John 2:24, 25 says that Jesus did not commit Himself to men because He knew what was in man and needed not that anyone should testify to Him of man. And yet, in the same passages are the stories of Jesus’ love for us. We face a paradox in our walk with God. The beautiful revelation of the Lord and of what God is doing in the earth comes to us, and we love that. We proceed with a certain image in our minds of our relationship to the Lord and to the Body. But Satan has no greater test, and God allows no greater test, than that of disillusionment, the supreme test of our love. It is the disillusionment in people and in ourselves. It can come many ways. We walk along and suddenly the bubble bursts; we see ourself, others, and the whole situation for what it really is, just as the Lord did. He did not need anyone to testify about man. He knew what was in him.
How can you explain the supreme love of the Lord Jesus Christ for everyone? He loved so much, yet He had a love with an understanding, and He never turned His back when He was around His friends. You may sometimes think that you want the Lord to trust you, but you know better than that. You do not trust yourself. Only when He works His faithfulness in you are you trustworthy. It is not always man’s wrong intention; it is the battle of the enemy and the deceits and lies that he brings. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred things are not the way Satan makes you look at them, whether in relationships, circumstances, or evaluations of yourself or your walk.
What does the Lord ask of us? He wants us to have love that is deep enough and real enough that it cannot be disillusioned. We do not love on the basis of others being faithful. Jesus knew from the beginning who would betray Him. Can you imagine the fantastic love of the Lord Jesus Christ—to bless Judas, to make him an apostle, to send him out to heal the sick and to raise the dead—knowing exactly what he was going to do? John 13:1 is a beautiful Scripture about Jesus: having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end. He loved them right on through. “You are going to deny Me, Peter. The man who dips his hand with Me in the bowl is going to betray Me. Tonight you will all forsake Me and flee.” He loved them. The love of the Lord Jesus Christ for us has impressed me deeply. If He can love that deeply without being disillusioned by anything that happens, I can too, with His help and His grace. He will put that love in me, and I will love without any disillusionment. It will not make any difference what I face; I can keep on loving because He put it in me to love.
“I thought we were all going to be brothers and sisters, a big family. I’m disappointed.” Have you taken a look at families lately? In the average family you need to wear some kind of bulletproof vest. Satan’s greatest test on the love of God is to create the atmosphere of disillusionment and get you to accept the illusion. There are some problems, and you may have come into this church with a vision of something great, and now you are wondering when it is going to happen, wondering when you are going to see the things you believe for. You have seen a lot of them already, but I know what you mean. Waiting calls for steadfastness, it is real love. Love has an enduring quality.
Various names are given to love in Galatians 5:22, 23. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy (love expressing itself), peace (love that has real trust in it), patience (the waiting quality of love), kindness (love’s measure of judgment), goodness (love’s character), faithfulness (love’s ability to stick to it), gentleness (love’s mode of action), self-control (more than having respect for yourself, it is respect for the other person—an attitude of love toward the other person gives you self-control). When we speak of the fruit of the Spirit we are really talking about aspects of love.
“But you don’t know what I’ve been through; I feel like quitting. I’ve been disillusioned. I’m bitter. I’m discouraged.” Do you ever get in that situation? What is the answer? Every time you get in a corner and start acting negatively, all you need is more of the love of God in your heart. Ask Him to give you more love.
I have a deep witness in my heart that God drives us into the place where we run out of our own love and patience, just so we will appropriate more, and we do. Drawing as deeply as we can, we manage to get through. We thank God for bringing us through, but all the time God is accomplishing what He wants. He is driving us deeper into the love of God, deeper into appropriating strength from Him. He is bringing it forth.
Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.… I Corinthians 13:4–8.
We must be that family of the Lord and help each other. We bless and minister to each other, but we must have enough love to correct the feeling of disillusionment. Sooner or later we will have that supreme test of disillusionment.
What makes people flip? What makes people lose out in a walk with God, or have deep personal problems if they do not lose out? The reason God allows people to come under a test of deep disillusionment is because of selfishness. It comes from an attitude within you so selfish that you relate everything that happens to yourself. As a result of that, God will bring you into disillusionment: He will bring you into failure. You may not think you are selfish; you would give your body to be burned. You are very generous. You give. You tithe. You sacrifice. You are right in there. The important thing is not what you are doing, but your way of thinking.
