Tuesday, January 2, 2018

God's Kind of Love

When we love someone, we recognize that they are not perfect, we accept the flaws as well as the good because it is the person that we love, not our idealized version of them. If we only love them when they do what we think they should do, then we are not loving at all, but hating, because hate says, if you do not do what I want you to do, then I will not accept and love you.

When we authentically love, we just do, even when we don't agree and even when someone falls, the love remains. The love is not based on performance, but on a bond that goes beyond actions.

We grieve when those we love do not walk uprightly, but we do not stop loving them. Often these days we must walk away because we cannot make anyone do as they should and our continual contact is a form of validation of their lifestyle when they are in sin.

We agonize in prayer over the things our loved ones do that will destroy them, or harm others, we never stop loving them, that's why we pray. However, we cannot stay in a person's life who does not value our love, does not value our God and does not value what God values. We cannot remain in the lives of those who hurt others having no conscience for it. These people must not be validated by our contact with them.

Sometimes the most powerful thing to do that causes us great pain, is the need to walk away and leave that one to God to deal with. When we see that all our efforts to reason with someone have failed, there is no change, there is no remorse, then we must walk on down the road as we exercise faith by leaving them to God.

It does take faith you know!!!! When we remain in the lives of those who will not seek God and will not want a change, we lack the faith that God can do it without us and we have ourselves a little too elevated, thinking we can do better than God or that He cannot do it without us.

There is some wisdom to the phrase "let go and let God." Perhaps we ought to say "release and believe God", since He is clear in His word that we should not keep company with those who are disobedient or who do not want to walk the same path that we walk.

Our world is continually validating the wicked for lack of consequences. It is backwards now, the wicked get the love to win them to Christ, or so goes the excuse, but the righteous are chastised for correcting the wicked and refusing to be a validating factor in their lives.

2 Corinthians 6:16-18 "…16 What agreement can exist between the temple of God and idols? For we are the temple of the living God. As God has said: “I will live with them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they will be My people.” 17 “Therefore come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you.” 18 And: “I will be a Father to you, and you will be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”…"

Now days our gatherings are boasting about how accepting of the sinning brother they are, and even their lack of disapproval of the world's antics shows their flippancy about sin. Our modern churches are acting the same way the Corinthians church did and look what God said to them:

1 Corinthians 5
"5 It is actually reported that there is immorality among you, and immorality of such a kind as does not exist even among the Gentiles, that someone has his father’s wife.
2 You have become arrogant and have not mourned instead, so that the one who had done this deed would be removed from your midst.
3 For I, on my part, though absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged him who has so committed this, as though I were present.
4 In the name of our Lord Jesus, when you are assembled, and I with you in spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus,
5 I have decided to deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
6 Your boasting is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough?
7 Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed.
8 Therefore let us celebrate the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
9 I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people;
10 I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world.
11 But actually, I wrote to you not to associate [g]with any so-called brother if he is an immoral person, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or a swindler—not even to eat with such a one.
12 For what have I to do with judging outsiders? Do you not judge those who are within the church? 13 But those who are outside, God judges. Remove the wicked man from among yourselves.

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