Love is the very foundation of true religion, yet what this world perceives of love is nothing but lawlessness and wickedness because what our world considers as love is nothing but a love that satisfies their own interests and lusts. The Bible teaches us that God is love but to think of God by the standard of what this world knows as love, is nothing short of heinous and appalling. Take the Moral Law for instance, which teaches the individual to put God first even before self and second to love their neighbour as thoughtfully as oneself. Does the world know any such structure in its love? No, because the individuals of the world are nothing but a law to themselves, still imagine the might of God that he restrains these individual in their wicked nature [1Jn2:2] (who are inclined to serve nothing more than themselves) and allows for such people to live in a structured society hedged by the Civil Law that is given to the state (1Tim1:9). That is how good and great God is!

1John 4
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.
8 The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

The reason I feel so compelled to write on love is because it is the most abused term in the world today. Today, even fornication passes of as love but what happens when a child is born from it? The apostate State then gives license for murder through abortion. Clearly this is not the love of God because Biblically love covers a multitude of sins (1Pet4:8), never ever serving as a cause to give rise to sin.

John 15
9 “Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love.
10 “If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.
11 “These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.
12 “This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.

So what then is love? Love is knowing God because if you don’t know God, you will not live practicing God is first and that you ought to deal with your neighbour (people in your environment) in the same manner you would be like to be dealt with yourself (Mat7:12). The Bible refers to knowing God as loving God because unlike the fallen lusts this world wallows in, God is irresistible to the extent that it will not prove detrimental to your wellbeing but would enrich your life instead (Ps34:8). This knowledge of God is available to you in the Lord Jesus alone, whose Spirit overcomes our sinful nature propitiating us to the righteousness of God. We are thereby given to understand that God is love because He is strongly relational being One in Three Persons, a beloved unity which His people are blessed with in King Jesus Christ (Jn17:11).

Matthew 22
36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
37 And He said to him, ” ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’
38 “This is the great and foremost commandment.
39 “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’
40 “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”

To the world, love is blind but that is only because they are blind to God. Love is not blind nor shapeless or lawless. Love is an absolute! Just take a look at the anatomy of our own bodies, the design is so complex. Take a look at our DNA and you notice the immensity of details it stores, which even exceeds the storage capacities of the fastest supercomputers today. If God was ever the senseless kind of love the world knows, there would never be such beauty in the details of all creation. So after you consider all of that and realize we are merely creation, we cannot imagine how infinitely awesome the Triune God Almighty is. In other words, if God is indeed love as the Bible teaches, He is not the irrational love the world knows because if you care to look into the Bible, God is absolutely rational, it is this world in its self-serving nature which is senseless and irrational, in being indifferent to the God of the Bible.

John 3
16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.
17 “For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.
18 “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.
19 “This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil.
20 “For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.

On this topic of love, I would like to touch-up on this popular notion which exists in Christian circles that: “God hates sin but loves the sinner”, which is far from the truth because from the fall of Adam, we all hated God but thanks be to the Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ, His elect are ransomed from all sin by the power of His blood. You see, a person cannot sin unless he/she is a sinner and the reason we all sin is because we all are sinners, and as sinners we hate the truth/light as it exposes our self-righteousness to be lie, which is a horrid feeling. We learn from the Bible that God in His Omniscience knows who are His even before the foundation of the world (Jn10:14/Eph1:3-4). So even though it is impossible for us who love sin to love God because the righteousness of God is contrary to our nature, our Salvation is by no means impossible to God (Mat19:25-26), since Salvation is not by the power of the people but by the power of God (Jn1:12-13).

Romans 5
10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.

Mark 2
17 And hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Rom 5:10 is therefore the highlight of God’s grace upon we who are his elect, undeserving sinners. Those who are righteous in their own eyes know nothing of such grace given to the individual in repentance (Lk18:9), on the contrary they are fools who believe that they are right and God is wrong but to the elect God grants repentance (2Tim2:25) that in His time they would see the error of their ways and submit to God in Jesus Christ (1Tim2:5-6).

John 14
15 “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.

John 15
5 “I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing.
6 “If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned.

