Bible Lesson 147

LOVE OR HATE WHAT WILL IT BE?

Jesus said.. “As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 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. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no man than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you.” John 15:9-14

What does love look like? It has the hands to help others. It has feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrow of men. That is what love looks like. Saint Augustine

We shall attempt in the time allotted and the space available, to seek to find out what God means when He speaks of love to those who abide in Him. But in order to fully understand what true love is, we must also deal with ‘hate’, and what it means. You may think that we are dealing in things that everyone knows all about. After all, who doesn’t know what love is and what hate is; however, stop for a moment and jot down an explanation of both love and hate.

There will be some who read this lesson and it will make them mad, or at least make them think that this writer does not know what he is talking about; however, you cannot use that argument because what I say is being reinforced by scripture that proves that it is the truth. We may know some things that come out of the two words, but we really find it hard to explain what love, or hate really is. Both love and hate originate from an inward disposition. The act of hate or love, is the outward expression of that inward disposition.

Both hatred or love are verbs, and express themselves in what they do. God speaks to us concerning love, in 1st Corinthians 13:4-8, and says to us, “Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails’” That outlines love pretty well, but as with all scriptures it must be understood in light of all other scriptures. For instance, we have to understand that, in light of Leviticus 19:17, which tells us to rebuke a neighbor who is in sin, or bear his sin. That is tough love, and the Christian must always be ready to practice tough love.

God requires the true Christian to practice hate, in fact, in Luke chapter 14 beginning in verse 26 requires us to love our parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, so much less than we love Christ, that it appears to be hate. Unless you know the Bible and are ‘In Christ’ you cannot understand what love or hate is, and how to differentiate between the two. If we have been Bible students for very long we have to understand that the source of love is God, and the source of hate is Satan.

That means that everyone of us was born with hate planted in us, and we exercised it without even knowing we were doing so. God is the source of love, and unless and until God reaches down with His effectual call to a person to quicken them gives them the capacity, to know Him intimately, we are unable to really love anything or anyone other than ourselves and even that is a corrupt kind of love. That does not mean that we do not know how to appear loving, as we fool most everybody that is around us with our two-faced kind of love. We can appear to love you while planning to murder you the next instant. How many young brides have entered into a marriage with some suitor who has confessed his love and even given some evidence of love, or lust; only to find out a few day or weeks or months later that there is no love in him’

That is one of the reasons why we need to have this conversation about love and hate. We must come to a point where we know how to define and identify which is which. This understanding will require us to become clear eyed and willing to look for the marks of each one. One thing we will have to change our minds about is the Inspired and Inerrant Word of God, the Bible. If we are honest with ourselves we have to admit that none of us really looks at the Bible the way we should anymore. We have been trained by religious institutions to trust men who in their heart of hearts do not believe that the Bible is the Inspired Word of God. They believe that the Bible contains truths, but not necessarily that every word or thought contained in the Bible is God speaking to us through holy men that God controls as they write.

If we cannot believe that, and read and study the Bible with that mind-set, then we will never know the difference between love and hate. You see, it has been convenient for us to form our own idols that we worship and it is normally ourselves. We read the Bible and select what we think we would like for our truths to be, and that puts us on the throne rather than God. When we read the Bible we must hear God speaking to us. Unless we do that, we can never really know the love of God and never understand that we are headed to hell because of our idolatry. Do you love God’ Do you understand what love entails’ Do you love God enough to understand your condition before Him because of your depraved nature’ Are you willing to die to self and live by faith in Him alone’ Can you trust Him with your eternal life’ And finally, will you do that’

Will you come to the Cross knowing that you are vile, unheeding, apart from help and hope, and cast yourself on Jesus Christ as the only hope you have, asking Him to change you and save you’ If you can and will do that without any equivocation, then the Bible says that He will save you. Jesus Christ speaks to lost men and women in Matthew 11:28-30 and says’.”Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” The Lord also speaks to us in John 6:44, and says “No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me, draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.” That means that It is God who is Sovereign in our Salvation and we will not come, cannot come to Him unless He issues that sovereign call. Jesus Christ tells us in John 6:37: “all that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and the one who comes to Me, I will in no means cast out.”

I give you that scripture not to frighten you or cause you to run from God, but to give you the assurance you need to depend solely upon the master. It is God who causes you to realize your terrible condition without God; and then to desire and seek His face unrelenting until God issues you that call that cannot be ignored. If you have been playing church and do not really have that rock-ribbed assurance that you are God’s child, then you are probably not His child; but that doesn’t mean that God won’t save you, so you do what you would do if you knew your house was on fire, and run to the Cross where God sent His One and Only Son Jesus Christ to sacrifice Himself on your behalf’ if you will ever become obedient.

We are told in the Gospel of John chapter Three, that 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 offered up His Son Jesus Christ as a sacrifice for those whom He had chosen before the foundation of the world. Jesus took the sins (past, present and future) of all who would believe, and suffered the penalty due for them, so that the chosen would not have to suffer eternal condemnation. That word perish in John 3:16 speaks of the condemnation of those who go to hell. It does not mean that the person is destroyed but that they spend eternity in literal flames in hell, a place of darkness and pain and torment (See Luke 16:16-31).

