Yesterday, we began this series on love.  Now let’s look at some of the attributes described by the apostle Paul concerning what genuine, true love looks like and check our own love-o-meters. 

1 Corinthians 13: (AMP)4 Love endures long and is patient and kind; love never is envious nor boils over with jealousy, is not boastful or vainglorious, does not display itself haughtily.

How are you doing so far?  Are you willing to endure long–even in those seasons when your mate or loved one becomes critical, distant, and stops meeting your needs?  Or what if some accident or illness left them completely unable to meet any of your needs and required you to sacrifice everything to provide their care; how long would love endure and remain patient and kind?  And even if you went about the steps of their care or the outward appearance of forgiveness for the critical mate; how long would it be continued out of genuine love for the other instead of a motivation of self-pitying and self-exalting (for one’s tremendous capacity to love) at the same time? These are tough questions that I still must ask myself everyday as I care for Mom?  Do I ever find myself grumbling because she has made one more demand of me and that seems impossible with my schedule?  What about "never boils over with jealousy?"  How often have I even thought, "I wish for one day that someone would take care of me and provide for me like I do mom."  Ok, I just admitted my failure and even more so if you continue on to "not boastful, vainglorious, nor display itself haughtily"  How are you doing on this love meter? Well, we are not done with this evaluation as next Paul continues with the next verse.

5 (AMP)It is not conceited (arrogant and inflated with pride); it is not rude (unmannerly) and does not act unbecomingly. Love (God’s love in us) does not insist on its own rights or its own way, for it is not self-seeking; it is not touchy or fretful or resentful; it takes no account of the evil done to it [it pays no attention to a suffered wrong].

Have you ever spoken a harsh word to your loved one?  Have you ever said, "But you don’t understand what they did or said?" How are you doing now with this love meter?

6 It does not rejoice at injustice and unrighteousness, but rejoices when right and truth prevail.

What if right and truth prevailing means you must accept that you are wrong? 

7 Love bears up under anything and everything that comes, is ever ready to believe the best of every person, its hopes are fadeless under all circumstances, and it endures everything [without weakening].

We are forever given opportunities to change our natural ability to love (which is lacking) into a love which is more resembling of perfect love which is only found in God.  Too often we try to explain away our inability to love perfectly as C. S. Lewis points this out in his book "The Four Loves"   " "If only I had been more fortunate in my children (that boy gets more like his father every day) I could have loved them perfectly." But every child is sometimes infuriating; most children are not infrequently odious. "If only my husband were more considerate, less lazy,” the wife says, to which her husband replies: “If only my wife had fewer moods and more sense, and were less extravagant…But in everyone, and of course ourselves, there is that which requires forbearance, tolerance, forgiveness."  Yet in each of these instances God is working in us to recognize our own inability to love perfectly, thus our need of Him to learn perfect love.

8 Love never fails [never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end]. As for prophecy ([d]the gift of interpreting the divine will and purpose), it will be fulfilled and pass away; as for tongues, they will be destroyed and cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away [it will lose its value and be superseded by truth].

Created within our nature is a need to love and to be loved.  Yet, we are incapable within or very nature to love perfectly.  The only perfect love is that of God Himself.  So, is there any hope for us outside of God?  Are our natural need for love and inability to obtain on our own a means by which God draws us to Himself?  There remains a void within us that only God can fulfill.  Yet, we seek it with all our hearts.  We desire to give love; yet, are without Him incapable of achieving this.  In fact, the more I know of His love; the more I realize my own inadequacy of loving God as I should.  All Knowing God, did not have to create man, He needed nothing of us; yet, He did so that He might have a someone to share His Love with (share like one who shares with a pauper his food and his wealth).  Without free will we could never understand His Grace nor fully understand the depth of His Love.  A love that as pointed out by C. S. Lewis again in his book The Four Loves  "He creates the universe, already foreseeing — or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God — the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves,the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up." Knowing the depth of depravity that would occur in man and the price that must be paid so that His relationship with man be restored in order that He give of His Overflowing Love to Us, He still created man.  I John 4: "8 God is love.9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

Our only hope of truly loving anyone is by the empowering work of Perfect Love-God.  We need first to learn of God’s love, seek to know His love, and with His help to lift us up learn to love Him better; then, the love of God will fill our hearts and overflow to those around us.  

Marriage gives us an opportunity to learn of this kind of love, to learn a little more of God’s love and to truly point out our own inability to love perfectly without the help of God’s love within us.  It should always point us even closer to God.  Two imperfect people learning to love, forgive, hope, and endure through everything; always seeing only the good in the other while at the same time helping them to see that good themselves, dying to self so that the beloved is Glorified, and always praying that God teach us more how to love while we seek Him first, knowing He is our only Hope. 

To this day, I can never thank God enough for all the lessons of love learned with my belated husband, Pedro Barba, Jr.  How often he forgave me for all my inadequacies and how much I learned of unconditional love as I forgave him his.  In the midst of that love between Pete and I, I learned so much of God’s love and one day I will see Pete and finally we will be perfected in love.  Still, that reunion will pale in comparison to seeing Love Himself (God).

