Bible Lesson 162

The Love of God

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” Deuteronomy 10:12

“What does love look like? It has hands to help others. It has the feet to hasten to the poor and needy. It has eyes to see misery and want. It has the ears to hear the sighs and sorrows of men. That is what love looks like.” Saint Augustine

Now, if you read and meditate on those verses, you must come to the conclusion that God does not love everyone because everyone does not love Him enough to keep His commandments. That does not mean that God does not consider and provide for everyone, but the Father’s saving love, and The Son’s love are predicated upon our obedience. Why would God and Jesus Christ demand that we love them enough to obey them’ The only answer to that question that will ever settle it in the minds of the creature, is that God is God and He is Sovereign over all things, He made us and therefore He owns us and He knows that those who do not walk the way He has laid out for us, will not lead a fulfilled live and gain eternal life in heaven.

If you require more explanation than that, you will have to ask someone else. If we have gained sufficient knowledge of God by reading the Word of God, the Bible, we have to know that the reason God created man in the beginning, was to have a creature that loved God and enjoy Him enough to obey Him. God’s love accrues only to those who God chose in eternity past, to be the children of God, and adopted brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, who is God in the flesh. In fact, we find in the Word of God, that love is in Christ Jesus. If we read Romans chapter 8, where we find Paul under the inspiration of God telling us, that we will never be condemned if we are truly saved and obedient, and that we are no longer under the law’.verses 28 through 38, tells us that all things work together for good for us, that we are predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ, that we are called, justified and glorified, and that nothing can separate us from the love of Christ and then in verse 39 of Romans chapter 8, we read, “Nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus the Lord.”

That means that the only people who know the love of God, are those who are born again, obedient, and walking in Christ. We in our society, are for the most part, like the Church at Ephesus, who received one of the seven letters from Christ. The Lord told them that He knew all about them and one of those things was that “They had lost their first love, that first blush that comes when a sinner realizes what Christ has done for them”. Revelation 2:1-4.

That great old preacher Vance Havner had this to say about love’ ‘What we love usually manages to get into our conversation. What is down in the well of the heart will come up in the bucket of the speech’. So many of us, who profess to know Christ are like a wife who has two lovers on the side. Many who belong to the church of our day are much like that woman. The truth is that a wife who is faithful 85 percent of the time is not a faithful wife and neither is a professing Christian who is faithful part time, in fact they are not even a faithful professor! We too often are like con-artist, we are double-minded, and deceitful and even devious. We want to practice a ‘little game’ on the Lord.

We seem to think that He won’t mind if we are pretty good church members, and we don’t get caught in sin too often. Adam must have thought that same thing in the Garden of Eden, because when Eve took the fruit and took a bite, she wanted Adam to eat and He did, but God never let’s us get away with disobedience and sin. Up until the time that Adam disobeyed God, he had peace and contentment with God. He had a paradise that God had prepared especially for him and his family, all the food that was necessary and no worries at all; but the moment that he took that fateful bite, he lost it all. That should tell us a lot about how hateful sin is to our God. Sin is like spitting in the face of the Almighty, and it is never a good idea. Have you ever thought about why Adam would disobey God’ He had it all, the best of both worlds, and he for some reason was able to give all that up for a midday snack.

The problem was that in all probability Adam began to become self-centered. He had for some reason taken paradise for granted, and he must have thought like many today do.. that God would not mind this little sin of disobedience. He might have thought God wouldn’t notice, but when he took that bite of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, everything between him and God changed. He now had the knowledge of good and evil, which before he bit the fruit he did not have. God had created Adam and Eve in a state of innocence, and as long as they would have obeyed that one commandment ‘not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of good and evil, they would remain innocent, and fit to commune with the Almighty. They had known the love, comfort and provision of God as long as they obeyed, but now everything was against them (Genesis 3:1-19). However, God is a Gracious and Merciful God and He made provision for them in the future. Genesis 3:15-21. This was the first shedding of blood in Time as we know it.

God sacrificed animals to cover the sin of Adam and Eve (they were naked and they knew it). We in our time know the love of God by what God has done for us by sending His One and Only Son to die (shed His blood) for us. John 3:16-21. Now if you are wondering why I nearly always quote John 3:16-21, because that is verse 16 in it’s context. We cannot simply lift John 3:16 and think that that is all there is. In other words just because we know that Jesus Christ died for sin, does not save us: We must understand that verse 17-21 complete that verse of scripture. We have to understand, first, that Jesus Christ died to save a people from every tribe, tongue and nation (without distinction, but not without exception) that means that not every one in every nation will be saved. God makes it abundantly clear in the verses there in John 3:16-21, that only those who believe unto obedience, those who come to the light (Jesus Christ), (John 1:1-5).