Can there be any doubt that we as a people, are confused about what true love really is’ We seem to think that love for our God consists of our occasionally, attending church or even speaking the name of Jesus Christ. Even if we went to church every time the doors were opened, that is no indication of our love for God. We prove our love for God by our obedience to His commandments. The Bible gives us no other bench mark for love for God (John 14:21-24; John 15: 9-14). As we said before, love is a verb and it always manifest itself by acting a certain way. The way love acts is that it is self-giving, meaning that it will always put itself second instead of first for those that it loves. It is interesting that the Apostle Paul, in First Corinthians 13 said of love, that a person might be willing to give up all of their possessions or even go to the stake to be burned alive’.yet if that was not an act out of love for God and brothers and sisters it would be an empty act. Some one has said that love is action, not abstraction.

Love is both positive and negative, meaning that in the positive sense, love is patient with people and gracious to them with generosity and negatively, love never envies or brags or is arrogant. Love is never rude or overbearing and rarely takes offense except in some slight of God’s Word. I always enjoy the thought of James in his epistle where he says concerning wisdom’.. ” Who is wise and understanding among you’ Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your hearts, do not boast and lie against the truth. This wisdom does not descend from above, but is earthly , sensual and demonic. For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality and without hypocrisy. Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace.”

Many people who chase after religion, seem to always end up as the center of their own world and that is not a picture of the child of God. What love engenders is a life that is centered and stayed on God and His Word and Will. Love will always make the person who is saved have the mind of Christ and as we learn in our Scriptural text for this lesson, Christ was obedient to His Father. Jesus tells us in John 15:9-14… ” As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love. 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. These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full. This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends, if you do whatever I command you.” Our Savior and Lord Jesus Christ never asks us to do anything that He has not already done before us. Christ says to us there, that the way we abide in His love is to keep His commandments. That’s what Jesus Christ did when He left heaven for a time, and took on the form and flesh of mankind, and walked with us here on the earth, finally to be nailed to a cross to die to redeem us who would abide in His love by keeping His commandments.

Most of the time when we read of love in the Bible we see that it is about God’s love for us. Sometimes it refers to how we are to love God and love our neighbors, spouses, children etc. What we have to remember is that our first priority in love, is God (Luke 14:26-32). Love is divine and can only be exhibited, in true essence by the person who has been born again. Love is one of God’s attributes and whenever God (Holy Spirit) takes up residence in a person, then and only then can that person truly love anyone. On the other hand, hate is a common commodity, it is of the devil and we live in the devils principality. We are born knowing how to hate and to be hateful. What we call love in most instances is simply hate in a new dress. Young people think that they fall in love in our day, and everyone is happy and spend many thousands of dollars in a marriage ceremony that takes longer in many cases than the marriage itself. Remember we found in First Corinthians chapter 13 about love and in verse 8 of Chapter 13 of First Corinthians we learn that love never fails! Prophecies may fail, tongues may fail and knowledge may fail but real love never fails. We can ask, how is it that love never fails’ What does love not fail to do’ Love never fails to act in the way God wants it to act, it never fails to care for those who need love, and it never fails to cause us to glorify God in the way that we act because of our love for God and love for others.

Hate is the opposite extreme of love. It hates and extracts revenge and punishes those that deserve love. Hate manifest itself in those who are unloving, by envy, covetousness, ungodliness, and downright violence towards others. Hate is corrosive, and eats away at the insides of those who hate and sometimes those who are the object of hate. Hatred produces no good thing; unless it is our hatred of those things which the Bible says God hates. Does Got hate anything’ Yes, God hates anything that is not of love and we will take time to illustrate some of the things that God hates. First we know that God hates evil (Psalms 97:10). Then God hates every false way (Psalms 119:104). God hates the double minded, the wishy washy or those who sit on the fence ( Psalms 119:113).

God hates lying, backbiters, All unrighteousness, sexual immorality, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness, envy, murder, strife, deceit, and pride ( Romans 1:29-32; Psalms. 97:10; Psalms.119:104,113,163; Proverbs 6:16). Jesus Christ warns those who truly are born again and obedient, that they will be hated by the World, but He says that they hated Him before it hated us (John 15:18). We might be better served if we understood that being a child of God (Christian) will make our journey through this land one in which we will not be loved by the World but rather, hated. We are called to be saints, a people who exist as strangers and pilgrims in this world of darkness and sin, and it does not love us and neither do we love the world or the things of the world (Romans 1:7; Hebrews 11:13-16; James 4:4). Too often, new professors of religion are made to think that simply being a church member will make your life so easy that you will never have any trials or heartache. That is not the truth and we need to understand on the front-end of our profession that the only thing that God promises us while we live this short while on the earth is trials, tribulation and the hatred of the world and the worldly.