 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mXAtFvnibc

 

Amplified Bible (AMP)

Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation

Though we seek being loved, we by nature do not truly know how to love.  Our ideas on love generally are some feeling that makes us feel good and makes us feel better about ourselves; yet, are we willing to lay aside our interests in order to love another? Do selfish, self-exalting hearts really ever love another, forgetting about our own feelings?  Or do we by nature seek our own glory and our own desires rather than that of others?  Paul wrote an entire chapter in I Corinthians to help us see the difference and to help us understand what love really looks like.  I want to do this series to help us all understand the difference.

I Corinthians 13: (AMP) 1If I [can] speak in the tongues of men and [even] of angels, but have not love (that reasoning, intentional, spiritual devotion such [a]as is inspired by God’s love for and in us), I am only a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.2 And if I have prophetic powers ([b]the gift of interpreting the divine will and purpose), and understand all the secret truths and mysteries and possess all knowledge, and if I have [sufficient] faith so that I can remove mountains, but have not love (God’s love in me) I am nothing (a useless nobody).3 Even if I dole out all that I have [to the poor in providing] food, and if I surrender my body to be burned or [c]in order that I may glory, but have not love (God’s love in me), I gain nothing.

So often we might want to say that we have done great things to or even sacrificed to demonstrate our own ability to love; yet, if we do those things in order to gain our own glory, then we do not understand love at all.  If our own comfort and praise are the reason for doing these things then we have remained merely self-centered and self exalting and do not understand the principles of God’s love.  Love requires that we die to our own self, our own desires so that we might place the comfort and desires of another as more important than our own.  God’s love for us is a sacrificial love which was willing to suffer and die so that we might be able to receive His love.  He loved us even in our most unlovable state and was willing to pay the price so that through His love He could transform the ugly into something beautiful.  Look even at Adam and Eve. Once they had sinned by placing their desire for self exaltation above their relationship to God, they began to make excuses and even accuse the other as well as God for their malady.  (Genesis 3:12 12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.)   Without God’s love within us to transform our selfish heart, we are unable to ever truly show love to another.  It is not within our nature to love another completely unless we learn to die to self and the power to do that can only come from God.  There is no perfect love outside of God. 

John 12: 23 And Jesus answered them, saying, The hour is come, that the Son of man should be glorified.

24 Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

25 He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.

26 If any man serve me, let him follow me; and where I am, there shall also my servant be: if any man serve me, him will my Father honour.

Let me close today with these 4 quotes from CS Lewis. 

Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal….   

God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense….

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness….

God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love (from The Problem with Pain)

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. from Questions on Christianity

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcsCxC8JGX0

Amplified Bible (AMP)

Copyright © 1954, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1987 by The Lockman Foundation

Have you ever at school or at work stood back and watched as what appears to be an injustice performed and wondered about what God’s response is?  As you watch the corporate wheels become impersonal and see dedicated employees fired with no real explanation or you watch while money becomes the all driving force; you wonder where does God stand?  Still we must remember that God is Sovereign and is still in control.  We must never put our trust in man, our trust is in the Lord and His promises.  He always has the best plan for His Children and that plan is for our good, no matter what the circumstances are that surround us.

Jeremiah 17:

7 Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is.

8 For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.

9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?

10 I the Lord search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings.

11 As the partridge sitteth on eggs, and hatcheth them not; so he that getteth riches, and not by right, shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a fool.

We must always remember these four facts.

Fact #1:  God is Sovereign and nothing enters the life of a Believer but that God has ordained it by His Sovereign Will or that God has allowed it and hates the sin perpetrated against the believer; yet, is able to take that sin and turn it for good for all who believe in Him while still enacting judgement against those who have broken His commands by performing the act of evil.

Fact #2:  God has promised to provide blessing to all those who trust and hope in Him.

Fact #3:  It may appear that evil prospers for a time, but in the end; those who obtain riches wrongly from their selfish and covetous means will lose it.

Fact #4:  We must have a forgiving heart and leave all vengeance to God alone. 

Romans 12: 19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.20 Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FiEB6mNpNU

How quickly our minds stray from seeing Christ as our greatest treasure and become focused once more upon ourselves, our discomforts, our desires, and our self-exalting pride.  How do I live out my salvation in such a way that Christ is displayed in all His beauty so that you might also desire Him?  I can only do that when I live a life that truly worships Christ with my actions, my life and my spirit.  But how do I lay my body as a sacrifice to God and slay this self-exalting heart with all of its desires for self comfort?  How do I live in this world and not be conformed to this world? What part can I play in this?  If everything is through mercy and grace, am I suppose to do anything to help in this transforming or does God work that out apart from my willing?

Romans 12: I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.

2 And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.

3 For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.

There are two actions that are ours to perform.

Action #1:  Study your Bible.  Never neglect the reading of the Word of God both day and night.  How can the Holy Spirit work toward renewing of my mind, if I neglect reading of the word?  Within the Bible are not only the commandments which help us to guide our lives; but also there are the covenant promises of God.  Yet, the most important part of the Bible is that with the help of the Holy Spirit you will come to see the overwhelming Beauty and Glory of which is Christ, you will begin to see Him as your greatest treasure, you will by thus be humbled by the ugliness of your own heart with it’s unworthiness, and you will fall overwhelmingly in love with Christ.  That love will cause your heart to sorrow whenever your thoughts and actions bring Him shame; thereby, causing you to be transformed.

