February 21, 2021
Greetings and blessings to all of you. I have been aware that the culture trivializes love by sentimentalizing it. The love our culture presents in popular songs and movies are almost always portrayed as a feeling usually involving unfulfilled desires. It is a Love that is a longing, an unfulfilled passion, a craving that is never satisfied and a list of expectations that are never met. Also, the culture reduce love as an involuntary one. People “fall” in love. They seem to be “helpless”. They have no choice. Our culture loves a nice romantic sentiment. But as “thinking” people we realize that a love like that is selfish and irrational. Our love in a Biblical perspective is not a “helpless sensation of desire.” But a purposeful self-giving devotion to the one he/she loves. NewsFlash! True love comes from the will; not from blind emotion. The attributes in the Love Chapter I Cor, Chap. 13 is impossible to do unless you intentionally and with mind and volition CHOOSE to love like this…like Jesus loves us. A verse says a genuine love “does not seek its own”. How do a human with an innate desire to please himself do this? He does this only by “an act of his will”. He has to decide to be concerned not with having his desires fulfilled but with seeking the best for whoever is the object of his love. If love is a giving of oneself then you can enter into a real true love like Christ by laying down your life for another. The Bible speaks of the kind of love that is a higher purer form of love than we commonly know from human experience. The love the Bible speaks of does not flow naturally from the human heart. It is not a carnal love, a romantic love, or even a familial love. Saints, it is a SUPERNATURAL LOVE that is manifested by those “who know God.” In 1 John 4:7-8 “Dear friends let us continue to love one another for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is a child of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Faith and love work together. That is why Christ said, “they will know us by our love.” Faith is expressed by exercising love toward others. It bears repeating, the love the Bible speaks about is a Biblical Doctrine… not the mushy, sentiment that the culture has us believing. This doctrine will compel us to NOT take Christ death on the cross for granted.God took the initiative because it satisfied God’s justice His righteousness and his Holy hatred of sin. Saints begin NOW to appreciate God’s love.
With the Love of Christ
First Lady Vivian C. Currie
Pastor ALC