Do you think of everyone and everything that happens as it relates to you? If someone barges in and takes over your job, how do you react? “Well, God bless that dear sister who is taking over my job. She can do it better than I can. I just think it’s marvelous; that will be a real opportunity for her to serve the Lord and serve the Body.” Is that what you would think about it? Or would you think: “How dare she take my job!” That is the selfish way of thinking. You think of everything as it relates to yourself, and anything that happens to anyone as it relates to you, as it relates to your opinion about things, your reaction to things.
Projects come up in the church, and people put a little money in them thinking they will get things going. There may be a problem and they pray for it. Suddenly it is a personal issue with them; they are thinking of it as it relates to them. Something will come along that will test each one. All will be tested. Every believer will come to the supreme test that Satan can throw at him, the test of being disillusioned. The only reason anyone will be disillusioned is that he is interpreting the path God orders for his life, and for all of us, in relationship to himself. Sooner or later this message will be applied to everyone. God will allow each one to be tested. Many have already been there. We should do some praying about this; this is the way God works.
Thinking back on the various things which have happened to me, I realize that the victory was won every time I began to seek the greater will and the greater glory of God in the situation. When I was thinking about myself and what was happening to me, I had a bitterness and a disillusionment; it would hurt until I saw it in relationship to the overall picture. Then I would think, “All things work together for good” (Romans 8:28). But we never see that things are working for good when we are using selfish thinking.
You go through experiences in your life in which you can be bitter and disillusioned, but such experiences can bring you into the greatest expression of your life. You are lonely and tested; things are difficult, but you must pass through the supreme test of disillusionment before you can see what God is really doing. You can only see what He is doing by being unselfish in your thinking, by not thinking of everything as it relates to you, as it affects you. After all, God has your welfare at heart, but He also has the entire Kingdom at heart. He has everyone in mind, and He is working out something great. You will not receive your great blessing until you think of yourself in terms of the greater picture. Every day expect to see one more step toward that perfect will of the Lord.
A mother has to be objective in her love. When she brings a little baby into the world, she has to recognize that in his infancy the child will be without a number of restraints which he will learn in time. It takes awhile to train a baby and teach him to feed himself, but the mother does not condemn the child for what he does. She must accept that the child is an infant and is to be served and blessed and loved.
From the time I was about eleven until I was fourteen, I helped my mother to take care of the babies. It took quite a hit of objectivity. As soon as I finished changing their diapers, they would need clean ones. I began to believe it was done intentionally. But I was told not to blame them, for they did not intend to trouble me. That is the way little babies are. I learned that lesson a long time ago, and I have applied it many times.
Sometimes people do things you could react to and say that they did them intentionally; they did them on purpose. No. Whenever immaturity is manifested, people do things more out of instinct than they do out of reason. As you grow older in the Lord, the discipline and control leads you on another path. When people are not mature, they will constantly react in a way that could cause you to take offense. Blessed is the person who is mature enough that he does not take offense at other people’s actions, but looks at them objectively and becomes a blessing to them. Sometimes you speak to someone, and he walks on by you. He may be hard-of-hearing. He may not have intended to be rude at all. He may be overwhelmed with an emotional problem. It is so easy to become disillusioned or to misunderstand someone’s action. I learned it when I was a little boy helping to take care of the family. Do not judge anyone, because you do not know what they are going through. Remember the Lord; He loved. He loved people when He could not trust them, when He would not commit Himself to man because He knew what was in man. He did not dare trust them, but He loved them faithfully anyway.
We may start thinking we know all the answers about love, but if we still are thinking about others and our love for them and their love for us as it relates to us, maybe we do not know as much about love as we think we do. That is selfish thinking. Although there is much love in the Body, we have a lot of growing up in love to do. In fact, there will be more mature love and understanding than ever.
We can be glad for the way the Lord maneuvers us and works everything together for good: for the way He times things and the way He is setting the stage for the last great battle of the conflict of the ages. We are glad for the victory that is assured and the imminent defeat of Satan, who will try to do everything he can for a while to discredit, persecute, and cast down everyone that he can. This is a time of great deception, but we are the victors; we are the conquerors. As we come closer to the final conflict, the spirits of deception are more operative than any others. They try to create illusions and deceptions in people’s minds.
The greatest test of your love for God will be to walk through a time of disillusionment when everything seems to be going wrong, and you are completely disillusioned. Everything will seem to give witness that it is all bad and you are defeated. Disillusionment will be so great that it will lead the people of God into torment beyond what they can handle, unless they learn to resist the lie of the enemy. The only way to walk in the truth is to love God and love one another. Love will be great enough that no matter what anyone does, or what the disillusionment might be, you will not turn away from the Lord, and you will not turn away from your brother.
