Desolation is left in the city;
the gates are battered into ruins.

13 For thus it shall be in the midst of the earth
among the nations,
as when an olive tree is beaten,
as at the gleaning when the grape harvest is done.

Was the righteous olive tree, Christ Jesus, not beaten for your sins?

Will the Lord of all the earth not give the Son of Righteousness reign and judgement over all the earth?

Does the Song of the Vineyard of Isaiah, Prophet who so accurately foresaw the life of Christ Jesus as God Incarnate, not seem somewhat familiar from a parable of Jesus?

Mark 12: And he began to speak to them in parables.

“A man planted a vineyard and put a fence around it and dug a pit for the winepress and built a tower, and leased it to tenants and went into another country. 2 When the season came, he sent a servant to the tenants to get from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3 And they took him and beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Again he sent to them another servant, and they struck him on the head and treated him shamefully. 5 And he sent another, and him they killed. And so with many others: some they beat, and some they killed.

6 He had still one other, a beloved son. Finally he sent him to them, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

7 But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’

8 And they took him and killed him and threw him out of the vineyard. 9 What will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others.

O, beloved Bride of Christ:

Have we thrown the beloved Son out of the vineyard?

What will the Owner surely do?

Did our Lord not warn us (wild vines worshiping whatever we would)?

John 15 KJV

1 I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman.

2 Every branch in me that beareth not fruit he taketh away: and every branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that it may bring forth more fruit.

3 Now ye are clean through the word which I have spoken unto you.

4 Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me.

5 I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.

O beloved Bride, vineyard of the Bridegroom, betrothed of the King of Righteousness:

Do you abide in the life of Christ Jesus?

Surely He will return to the vineyard. Will the Bridegroom not expect grapes, and not wild grapes? Will the One who has prepared a place for his Bride not throw into the fire the one who would not wait for the Bridegroom’s on the clouds?

Will the Lord not take with Him only the faithful Bride?

November 15, 2014