We have to know and believe that God cares for his creatures but not all are simply creatures, God has elected or chosen some to be saved and only those will know that life eternal bliss to come. God cares for and provides for all of his creatures but those who were foreknown (loved before and chosen in eternity) will know His love as He saves them and adopts them into His Family.(Ephesians 1:1-11; Hebrews 5:8-9; John 14:15,21-24; John 17:8-24). I always like to preach that, God did not put any marks or signs, on those who were chosen: that means that since you don’t know if you were chosen or not, then if you are really interested in being saved, you know that you must seek God and His salvation, study the scriptures because it is in the knowledge of the Scriptures, that saving faith comes (Romans 10:17).

Then you must throw yourself on God’s mercy and commit and submit yourself to His Son Jesus Christ. Do not stand on the side-lines complaining about God not being fair, just jump in and see what will happen. Since there is no middle ground with Christ it has to be, that you give up everything for Christ (Matthew 12:30). When I say that we give up everything, I mean we give up everything that involves sin and worldliness and take up living like Jesus Christ (Titus 2:11-14; Romans 6:1-4; Romans 8:28-30). God does not tell us to give up anything that would ultimately be good for our lives, and He never tells us to do anything that is not for our ultimate good. It may not always seem like something good that God is telling us to do but He sees us as we are everyday, as we were yesterday and the day before and the day before’and He sees where we will be tomorrow and everyday of our lives.

Part of living the Christian life is learning to trust God in everything; and not listening to any other spirit except the Spirit of God. We need to be reading, meditating and praying over the Words of the Bible everyday, and growing in our understanding of Who God is and who we are. God sent His one and only Son Jesus Christ to the earth to take upon Himself the sins that we had committed and suffer the just penalty (death) for those sins. God never does anything lightly, never does anything except what He has eternally meant to do and you can be sure that if God offered up His Son, that He will always give us the best of everything that we need (not always what we desire or what we think we need, but everything without exception, that we need).

How easy is it for you to say that you love God’ Does it flow off your lips as easily as butter runs off of a hot knife’ Probably for most of us, it comes with no effort at all because we know in our heart of hearts that, that is what people want to hear and expect of us because we identify ourselves as Christians. If we are students of the Bible, we should know that God has put a test on real love. We can read about that test in 1st John 2:1-6, where we read about our Advocate (One who turns away God’s wrath from our sin) Jesus Christ. Then verse 3 begins outlining the test concerning real love. Verse 3 tells us that “If we know Him, we keep His commandments, and verse 4 tells us that if we say we love Him and do not keep the commandments, we are liars (we fail the test). Then verse 5 says “But whoever keeps His Word, truly the love of God is perfected in him. By this we know that we are in Him.

Then verse 6 concludes the test of love when it says, “He who says he abides in Him ought himself also to walk just as He walked.” Will your test your love for God by that small test of love today’ It takes a pretty honorable person to sit down and really examine their lives and honestly see where they are failing in the love of God. This is probably one of the tests that God would give us at the judgment, if He was not an Omniscience God who knows the answers before the questions are asked. God gives us the opportunity to test our own love for Him and He even gives us the answers before the test, can you pass it, and can I pass it’ God wants us to be real, and by that I mean not actors who play parts that they are detached from in reality. God tells us in 2nd Corinthians 13:5, “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves, , that Jesus Christ is in you’.unless indeed you are disqualified (Galatians 2:20)’ What an earth shaking question for God to put to those who really trust Him.

God says that we have to be soldiers who have been trained to war against sin, have been hardened by Christian activity, know the General Orders, and have put on the Armor of God and if we are able to test ourselves we are not ready for the battle. I find that one of the greatest problems that any minister has today is the problem of how to unlearn so much of what the institutional churches have taught simple people who never really read their Bibles. One of the things that we have learned that we must unlearn is ‘How do we define love’or what is love’ Our problem is that we tend to like the unreality of Hollywood and it’s desire to entertain us with lies and pretensions of what they think love really is. More lives have been ruined, more people led astray and more people lined up to go to hell by movies out of Hollywood that treat people to sexual sin, sins of self grandeur, murder, violence, and any other sin that you can think of. I give them credit for much of our problems in living daily lives.

