A new kind of love was brought to the world by Jesus. As we understand this new kind of love, we realize there never was any love before.
The thing we have called love has been sex attraction. In heathen countries, there is no love. It is mere sex attraction hardly higher than that seen in the animal world.
But Jesus brought a new thing. The Greek word has been translated charity or love in our Bibles. It should never have been translated so. The Greek word should have been anglicized—agape—with an explanation.
When we are born again, we are born in love. We have found out that God is love and so the new birth is the impartation of this nature of the Father. We become children of love. It is a love family into which we have been born.
Paul speaking in Romans 5:5 says, “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts”—it has absorbed us, taken us over.
This love nature is the law of the new creation.
A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love [agape] one another; as I have loved [agape-ed] you, that ye also love [agape] one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love [agape] one to another. (John 13:34–35)
It was to be the stamp, the brand, if you please, that should differentiate us from the world folks.
Paul said, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus” (Galatians 6:17). He meant the scars and wounds that had been given to him in his persecutions.
But the believer bears the marks, the brand of love, upon his spirit.
Romans 12:5–6 says that every man, when he comes into the family, has a measure of faith given to him. He is to cultivate that faith and develop it.
The same thing is true in regard to this new kind of love. When you come into the family, a measure of that love is given you. It comes with a new nature, the love nature.
This love nature must be developed as you develop your faith life.
As you give love freedom to grow and act as it naturally should, it will gain control of your whole being. It must be fed by the Word of God; it must express itself in action. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God” (Matthew 4:4).
You see, the real man of whom He is speaking is your spirit. Your spirit hunger and your spirit needs are just as great as your mental or your physical needs.
Your spirit must have the privilege of meditation in the Word. You must learn to feed upon it just as Jeremiah did: “Thy words were found, and I did eat them” (Jeremiah 15:16).
Now you feed and exercise this new thing that has come into you by practicing love. The exercise makes it strong just as exercise makes your body strong.
Colossians 3:16 says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly,” gaining the ascendancy over all your faculties. This love life makes you gentle, Jesus-like. It makes you strong and vigorous like the Master. It makes you absolutely fearless in your walk with the Lord.
Some people have imprisoned love. We read recently of a father who locked his boy up in a garret and kept him a prisoner until the child was nearly dead.
How many have done that same thing to love? Instead of letting love have its perfect sway and control, we have limited it. We have forgotten that love will make a man a success. It will put him over where nothing else would make him a victor. Love never fails. It is the Master-ruler. It will lead a man out of selfishness, out of weakness and failure, and into the very strength and ability of Christ.
There is no force in the world that it cannot dominate.
It makes us wanted.
It makes us a blessing.
It enables us to take Jesus’s place.
I have sometimes wondered what would happen if a man dared to go the limit with love.
Some have neglected it, acting as though they did not have it; utterly ignoring its very existence, and yet they want the Father’s help in time of need.
Love must be enthroned in the heart.
It must govern the life.
As love takes over the kingdom of our spirit, then that wonderful passage in 2 Corinthians 5:14–15 becomes a living reality:
For the love of Christ constraineth us [or, better, has gained control and taken us over]; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again.
Paul’s friends had challenged him. They said he was beside himself, but the love of Christ had so set him on fire that he was slowly burning up. His very being was saturated with the passion that drove Jesus to the cross.
Now you can understand 1 Corinthians 10:24: “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth.”
When love burns at a white heat, selfishness stops reigning. What an unhappy thing it is for selfishness to have any part in the government of this new creation.
Selfishness is as deadly as poison.
It is poison to the spirit.
It is poison to the body of Christ.
It causes practically all the diseases in the body.
It is a strange thing how selfishness has never been feared by man.
He fears it in the other man but not in himself.
It is the cause of all the wars that have come; of all the strikes, the battle between labor and capital, and the strife in politics.
That thing born in the garden has grown so mighty that it governs the nations of the earth, and love is the only thing that can destroy it.
First John 4:16 was one of the most difficult Scriptures I ever encountered. It didn’t seem that I could ever enter into it:
And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.
Here are three great facts: first, I have come to believe in love. I believe it is best to let it govern my life. I have come to believe that it is the best method of ruling a home, a business, or a government. You know only a few folks believe in love. They believe in force; they believe in intrigue; they believe in sense knowledge arguments.
If, in your heart, you believe that the love way is best, then act it. Not only is it best, but it is your way. It is the way you are going to walk regardless of how anyone else walks; you are going to walk the love way, and when you do, you discover you are living in the love realm.
Your home is in love. Whenever you step out of love, you step into darkness and unhappiness, and so you have learned to stay in the love way.
You found that living in love is actually living in the highest, sweetest fellowship with the Father.
It is actually living with Him. He has come into your body to make it His home.
The next verse seemed so difficult to me in those early days, when I first discovered this love law and this love way.
Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. (1 John 4:17)
What does he mean by that? Love is perfect in itself, but it must gain perfect control of me. When love becomes the rule of my life, I grow up into it until my life is dominated, ruled, governed by it, and that gives me a quiet fearlessness in His presence.
You see, He is love and I am a love child. Now I am walking in the realm of love.
I am thinking in terms of love.
I am acting according to the rule of love.
My whole life is pitched to the key of love.
Then you can understand that there is no fear in love. There is fear in everything else.
When you are out of love, you say and do things that you would be afraid to face. You think things out of love that you wouldn’t want to become public property.
But perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment [or punishment]. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. (1 John 4:18)
Now you can understand that if we walk the love way and the love life controls us, we will say nothing; we will do nothing; we will resolutely refuse to think anything outside of love.
Can’t you see what a fearless life that would be?
No matter what happens, you know you are walking in love.
When you speak, you know it is in love.
Ephesians 4:15 illustrates this:
But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.
Speaking out of love is speaking out of tune. It is off-key. It breaks harmony.
It jars on the ears of the men and women who walk in love.
So our whole life swings into the orbit of this new kind of love, this new creation life.
This is the thing that Paul gave us.
Even as I please all men in all things, not seeking mine own profit, but the profit of many, that they may be saved. (1 Corinthians 10:33)
And then he says, “Be ye followers [imitators] of me, even as I also am of Christ” (1 Corinthians 11:1).
That is heart-searching, isn’t it?
Not living to profit from my brethren but living only to help them. But how 1 Corinthians 9:20–22 challenges us:
Unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews [he had stopped being a Jew; he had become a new creation, a Christian]; to them that are under the law, as under the law, that I might gain them that are under the law; to them that are without law, as without law, (being not without law to God, but under the law to Christ,) that I might gain them that are without law. To the weak became I as weak, that I might gain the weak: I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
What Christian workers we would make if love melted us into that cast! What Jesus-believers we would be! What soul-winners! What mighty men and women of God!
You see, the gospel comes first.
The lost must be reached; they must know this new life.
In Romans 15:1, there is another challenge of the believer to his brother believer: “We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves.”
In the third verse, he cries, “For even Christ pleased not himself.” There is a battle line laid down for us.
That is where we must begin our fight with the reign of selfishness.
This is a love affair and we must not live outside of it.
This is a love realm and to live outside of it is to destroy our usefulness.
The new law that was to take the place of the old Ten Commandments was given by Jesus in John 13:34. You remember, He fulfilled the old covenant and established a new covenant in His blood. And now He said, “A new commandment I give unto you [or a new law], That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.”
The men who live in this realm, under that new law, will never commit sin.
Hear it again, with verse 35: “By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
Take with that Romans 13:10: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.”
There is no need of the Ten Commandments now for us who are in Christ.
We are in the love family and walk in love, and as we walk in love, we do ill to no one. That will make the most beautiful type of life. Never any more harsh, bitter, unkind words spoken by us. No cruel insinuations, nor biting sarcasm. All our words would be soaked in love before they were uttered, literally saturated with love. Those words would need no artificial perfume. They would have the sweet fragrance of heaven itself.
What homes it would make!
What assemblies of believers where there would never be another unkind word spoken.
You know, as I studied the life of the Master, I saw that He never had suspicion.
I wondered how He could be above suspicion, surrounded He was with that crowd of godless men, but He was love. Love destroys suspicion.
Jesus never stepped out of the realm of love.
He was living the life.
He was walking in the new way. He built the new way.
You see, this is the new order for the full-grown man in Christ.
It is the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.
This would create a revival of the Jesus-life among men, wouldn’t it?
It would be good for us to read daily 1 Corinthians 13, at least the first eight verses. We would then suffer long with people and be kind while we suffer.
Love would gain such control of us that there would be no envy. We would thank the Father for the success of others.
We would never be elated over our own success, for it says love “vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up” (1 Corinthians 13:4).
Our conduct before the world would be one of restraint, love’s restraint, and we would be as kind to the outcast as we would to the wealthy.
We would never behave ourselves unseemly.
No one would ever hear a harsh word from our lips, nor an unkind criticism.
The love life would govern us.
It says love “seeketh not her own” (verse 5). It is not trying to gain ascendancy over anyone. And if others need what we have, we share with them.
We would never go to law; we would never quarrel or parley even over what belongs to us.
This new kind of love makes us so big that selfishness is utterly eliminated.
You see, in the new creation we were given a new self, a love self; a self born of God, a self like Jesus’s self that He had in His earth walk.
We are not seeking our own.
They cannot provoke us, and we refuse to take any account of evil.
We never rejoice in unrighteousness, we only rejoice in the truth, in the things that are real.
Verse 7 startles us. The text says that love “beareth all things,” but Robert Young translates it as “covering closely.” Joseph Henry Thayer translates it as love “covers over with silence.”
