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Love SchoolbyKatherine BellIntroductionThe human heart longs to love and be loved. Love fills man’s deepest needaccording to the Bible. And this is a radical idea in a consumer culture thatscreams at us to live for overachievement in order to attain status and purchasingpower. Sensual appetites should be king our world tells us. Prominence andimportance in the pecking order make one significant. So we compete and pitourselves against each other. Enter Jesus to show us a wholly opposite way – theway of self-denial and laying our lives down for others which leads to the richexperience of God’s love within and through us. It is this heavenly way of loveknown as the way of the cross that we will explore.Definition of LoveWhat exactly is love? The dictionary defines it several ways: (1) strong affectionfor another arising out of kinship or personal ties (2) the affection andtenderness felt by lovers (3) affection based on admiration, benevolence, orcommon interests (4) warm attachment, enthusiasm or devotion and (5) unselfishloyal and benevolent concern for the good of another (a) the fatherly concern ofGod for humankind (b) brotherly concern for others.1 It is love in its unselfishand unconditional dimensions that we will look at.How does the Bible define love? The love that the Bible describes is so much ofdivine nature and origin that the New Testament writers had to coin a new word tocapture it: agape. Agape is not found in classical Greek but only in the Christianrevelation. Zodhiates in his Keyword Study Bible says of agape love, “It is thatself-giving divine love which emanates from God and is to be seen reflected inbelievers.”2 The King James translates it charity meaning benevolent love or lovethat wills the good of its recipient. Zodhiates’ lexicon adds, “Its benevolence,however, is not shown by doing what the person loved desires but what the one wholoves deems as needed by the one loved.”3 John 3:16 sums up the picture of God’slove: “For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the world that He [even] gave upHis only begotten (unique) Son, so that whoever believes in (trusts in, clings to,relies on) Him shall not perish (come to destruction, be lost) but have eternal(everlasting) life.”4 Zodhiates adds, “What did He give? Not what man wanted butwhat man needed as God perceived His need. His Son to bring forgiveness to man.God’s love for man is God doing what He thinks best for man and not what hedesires. It is God’s willful direction toward man. But for man to show love toGod, he must first appropriate God’s agape, for only God has such an unselfishlove.”5And we might add as we look at love in God’s Word that it is only as weappropriate agape that we can truly love one another on an unselfish plane. Whenwe love each other with agape love, we further experience a kinship or familiallove (phileo in Greek) because of this common spiritual bond. Thus a supernaturalbrotherhood is born.We see how foreign this love is to the natural human heart as we read about itsnature in I Corinthians 13: “Love is very patient and kind, never jealous orenvious, never boastful nor proud, never haughty nor selfish nor rude. Love doesnot demand its own way. It is not irritable or touchy. It does not hold grudges
 
and will hardly even notice when others do it wrong. It is never glad aboutinjustice, but rejoices whenever truth wins out. If you love someone you will beloyal to him no matter what the cost. You will believe in him, always expect thebest of him, and always stand your ground in defending him.”6 The Amplifiedtranslation adds the helpful phrase “God’s love in us” to clarify how all thesetraits are actually lived out.Absolute Necessity of LoveLove is so much the whole thing that God is after that the Holy Spirit speakingthrough Paul goes on to say, “If I had the gift of being able to speak in otherlanguages without learning them, and could speak in every language there is in allof heaven and earth, but didn’t love others, I would only be making noise. If Ihad the gift of prophecy and knew all about what is going to happen in the future,knew everything about everything, but didn’t love others, what good would it do?Even if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make itmove, I would still be worth nothing at all without love. If I gave everything Ihave to poor people, and if I were burned alive for preaching the Gospel butdidn’t love others, it would be of no value whatever.”7 Love is the sine qua nonof the Christian life.To understand something further about the absolute necessity of a radical practiceof love, it is helpful to look at how the Father has set up the situation withforgiveness. God has so arranged it that withholding forgiveness when we have beenwronged is not an option. Though it may be very hard to forgive, if we hold back,God Himself will not release us from our many debts against Him. Matthew 6:14-15states unequivocally, “Your heavenly Father will forgive you if you forgive thosewho sin against you, but if you refuse to forgive them, He will not forgive you.”8 God’s love for us is unchanging. We can bank on the truth that He neverwithholds His love. “God is love.”9 God even loved us before we ever entered intoa relationship with Him as Romans 5:8 testifies: “But God…clearly proves His [own]love for us by the fact that while we were still sinners, Christ (the Messiah, theAnointed One) died for us.”10 Nonetheless T. Austin-Sparks writing in His GreatLove makes the case that in a sense a similar relationship holds true for love.Our experience of God’s love is choked when we say no to giving love to others.Austin-Sparks pens this primary truth about love such that we really see it: “…ifyou should have reservation of love toward another child or other children of God,some attitude of criticism, suspicion, or prejudice, within you something dies orseems to die. Your joy goes, you feel something has gone wrong, and within youthere is a sense of grief….But in this case it is not you at all who is grievingover that unlove, but there is Someone within you who is grieving: there is a sobat the center of your being.”11 He names the Holy Spirit by His nature, “TheSpirit is…pre-eminently the Spirit of Divine love, and as such He is verysensitive and easily grieved. ‘Grieve not the Holy Spirit of God’ is theexhortation.”12 What is the Spirit’s response to a believer’s blocked heart?