They portray drugs and sex as the answer to life’s problems. But as many bad things as we can accuse the movie industry of, the real root of the problem is within us. It comes from our nature that we inherited from Adam, and our extreme tendency to satisfy the flesh and it’s desires. We need to get it straight in our minds that, God did not send His One and Only Son Jesus Christ to the earth to help us understand God and His plan for man, He sent him to make a change in those to who He extends His grace. Does that mean that God will save everyone’ No, because Jesus Christ (God with us) tells us plainly in the Gospel of Matthew that only a few would make the effort to find and go through that Strait Gate that leads to eternal life. (Matthew 7:13-14). God must and will do His Supernatural Work in salvation, and that work always makes a radical change in the life of the person that God saves. The old man with all of its fleshly desires is put to death and a new man, predestined to be conformed to the image of Christ is raised up.

This new person has the ‘old things’ passed away and all things have become new. This new man will have the power to understand and to obey all that Christ would have them do. (Ephesians 2:1-10; 2nd Corinthians 5:17; Romans 6:1-14; Romans 8:1-17). Those who will not be made new, can never be saved, unless God works to change their hearts and minds and grants them the New Birth. God sent Jesus Christ to the earth with a mission, and that mission was to save His People. Now, if God was willing to give us His Son to Die for our sins, certainly He would not do that unless it would accomplish His purposes; and His purpose as stated in the Bible was to change us from sinners to saints ( Matthew 1:21: Romans 1:7; Romans 6:1-4; Ephesians 1:1; Colossians 1:2; Philippians 1:1; 2nd Corinthians 5:17).

We seem to want to think that we can negotiate with God concerning what He must do to prove His love for us. There is where our problem exists, we do not have a correct understanding of Who God is versus who we are. He is the Creator, hence He owns us, and everything else that exists. He as the creator may do, and God does, what so ever He pleases, with mankind or the animals or any other part of His creation. Ecclesiastes 12:13-14; Romans 1:18-25; Isaiah 55:6-13. Man without God can do nothing but we have become so accustomed to serving other gods, that we go through life often, with nothing but misery, pain and eventually we die and go out into eternity without any hope of anything in eternity but torment and terror in the blackness and misery of hell fire. We adopt the ways of the world and the worldly, and we pat ourselves on the back as we swim against the current of God’s will.

We even teach our precious children that are given by God to us, to raise up in the nurture and admonition of God, to follow that yellow brick road that appears to be going upward but in reality it goes down into hell. We who have been so richly blessed in having God to provide for and protect us, have decided to live like a nation of pagans and we have not stopped to consider who God is and what we give up when we chose to ignore Him and His will for our lives. How much did God love His people at the beginning of the line of humans’ He loved them enough that He trusted them to make good choices, which would have given them eternal life in paradise. He loved them enough that He created a special place, a paradise, a heaven if you will for them to live in. However, they thanked God for all of His blessings by taking the advice and encouragement of Satan in disobeying God. Did God overlook their sin’ Absolutely not, and God drove them out of paradise into a world that their sin had caused to resist their efforts to draw their daily sustenance from it. They left their upscale home with nothing but the skins of animals that God had sacrificed in order to cover their nakedness. Over and above that God loved them enough that, in time, He sent His One and Only Son to take on the form and flesh of mankind, to die on a cross in order to redeem them from their sin, and provide a home in heaven for them. Genesis 3:21; John 2:16.

We as the descendants of Adam and Eve, have inherited their disobedience and we are born into this world under the wrath of God because we love to disobey and sin against God. We have thought ourselves to be so wise and so lofty and good that we have forgotten that our duty is to fear God and keep His commandments. We have professed to be wise and proven ourselves to be fools as we have chosen to worship the creature rather than to worship God. Oh, yes, we have become pretty good at ‘putting on’ the act of worship as we go to church; and leave a worse sinner than we were before we went. We could trip ourselves over what we call worship and God wouldn’t even notice it. Only those who understand God’s love, and how it manifests itself in our worship, can worship God in Spirit and truth.

Jesus Christ (God in the flesh) said.. “Greater love has no man than this, to lay down one’s life for his friends.” John 15:13. We are the inheritors of a Grand and Precious legacy, that of having all of the fundamentals, the written Revelation of God in the Bible, and the almost forgotten dedicated daily worship and walk of true Christian leaders. We chose to give that up for the servile and sensuous attraction to pornography, and the idea of free sex and Hollywood’s idea of love. We enjoy face book and all of the other cheap ideas, that the devil has devised to take our attention off the Word of God and the God of the Word.

Someone has rightly said that we have left our love for Christ, and when love for Christ dies, love for each other, for the Bible, for souls die. Remember, “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son’that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Do you and I believe and appreciate that great love wherewith He loves us, to stop following Satan, and begin to really follow the one that loved us’ Think about that