We have need to be delivered from a great fault people have of reading the Bible with so much pharisaism in them that they are ready to start pulling out Scriptures and laying down plumblines for people according to what appears rather than what really is. We are not to judge according to appearance. If we are not careful, we will give way to deception in which Satan will maneuver some of the ministries of authority into situations where we could start pulling out Scriptures and utterly condemn them. It is the same spirit that is hitting the world. The most wicked men, seeming to be so righteous, will rise up to condemn the righteous. The Bible prophesies that. “Woe to them when they call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20). They belittle the righteous man. That is exactly what Satan is trying to do in the Body.
The greatest test before us will be whether or not the Body will so love God and absolutely stand together that they will not judge one another, nor thrust one another through, and if there will be a faithfulness in their love, a steadfast love that will not draw back from anyone nor hold anything they see and say, “This is wrong; therefore we condemn him.” How will you know? The days of illusion are upon you. Satan is trying to deceive. False christs and false prophets will arise, if it were possible, to deceive the very elect (Matthew 24:24). Hold that in your mind. Many false things will come, and if you are not prepared to walk before the Lord in perfect love in these days, you will be open to that deception and fall prey to it. You will either become a victim, or you will victimize someone else. You will find that Satan will do everything he can to turn the Body in division against one another. However God is bringing an ever-increasing unity to the brethren and that unity is causing us to cling together.
Let us be very careful that we walk in love, that we walk as God’s dear children chosen for these things that are before us (Ephesians 5:1–2). Old-order churches will be torn apart, because they are ready to criticize, ready to judge. Some of them have been thriving on what they could sweep under the carpet, what they could hide and conceal. God brings the day of great openness, but not a day of judging one another. It is a day of judging yourself. If there is such a thing as judgment, it will have to be in perfect love. The days of Ananias and Sapphira cannot be trusted to come back to a church that is not moving in perfect love. God will not allow it, but He will cause judgment to return to a church that will not break ranks, nor thrust one another through, and believes in love that can come, in the name of the Lord, and get the job done in this day. It is necessary that we learn to walk in love.
Love gives you the criterion of emphasis so you can decide how much emphasis to place on a thing. If you watch the news, you see that people are trying to make mountains out of molehills. They have nothing important for which to live. A man who has the love of God is not eternally wrapped up in the small thing. He has the privilege of giving emphasis. He can decide what is important. You would be surprised how many of your problems would disappear if you stopped evaluating everything that happens to you in relationship to yourself, if you would not be selfish in what you think about something. Do not evaluate a relationship and say, “They can’t do that to me.” Immediately you have taken a little thing and given it the wrong emphasis. Of course it may be a big thing to you. Paul must have felt the things that happened to him were big, yet he said, “All of these have come about simply for the furtherance of the gospel so I can rejoice in the Lord” (Philippians 1:12). He saw the overall picture. He never evaluated a situation as related to himself. He evaluated it as related to the Lord. “I have desired to depart, but it would be better for you if I stay, so I’ll stay” (Philippians 1:23, 24).
Our motivation always should be: “What’s good for the Kingdom?” We need to study the thinking of the men of God so we can come to the place where our judgment of a situation, the emphasis we give it, and how important it is, will be based upon the love in our heart, the love for God, and the love for the Body. We will not count anything to be very important even though it seems to devastate us. If it does not seem as if it is hurting the Kingdom, we will rejoice and go on. It is the selfish thinking without love that is bad. Love is the basis by which we move in God.
Suppose you believe, “God can forgive anybody: even if the antichrist would repent he would be saved.” You have this marvelous view of the love of God until you remember the brother in the church who borrowed twenty dollars from you six months ago and did not pay it back. Suddenly, you lose all your victory, because you see anything that happens only as it is related to you. That is the selfish attitude which must go. There is no love in that. Rather you should simply forgive the brother the twenty dollars and have the joy of giving him the money. You may protest that he borrowed it. Still the Lord says if anyone borrows from you, loan it without expecting it back (Luke 6:35). You do not expect it back because the love is reaching out to meet a brother’s need. Why loan it to him? Why not give it to him in the first place? Because he will be happier if he borrows and pays it back. He will have a certain feeling about the whole thing that will be better. Nevertheless, you do not expect it back. Oh, how we should begin to understand that the emphasis has to be of love! There must be a real emphasis on love, especially in the way that we love each other. The way we react to things must be according to love.