Action #2:  Prayer.  Do not neglect the times of talking to God and listening to God.  God often whispers to you with a soft voice. Pray for God’s wisdom, that He will guide your steps and will squelch those self-exalting thoughts.

Most of what we do in life is spontaneous, so our only hope to display God is to have our minds and hearts grounded, embedded into so much truth of God enabling those spontaneous actions to still display Christ.  Yes the transforming work can only be done by the Holy Spirit; but, we must (if able to read at all) be diligent in Studying the Word so that the Holy Spirit might reveal the treasure that is Christ so that all our other desires become nothing compared to our desire to know Him more and we must pray so that the Mind and words of Christ take over blocking out the human thoughts.  So simple, so why would we ever neglect these two actions of faith

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRTLocMzTvs

This earthly journey is a constant battle against sin, fear, despair, and moments of faithlessness in our life.  It is a battle to hold firm to the Joy, Hope and Faith that we have found in a relationship with our Creator, God.   But how do we do that and win against the evil forces from without and within?  Is there something within the covenant promises of God that gives us the assurance that we need when fears press us from every side? Where do we find the power to stand firm and hold tight to past, present and future grace?  Look at what God said in Isaiah.

Isaiah 41: 10

10 Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.11 Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.

12 Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, even them that contended with thee: they that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of nought.

13 For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

If God is upholding me with His right hand of righteousness tightly holding onto my right hand then visually He is standing behind me, supporting me so that were I to start to fall His left arm would wrap around my waist pulling me ever closer against His chest; while the right arm firmly supports my right arm and He holds the right hand.  This visual is hard to write in words; but as a nurse having assisted patients who are unsteady, I can see it clearly.  It is very much like the portrait "Forgiven" by Thomas Blackshear with the exception that the right hand of the man has dropped the mallet and is now firmly placed into the hand of God.  It is there that God’s Righteousness becomes the support because we have none of our own.  David in a song praised God for His right hand of righteousness.

Psalm 48:

9 We have thought of thy lovingkindness, O God, in the midst of thy temple.

10 According to thy name, O God, so is thy praise unto the ends of the earth: thy right hand is full of righteousness.

Yet on what basis can a just and holy God have any part with sinful man?  Both Isaiah and David pointed toward the one who would make that possible.  Please note in Hebrews that God spoke through many prophets in the past; yet, all was completed when Christ completed His redemptive work upon the cross and then rose again to be seated at the right hand of the Father.

Hebrews 1: God, who at sundry times and in divers manners spake in time past unto the fathers by the prophets,

2 Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds;

3 Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, and upholding all things by the word of his power, when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high:

So by what authority could Christ establish and complete the redemptive process so that I might be brought into a intimate relationship of being the adopted child of God, bought with a price and declared righteous?  

Authority #1:  Christ is 100% heir to all things on heaven and earth; thus, has full power to make good on all His promises.

Authority #2:  Christ being co-eternal with the Father and a exact part of the Father (like we who have body, soul, and spirit) was present and directly engaged in the creation.  (John 1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.2 The same was in the beginning with God.3 All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.4 In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

Authority #3: Christ displayed and displays at all times the Brightness of the Beauty and Glory of God–a glory so magnificent that we may only see dimly now; though the glimpses of which are so magnificent that we seek, savor and long to see more and one day will.

Authority #4:  Christ is the express image of the Father–In perfect righteousness, in perfect justice which demands the payment of our penalty, in perfect love which made Him willing to pay the price, and in perfect Joy that sees beyond the momentary circumstances to the final overwhelming joy of Christ himself when he sees our joy fulfilled as we stand in His presence.  A dim comparison, but remember when you gave up and sacrificed something to buy the perfect gift for your child and you waited expecting until the day you could hand it to him and the sheer joy on his face made you feel overjoyed–sort of like that, but even bigger.

Authority #5:  Though Christ had come in human flesh, He did not sin.  This is why the word says "upholding all things by the word of his power".  2 Corinthians 5: 20 Now then we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God.21 For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him." 

Authority #6:  Christ who is perfect righteousness took upon Himself the full wrath and penalty that justice demands when he was nailed on the Cross.

Authority #7:  He then having paid the price, conquering sin and death was raised again and is seated on the Right Hand of The Father.  Are you beginning to see the significance of God’s right hand of Righteousness? 

Ephesians 1: 17 That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give unto you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him:

18 The eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that ye may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints,

19 And what is the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to the working of his mighty power,

20 Which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in the heavenly places,

Have your eyes been enlightened?  Or do you still see yourself in such a high esteem that you think you have anything to bring to the table for your salvation apart from Christ?  And for those of you who know Christ as your Savior, why are you still downcast and burdened?  Do you understand the hope of His calling and the riches of Glory which will be yours because of the Authority of Christ?  Do you know the exceeding greatness of His power toward us who believe and know Him as our Savior?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_LEodJX3lA