We are passing through the most critical period of human history. All that has been built through the centuries is in danger of being destroyed.
Is there a remedy that can be applied at this dark hour that will save the situation?
Our home life is disintegrating. The whole moral structure of family life is endangered.
There is something lacking. Natural human love has failed. Again, we have asked the question, “Why has it failed?”
It is because it is based upon selfishness. It has been unable to stand the tremendous test of selfishness that has been developed by modern education.
There is a combat that is touching every life. It is the war between natural human love and selfishness, and love is losing the fight. You see it in the divorce court, in the struggle between capital and labor, between the classes.
Has God a solution for this problem? We believe He has.
It is The New Kind of Love that has been overlooked by the church but has recently been rediscovered. This series of messages is an attempt to bring this new kind of love into modern life.
How It Came
For a long time, I did not believe I possess this kind of love. I knew Jesus majored it, and it was majored in the Pauline revelation.
There are two main Greek words translated as “love” or “charity” in the New Testament: agape and phileo.
Although love is used as brotherly love in a godly way, it is mainly used as a natural human affection. But agape love is used as a divine attribute imparted in the new birth for that word did not occur in the classical Greek before the time of Jesus Christ.
Jesus has brought a new kind of love into the world.
These two words are never used interchangeably.
John tells us that God is agape.
When we partake of God’s nature, his eternal life, we are partaking of the God kind of Love.
Love, Greatest Thing in the World
Love has never given birth to pain. Love has never suppressed the faith that is imparted to the believer
Love is God unveiled. “God is love” (1 John 4:8).
This love life is God living in us as He lived in Jesus.
There was a harshness in Jesus towards the religious leaders, who hindered the love of God being manifested on the earth, yet a gentle tenderness towards the human race.
The love that was in Jesus is the love that is to rule the church, rule the home, and rule our hearts.
Love is like what flowers are to the hillside. Flowers cover the naked, worn-out places in the soil. They grow around the rocks. They grow among the roots. They cover up the wounds in the earth’s surface. They cover the clay and bleak soil with a garment of glory, royalty, and lustrous beauty. So, love covers the rough stony places in the human heart.
Love is the reason for the flower garden, just as love was the reason for the flower’s being.
Love gathers flowers and arranges them to please the human eye.
Love makes the home a beautiful place to life. Love comes and lives in the home to keep it a place of happiness.
Love is the most beautiful thing. It may be the most fragile thing, yet it has the most enduring strength of anything that we know.
When man is ruled by the God kind of love, it becomes an overwhelming motivation and does not shrink back from any sacrifice. Christ did not withdraw from bearing the sin, pain, and anguish of the world.
LOVE AND THE CROSS
Love made that ugly cross beautiful. Love made that tomb beautiful—that dreaded place where death reigned. Love stripped death of its fear.
Love made me crown Him, not with thorns, but with my heart and its devotion.
Love drives that delicate tender spirit into the darkest heathenism of Africa to endure every privation, to be shut alone with heathen minds that have no sense of appreciation, no touch of love, just cold indifference and selfish greed. And yet that love spirit lives, thrives, and pours itself out until that dark place blossoms with all the tender fragrance of the new creation.
Such is love, the mightiest thing in the world, and the most beautiful thing there is. It is this God nature gaining the ascendancy in the heart.
“EVEN AS”
There are two little words in the new law of the new covenant that challenge us. We need to allow it to grip our hearts.
This is my commandment that ye love one another, even as I have loved you. (John 15:12)
I could hear even as, until it became a part of my spirit.
“Even as what?”
“As I have loved you.”
To the human heart it seems impossible. If I loved like that, I would be compelled to give away everything I own.”
“What is it that you would need to give away?”
Take an inventory of the things that you feel you would have to give away to love “even as” He loved you.
After the inventory, “what would you get in place of these valuable treasures of yours?”
Every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ which your heart could imagine. If you loved “even as” He loved, you would have His companionship. you would have His strength. you would have His gentleness and His forbearance. You would no longer live by physical sense knowledge but live in the world and wealth of the Spirit.
When we are born from above, we become a divine human. We are two people, and we enter a battle, our flesh desires one thing and our spirit another.
There is a division in us, and only through the dividing of the soul and spirit through the sword of the Lord, can we in the wisdom of the Spirit, surrender the part of us that is an enemy of God, and become a whole person, what we call a spiritual man or woman. We become a mature, male or female son of God. We become the manifested sons of God who will loose the creation, the heavens and the earth from futility.
LOVE’S METHOD
We begin to give away things that perish after much use to receive something that increases when used. We then begin to experience a joy we have never known before.
As humans we naturally seek happiness. But happiness comes from things, people, and circumstances, that can easily be lost. We begin to see what an illusion it has been.
You become willing to decline some of the things that make people happy, if to experience this eternal joy.
This new life gives a joy that comes from love. The fruit of the Spirit is singular, the rest of the lists are just aspects that the nature of this divine love produces.
Happiness springs from sensuous things around us. The joy of the Lord is far superior to happiness as the diamond is too glass, as gold is too common dirt.
Then you know now what love means. I am to love even as He loved. I am to take His place.
He is seated upon the throne, ministering to me, enabling me to take His place down here. I am to speak His words and to do the kind deeds that He would do.
I will feel the same kind of passion for the lost and broken that He felt.
I am to love in His place.
Oh, the unspeakable joy that comes. you have joy even as He had joy because you are loving even as He loved.