In the last BLOG the idea was that in the professing Church the reality of what love is has been changed. The Bible is reduced to the idea that if we love we are okay. While it is true that love is a core message of the Bible, if the very idea of love has been changed or distorted that would cause a massive misunderstanding about God and about Christianity itself. If someone has imported the world’s idea of love into the professing Church today, then the professing Church is in pursuit of the world and its ideas while it thinks it is pursuing God. Simply put, in former BLOGS pains were taken to demonstrate that all human beings are divided into two types. There are those that hate God and then there are those that love God. If those that hate God have changed the definition or idea of what love is and have brought it into the professing Church, we can see the kinds of problems that would result. The God who is love within the Trinity would no longer be the same and that by which all things are to be done in the Church would also have changed. A massive deception would have occurred and many souls would be deceived.
1 Corinthians 13:1 – If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
A great mistake is often made concerning this text. It is thought that if the things listed above (like patience and kindness) are being done then that demonstrates that love is being shown. So people will give themselves to feeding the poor (good thing ) and other social works and think that they have love. People will take on an outward form of niceness and kindness and convince themselves that they have love. But what is missing here is the biblical idea of love. This text gives us the qualities of biblical love, but we must not assume that if we have forms of these things that we must have biblical love. These things themselves must come from biblical love or they are not love at all. True patience pleasing to God can only be produced by true love.
Patience is said to be a virtue so people decide that they want it quickly. It is easier to develop a form of patience through the practice of self-love and the desire to be honored for patience than it is to die to self-love by the mercy of God. Human beings are full of self and self-love in all they do until they are converted and filled with the love of God. Self-love is really the idolizing of self and having self as the focus of all that is done, even in the “service” of others, so in reality self-love is a form of hatred for God. If I do what I do from self-love then it is not love for God that is moving me. Just because I have what I think is love does not mean that it is a love for God. I can do what I do out of love for the world and all that I do is from love, but a love for the world is hatred for God (James 4:4; I John 2:15-16). If I am a worldly person and do all from self-love, then I am an enemy of God. If I practice patience from self-love, then my patience is an act that is at enmity with God as well. If I do acts of kindness that is from the love of self, then my kindness is actually acts of enmity against God. If I think that by being nice I have love, then my niceness is at enmity with God. If even our love is actually hatred for God, then all we do out of “love” is hatred for God. No matter how nice and “loving” a man may be to a woman that is not his wife, his wife may take that as enmity toward her. God commands all of our love and so our self-love is enmity toward Him.
Christianity is not about making the self better by making it more patient and kind, it is about human beings dying to self so that the love of God will dwell in them. The human being is to be an instrument of God rather than an instrument of self. When what is called “Christian” is nothing more than efforts to strengthen self and to enable people to help themselves, it has become a religion of self rather than a religion of the glory of God shining in and through Christ. The Gospel does not take us and make us better; it comes to us and kills self so that the life we live would be the life of Christ. The human soul was never made to function and operate by self-love. That is the innovation and deception of the devil. The human soul was not made to become better and better by more and more actions, but to die to self and become more and more under the control of the indwelling God who is love. The unregenerate human soul has no capacity for true love and so lives by self love apart from the God who is love. We have replaced that which God alone can do by human efforts. That is nothing but hatred for God.
God Loves... Himself 
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