“When we grieve that love, we know that in us the Spirit says, ‘I cannot go on inhappy fellowship with you, I am grieved, I am pained.’”13 Thus Austin-Sparksinstructs us, “We need to be made sensitive to the Spirit of love so that our lipsand hearts are purged by the fire of love, and so that it is not easy for us to besuperior and pass superior judgments and to be of a criticizing and suspiciousspirit. We shall never get anywhere with God if there is anything like that.”14The cost of a blocked heart is pronounced. It shuts down the very life flow fromthe indwelling Holy Spirit. Fruit is ruined. T. Austin-Sparks declares theconsequences thus, “Paul said ‘The fruit of the Spirit is – love’ and then he wenton to tell…what love is – ‘joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness,faithfulness, meekness, self-control.’ Kill love and you kill all the rest; injure
 
love and you injure all the rest. You cannot have all the others, without…--love.”15 And the blocked heart cuts off communication with the Godhead. Sparkssays, “We shall never be able to... pray through…(be) led…into the presence ofGod, and take right hold on Him, and get a situation established by prayer…unlessthis basic relationship with God is established, expressing itself in love for allthose whom He loves, no matter what they are. Prayer life will be interfered with,and the Word of God will be closed to us. The Lord will not go on if thefoundation is hurt.”16The love walk is not some advanced stage of spiritual attainment but it is thevery measure of all growth in God. It is the measure of our yieldedness to theHoly Spirit’s promptings commanded in Romans 6:13, “But offer and yield yourselvesto God…as implements of righteousness.”17 The Living Bible employs the phrase“tools in the hands of God”18 for this same verse. The promised living water ofJohn 14 flowing continually from one’s belly or inmost man is a flow of love. Andthe promise is if we let it flow we will never thirst; we will be carried intoeternal life by it.Austin-Sparks words give insight, “’We love, because He first loved us.’ Thechallenge is there. The measure of my love for others is the measure of myapprehension of God’s love for me....It is herein that we know the love of God, inthat we love the brethren. There is the test of our apprehension, the test of ourrelationship, and it is the basis of everything for the child of God.”19 T.Austin-Sparks continues with his case that all growth is growth in love: “If I amgoing to grow spiritually, I shall only do so on the basis of love. I shall nevergrow because I get a lot more teaching. You do not grow by teaching. That is thetragedy of attending conferences – that you may attend them for years and yearsand still be of the same measure afterward, and never grow: still making nogreater contribution to the measure of Christ in the church, still not countingany more than you did years ago in the spiritual battle.”20 Love must informministry. “…Nothing of usefulness to the Lord is possible except on the basis ofGod’s love shed abroad in our hearts. It must be this Holy Ghost love for thepeople to whom we would minister: love for them even to the laying down of ourlives for them, suffering unto death for their sakes: love to the point of beingbrokenhearted …over people for whom you have spiritual concern and in whom youhave spiritual interest; love like that. No ministry will be ministry to the Lordthat is not born of that; no testimony, no life, except as rooted and grounded inthe love of God. You can have all the rest, a mass of Bible knowledge, a wealth ofBiblical instruction and doctrinal information... but it is all without any valueunless its exercise is in a love, a passion, a heart beating with the heart of Godfor His great love wherewith He loved us.”21 So we now understand Paul’s words tothe Corinthians, “Eagerly pursue and seek to acquire [this] love [make it youraim, your great quest]”22All That Hinges on LoveWe have seen the necessity of love and that love is the measure of all progress inChrist. We now turn to the many dimensions of the Christian life that hinge ongrowth in love.It’s as we love that we come to know God experientially. Colossians 1:10correlates our acts of love with our knowledge of God, “That the way you live willalways please the Lord and honor Him, that you will always be doing good, kindthings for others, all the time learning to know God better and better.”23 It’sseen as well in 2:2, “That you will be encouraged and knit together by strong tiesof love, and that you will have the rich experience of knowing Christ with realcertainty and clear understanding.”24 John wrote of this truth, too. “Dearfriends, let us practice loving each other, for love comes from God and those who
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