I have been putting off making this video for several weeks now
because I know that I will not be able to do justice to what it is that I want so badly to say.
Yet I keep thinking that, in many ways, it is the most important video I have ever made.
It's just that people are likely to hear me and think, "What was so special about that? He thinks love is the answer. Big deal!"
This is doubly true when I have already said a fair bit about love in many sermons and videos over the years.
I have supported love in principle, and believed intellectually that it is the answer to the world's problems.
I have tried to show love in a number of different ways.
Even my present revelation is not one of someone
who has turned around and headed in the opposite direction to where I was heading before all this happened.
But the results already are, at least in my opinion, almost as dramatic as if it WAS a total turn-around.
And I want to at least try to say something that may help others to experience something similar.
You see, the thing that seems to hold each of us back from really experiencing love
the way God intends for us to experience it, is that we think we are already doing it.
We each have our own definitions for love, and some of them are really quite valid.
So we hide behind those definitions, and our limited attempts to live up to them.
But, when I look around, I see a world full of people who are all pretty much the same...
a mixture of love and hate... very kind at times, yet very hurtful at other times.
We each express love in different ways, and there is no one way that seems to stand out as the best.
Yet Jesus said that his followers would be distinguishable from everyone else in the world by their love.
It may be that there is a love that some of us have which stands out in the eyes of others
while being indistinguishable to the person who has it; but, on the whole, I think that real love...
the kind that Jesus spoke of... is as rare as the genuine faith that we have talked about on this channel so much.
They are both very close to being non-existent. At one point, Jesus said, quite cynically
"When the Son of Man comes, will there be faith on the Earth?" And, in another place, he predicts that
"The love of many shall wax cold." So when the light goes out in one window, it seems to go out in the other as well.
No faith results in no love. Or, no love results in no faith.
Perhaps more commonly, lukewarm or counterfeit faith leads to lukewarm or counterfeit love.
And lukewarm or counterfeit love leads to lukewarm or counterfeit faith.
I have spent a lot of time trying to get people to question their faith
so that they can trade their present faith in God doing it all for them
to the kind of faith that actually listens to Jesus, and then ACTS on what he says, because you really believe him.
But what about doing something similar with love?
What about examining our own love more closely, and seeing just how lukewarm it really is.
That's what I did earlier this year, with some shocking and very depressing revelations.
I won't go into details here, but it was not a pretty sight
as I realised that I could not continue to justify my impatience as righteous anger.
It became most obvious in my reaction to covid deniers and other conspiracy theorists.
Okay. Yeah, their logic can be laughable at times, and their inability to question themselves can be infuriating.
But does ridicule and anger do anything to help them, or to bridge the gap between them and me? Hardly.
It has only driven them farther away.
But the error was there in other ways as well... ways that always ended up hurting the people whom I claimed to love.
But this video needs to be more than a confession session on my part, if it is going to be of any use to others.
So, what I am suggesting here, is a revolution of divine, out-of-this-world life-changing love
where we totally commit ourselves to finding and being possessed by God's supernatural love
even if we have to pray non-stop for it for the rest of our lives. In fact, that seems to be the only way to get it.
Because the moment we think we have achieved such love, we start to lose it.
I have started making prayer for love my one consistent request.
I am trying to stay open to the many different ways that God may wish for me to express it; but in the end
I cannot do it on my own, and so I need to foster a hunger and a thirst for love
on the same level as I have so often talked about a hunger and thirst for the truth.
This dependency on God's love is, in fact, the ultimate truth.
Like Paul says, in that wonderful love chapter... I Cortinthians 13... everything else we do falls flat without love.
He says, "Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and yet have not love, it profits me nothing."
That is, by far, the greatest proof text against forsaking all and living by faith that there is in the entire Bible
and yet it is rarely used against us. And you know why?
It's because Paul says the same thing about knowledge, and prophecy, and speaking in tongues
and the ability to do miracles, and even faith itself. He is not saying that any of those things is wrong.
They are all, in fact, right and good. But they fall flat if they are not mixed with that one all-important ingredient:
God's supernatural love. When we put that at the top of our priorities
then the rest will begin to function as they should, bearing fruit that will last for eternity.
Hungering and thirsting after love. That is what we need... always desiring more.
Ah, but the verse doesn't say that, does it? It says that we should "hunger and thirst after righteousness."
Yet God's love IS his righteousness. Anything else is self-righteousness.
In the Lord's prayer, he tells us to pray for his kingdom to come. But what is his kingdom? His kingdom is love.
The disciples were filled with the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. But what is the Holy Spirit, if it is not love?
It is all held together through love.
What I'm saying to you right now could be just words. They might tickle your ears for a little while
but the real truth behind them will be lost unless they are translated into action... into change in the way you live.
What we each need to do is to pray for this love... now and always... with a hunger and a thirst for more of it
but also with open hearts, ready to act on whatever God asks us to do... both to receive it and to express it.
So things like faith and obedience come into the picture as well.
But, for me at least, what I see now is that love needs to be the starting place.
Every morning, I need to see my utter hopelessness without God's love
and keep that thought before me throughout the day. And THEN... by Gods grace...
I may start experiencing some of that supernatural love that Jesus said
would make us distinguishable from all the lukewarm and counterfeit love that swirls around us.
That's my message. I think it's radical.
I have found it changing me in ways that I have never been able to change before.
But I can also appreciate that it will sound pretty ho-hum to a lot of you.
In fact, you may even have to ask God what it was that you missed in what I have just said.
Because I don't know how to give the message the clarity that it deserves
and exactly what form this love might take can vary from person to person.
Nevertheless, love is definitely the answer, and we can never get too much of it. I may just have to leave it there.
I love you... or at least I WANT to love you. But I can only really do that as God's love flows through me.
I pray that some of that will get through to some of you through this video today.
God bless you and thank you for listening.