What are they talking about? Oh, it is scandal. It is something that has happened that is unseemly; something that if it were known would injure perhaps a lot of people; might cause a division in the assembly; might break up a family.
What do we do? We cover it closely with silence.
We never mention it, and the thing dies there and no one is injured. Hear this: Love “believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things” (verse 7). And then the climax: Love “never faileth” (verse 8).
We should remember this.
Agape, this new kind of love, never goes into bankruptcy. The red flag is never seen over its dwelling. Here is where love holds sway and rules, a queen upon her throne.
LOVE HAS MADE ME A VICTOR
I saw this translation in my spirit, of 1 John 4:4: “Ye are of God, little children, and have overcome them: because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world.”
Then my heart entered a spiritual clinic, and I began to take a diagnosis of my heart life. I began to investigate love’s realities.
I saw that 1 Corinthians 13:1–4 was a sort of a resume of the failure of sense knowledge religion. It is a summary of the best that sense knowledge could give to the world.
If I speak with the tongue of men and of angels, that is the highest achievement of a linguist, but have not love. “I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1). My linguistic ability is but noise, a jangling, unharmonious discord. Then, if I have all knowledge and know all mysteries, and have all faith so as to remove mountains, and my sense knowledge faith has made me a great business master, but have not love, I am nothing.
Or if I have knowledge so great that the universities are honored by giving me degrees, (and He says it softly and tenderly), but have not love, “I am nothing” (verse 2).
This is God’s clinic. This is the most heart-searching thing that the human ever faced.
Now He takes me into the realm of a philanthropist where I become an Andrew Carnegie or a John D. Rockefeller, and I pour out millions upon millions to aid the needy, and I reach the place where I give my body in service until I wear it out, but He says, “If you haven’t love, haven’t this new kind of love that I have given to the world, all your efforts are nothing.”
I stood amazed in the presence of it. I could see now that scholasticism, culture, everything that modern facilities have given us, travel, music, art—all are of no value unless love, this new kind of love, dominates my life.
When at the end of the list, if that is all I have, I go to my Maker empty-handed, I am a failure.
You see, the new creation is the only solution.
The new creation is created out of love. It is created in Christ Jesus. It is the workmanship of God in Christ.
God made the first man out of the dust of the earth.
The second man He makes out of Himself.
The first man is of the earth, earthy.
This last man that He has made was created out of righteousness and holiness and reality, out of the very nature of the Father Himself.
You see, this is the greatest thing in the world. Why?
Because it is God’s nature imparted to us.
It is God working in us.
It is God working through us.
It is God building Himself into our spirits, until our spirits dominate our sense knowledge reasoning faculties and bring them into harmony with His knowledge.
It makes us more than well-pleasing. It gives to us love’s creative genius that fills the very heart of the Father with joy. We become so Jesus-like, that the vine and the branches illustrate our union. We become a mirror in which the Father sees Himself.
This new love has given us a new self, a love self, a Jesus-self.
The old religion of fighting self and crucifying self is medieval.
It doesn’t belong to Christianity. It belongs to the religions of the East.
We see man through new eyes of love.
It is the new kind of love that has given to us new eyesight.
We can only see the good things.
You remember that translation we mentioned before about love, that love beareth all things. It literally covers closely, or covers over with silence all that is unseemly. There is no scandal. There are no old sores to uncover.
Love can see only God in us, and God can only see Himself in us.
We see men’s overloads in order that we may bear them.
We see their infirmities that we may share with them.
We see their weakness in order that we may give our strength.
We see their poverty in order that we may give them our money.
We become Jesus men and women.
As a battery is charged with electricity, we are charged with love.
We stay in His presence feeding on the Word until our whole being is saturated with Him.
Then as we go out and minister to the people, we are lights, little luminaries blazing a path in life where sin has no part and the misery that comes from sin can never enter.
Now we understand what it means to walk in love; what it means to be in Christ.
Somehow, the passage of Scripture in 2 Corinthians 5:4 begins to unveil itself, where He speaks of our mortality being “swallowed up of life.”
That is the nature of the Father. This mortal cannot now put on immortality, yet it puts on the very life and nature of the Father so our faces shine with the glory of our Christ, and His health and vigor and strength pour through us.
We are simply swallowed up of life.
All that was mortal, that which has been giving messages through the senses to the brain, now is enwrapped, immersed, overwhelmed with the love nature of the Father.
Can you imagine what this could mean, my being swallowed up in love, enwrapped in love, immersed in love, until love not only swallows up my mortality, but it swallows up my spirit?
“I am drowned in a sea of life,” as Arthur S. Way’s translation puts it.
O love that would not let me go until I caught a glimpse of this fountain!
O love that has followed me all these years in order that it might demonstrate in my spirit, soul, and body the completeness of the redemption that it has wrought in the man Christ Jesus!