I would like to put in a word of caution for those of you who are inclined to follow after the Charismatic Church. The Charismatic Church is not a body Christ has instituted because if you care to look into its history, you would learn that it is nothing but an atrocious spinoff of a retard girl (Margaret McDonald somewhere around the 1830s) from a mental asylum, who is believed to have been gifted with visions by some (I’d say just as in Acts16:16-18). We ought to understand that prophesies and revelation were given in its time to the Apostolic Church [1Cor14:24-25] (i.e. before the Bible was compiled in 325 AD) so that the miracles would bear witness to those to whom the Gospel was preached that the Church was indeed from God. However, after the Bible was compiled, all these healings, prophesies and speaking in tongues ceased (1Cor13:8) as they no longer stood as assurity that that body was a Church. Today, many ministries like that of Benny Hinn claim to be Ministries and Churches of God but with the money laundering and molestation charges that is brought against such leaders, we learn that these are merely bodies who serve themselves in their sin, not God. Today, what determines a body as God’s Church depends on how that body obeys God’s word in the Bible without being dependant on any additional revelation through prophesies or the speaking of tongues (Rev21:18-19) because the Bible by itself is complete/sufficient to edify/nourish the Church (Ps19:7/2Tim3:16-17).

1 Corinthians 13
8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away.

Mat 7
22 “Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’
23 “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

As Christians, there is a standard by which we are to live, which is the Moral Law (2Jn1:5). The Moral Law defines the very nature of God, revealed to us in scripture and so in our calling to be Christlike, this nature becomes our own (Ezek36:27/Jn3:3,16), owing to our Godly purpose as human beings who are made in the image of God. If you have time, take a look and the study Psalm 119, which is the longest chapter in the whole Bible, as it expounds on the nature of God revealed to the individual in the Moral Law.

1 John 5
16 If anyone sees his brother committing a sin not leading to death, he shall ask and God will for him give life to those who commit sin not leading to death. There is a sin leading to death; I do not say that he should make request for this.
17 All unrighteousness is sin, and there is a sin not leading to death.

Before I conclude, there is one more thing I need to caution you against. Please know that the Bible is not merely a set of instructions to the Church but it is a set of instructions to society at large, which means that it instructs both the Church and the State. So just as a parent would kill, if their child’s life depends on it, so too Capital Punishment is a power given to the State (not the Church or the individual) to protect society from deadly antisocial elements. You might find this fascinating that nations in the west like Switzerland and Netherlands who have abolished Capital Punishment because they are so civilised supposedly… have legalised Euthanasia! Can you believe that? It’s like Rev3:16 materializing right before your very eyes (God is indeed sovereign). It’s as though their self-righteousness made them break their fall with their own faces when they abandoned their faith, leaving their religious institutions to be turned into pubs and mosques.

Heb 12 (breaking in the middle of sentence)
5 and you have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons, “My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, Nor faint when you are reproved by Him;
6 For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, And He scourges every son whom He receives.”
7 It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline?

To conclude, this is something I must leave you with. True love does not start and end with mushy feeling because love bears a character of duty; just like one’s faith is evident in what he/she does (James2:14-20), so too Love goes beyond emotions in practicing Godly duty and neighbourly kindness. We need to remember that true love involves discipline and requires us to mend our ways… straighten us out, so to speak. It is from such “discipline” that we get the word “disciple” because the love we learn in Jesus Christ is not one which allows us to live as we please but to live according to the good pleasure of God. Such love is not merely healthy for our lifestyle but it also promotes a congenial environment for society to blossom in, where the corner stone is Jesus Christ.

1John 3
1 See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God; and such we are. For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.

If there is one thing I have noticed about the reprobate, is they feel that if God would just do this one thing for them as an individual, they would believe. This makes one question if the onus of believing in God is truly on man.