We need to stop right here and clarify what we mean when we say that God hates some things. We cannot relate or compare things of God with things of man. When man hates it is normally connected with an evil heart and mind; but when God hates it is always an act of love. God always comes from an attitude of ultimate love and His wish for a person’s good. When man hates it is normally because he wants to extract punishment or revenge. How do we show that we love Christ’ Can you prove that you love Jesus’ Yes, and Jesus tells us exactly how we can do that. Jesus said that those who have His commandments (knows them)’.and keeps those commandments are the ones that love Him and those that love Him will be loved of His Father. (John 14:21-24).

Knowing that’..allow me to ask you, do you really love Jesus Christ’ If you are keeping His commandments then you love Him otherwise you do not. There are a lot of people who would say that they love him; but only those who are really saved, born again and obedient can keep His commandments. We may get close but it takes faith because whatever is not of faith is sin (Hebrews 11:6). Keeping the commandments of God are not hard and if you want to argue that you cannot keep them, you are God’s enemy. If you are saved, you keep them because Christ kept them for you (Romans chapter 8). The saved are ‘In Christ’ and that has significant meaning. We are seen not as sinners but we are seen by God in our redeemed position, and that is ‘In Christ’ who knew no sin. Now we have to remember that being saved is not a ‘get out of jail free’ card. The truly saved Christian has been imputed the righteousness of Christ, and they will strive to live up to that degree of righteousness that Christ had when He died so that we might live.

I’m sure that most of you who read this Bible lesson have heard that old instructional phrase that says’..”God hates sin but loves the sinner”. That is true if you understand what it really means. God gave Adam, one commandment’. Not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. What did God do when Adam disobeyed’ Did God say ‘Adam, I love you ‘just don’t do that ever again:’ Or, did God drive them out of the garden of Eden, never to come back again, and curse the ground for his sake, which caused weeds and thistles to grow in his fields.

God always has a purpose for doing whatever He does, and God’s purpose has always been to have His creation bring glory to Him. It is hard for me to imagine that people who claim the name of Jesus Christ, call themselves Christians, and use the church to flaunt their misdeeds’could ever glorify God. There are millions of people in our day who call themselves Christians because they have said that they love Christ enough to obey Him; however they are only fooling themselves, they will never be able to fool God. God spoke to us through the Apostle John and said, “I know you, that you have not the love of God in you. You receive honor one of another, and seek not the honor that comes from God only.” (John 5:42-44). We seem to have forgotten that the bodies of those who have been born again, and are obedient to the will of God, are part and parcel of the temple of God.

The Holy Spirit (God takes up residence in the bodies of those who truly believe), and wherever we go in the flesh, we take the Holy Spirit with us. Where have you taken Him recently’ God does not play games with His Children. We may play games with each other and our church groups but we had better not play games with God. All too many have heard so much objective preaching, and that is preaching that keeps the law and the work that God planned for his people to do, off in outer space, never allowing it to confront the sin and the sinners in the congregation. That is wasted effort because God gave us His Word the Bible to humble the pride of man, to exalt the grace of God in salvation, and to promote real holiness in heart and life.

If I were to ask of you right now, how many commandments are there’ You would probably say ten; however Christ gave us another, so now we have eleven commandments. Christ said in John chapter 13.’ “A new commandment I give unto you, That you love one another. By this shall all men know that you are My disciples, if you have love one to another,” (John 13:34-35). Since most do not know that commandment, we are failing Christ at every juncture of our lives. We are not loving people, as a rule. Oh, we say we are and brag about loving one another but it is evident in the way we live that we do not love the brethren. God originally gave us Ten Commandments and then while Jesus was teaching one day a scribe asked Christ what is the great commandment and Jesus asked Him what does the law (10 Commandments) say’ The man said “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all you strength, and will all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus said, ‘You have answered rightly, do this and live.

Jesus raised the bar on love when He said instead of love your neighbor, He added as thyself. Do you love your neighbor as yourself’ How much do you love yourself’ That is something that all of us need to consider, a neighbor is anyone we come in contact with who needs help and we have the ability to help them. Now, it is impossible for the unsaved person to obey that commandment because they still sit upon the throne of their lives. They have not submitted and committed their lives to the Savior and Lord. The truly saved person has a new nature, and a new mind and heart that comes in the New Birth, that birth from above. I leave you with a suggestion and that is that you read and meditate on these scriptures that I list’ Genesis 1:1-3; Psalms 33:6-9; Psalms 90:2; Proverbs 3:19; Proverbs 26:10; Isaiah 40:12,26, 28; Acts 17:24; Ephesians 3:9; Hebrews 11:3; Psalms 33:11; Ecclesiastes 3:14; Psalms 94:14; 1st Corinthians 1:9; Deuteronomy 10:17; Jeremiah 9:24; Isaiah 6:3; Psalms 7:9,11; Jeremiah 10:10; Psalms 4:3; Psalms 31:19; 1st Corinthians 6:19-20;

Until next time,

may God bless and keep you

This is Bro. Bob