Mat 12:38-39
38 Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, “Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.”39 But He answered and said to them, “An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet;

What I have noticed in the charismatic school of thought is besides the: cast your troubles on the Lord and claim your healing; I have observed that when a guest charismatic preacher comes in to share the Word at another charismatic body, this preacher will not be in a frenzied state like charismatic body he has visited. This preacher may act just like them in his home charismatic setting but it makes me wonder how the charismatics define ‘filled with the Spirit’ because it seems that these preachers subconsciously know that they can either settle for the so called ‘spirit filled’ tongue speaking, yelling, clapping and dancing frenzy or sit quietly in the presence of His Majesty and preach the Spirit breathed Word. These preachers know subconsciously that they cannot do both. Why? Well, that is question that remains unanswered only to the charasmatics. It seems that being ‘Spirit filled’ has no connection with ‘Christ likeness’ to these charasmatics, as for me I would find it blasphemous to even associate the charismatic definition of ‘spirit filled’ with ‘Christ likeness’. Yes and I have noticed among this section that they like sketches of where Jesus is portrayed as rather jovial. This makes me wonder if these people ever took note of Isaiah 53:3, which speaking of Christ says that He was a man of sorrows and acquainted in grief. In fact in John 8:57, the Jews told Jesus that He was not yet 50 years old, when He would have been only about 33 years in his human age at that time. He truly was the Lamb of God (John 1:29) who bore the sins of the world.

The solution for man is not in meeting His every need but in being put right with His Creator. If it were ever so that man’s need were to be first met before any initiation of relationship between him and God, then one needs to see man’s belief as being conditional, which itself does not reflect the essence of belief and subjection to an Almighty God. In the Bible, many a times Jesus has said to people while healing them, your faith has saved you. You will notice in most of these cases, that these people subjected themselves to Him and His majesty. What is faith? It is not asking desperately or demanding with confidence in any way. It is seeing yourself under the behest of God. When Adam ate of the forbidden fruit, he received the knowledge of good and evil, which actually is, he received a new standard i.e. death because it was separate from the righteousness of God. It is for this reason that man independently chooses right from wrong though the Word of God may teach otherwise on that same issue. So faith is that where you humble yourself in the presence of the living God. God is already exalted and we cannot exalt Him any further but by His Spirit working in us we can deny ourselves the self righteous pride Adam gave us. This way we humble ourselves before Him, saying we are but sinners deserving of nothing but His justice and this is faith because to deny feeding our appetites and see ourselves for who we are before God, is how we truly prostrate before His Majesty.

Mat 15
21 Jesus went away from there, and withdrew into the district of Tyre and Sidon.22 And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and began to cry out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.”23 But He did not answer her a word. And His disciples came and implored Him, saying, “Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us.”24 But He answered and said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”25 But she came and began to bow down before Him, saying, “Lord, help me!”26 And He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”27 But she said, “Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”28 Then Jesus said to her, “O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed at once.

Psalms 51
17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; A broken and a contrite heart, O God, You will not despise.

When we look at the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, we see that they were a people who witnessed many miracles, yet it is recorded of them that they grumbled and sought to go back to Egypt. Now this nature is not peculiar to the Israelite people, this is what human nature is. We want to feel warm in the winters, cool in the summer and dry in the monsoon, there never reaches a point of satisfaction. This is what man’s fallen nature is about! However for a believer, His satisfaction is only in His relationship with Christ, he does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God (Mat 4:4). Will such a state ever be possible with man? Never by man (Mat 19:26)! But for the elect in Christ, who have RECEIVED a birth in His Spirit, they have also received a righteousness which is of God and so obedience to God is made possible only to the Christian. As for the reprobate, they never realize that satisfaction can only be found in a relationship with God and this does not even matter to them because they are dead in the spirit, owing to Adam; so they do not have, neither can they initiate communion with God by themselves.

To a reprobate man, it is always a miracle that he feels will satisfy him to bring him to belief but if this man were to question his desire and reason to materialize this miracle, it will in most cases seem that he chooses only to further his lust and excuse himself from subjection under God. This is the death that pervades through all the children of Adam. To these people, faith is nothing more than one’s hunger to make it big in life, which is nothing more than the highlight of audacious self righteousness in seeking pride, craving for power and lustful pleasure (1 John 2:16), that Adam took on in death to pass on to all his children. However scripture states that we have nothing more than what we have been given, in fact even the beasts of the Book of Revelation have no more power than what God has given them to meet His purpose of threshing the wheat from the chaff.

To conclude, what a man needs is not a miracle to set his life straight but he needs to receive Jesus Christ in the Spirit according to the will of God and never according to the will of man (John 1:12-13).