Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. Mark 12:30
This morning, I received an email from a brother. His name is Kolen. He’s been really encouraging to me and helping me with my problems. He sent me an email about Love. When I read this, I looked at my life and felt really convicted. I was crying all night yesterday and my eyes were swollen, I had a dream last night about the issue that has been bothering me. Well, in the dream, it ended with a note. I don’t want to say, but I felt like it was what I needed to hear.
Anyways, this is what the brother sent me, I copied and pasted what touched me.
Only God can satisfy a believer’s heart. Human beings cannot satisfy the believer’s heart. Many believers fail simply because they seek in man that which can only be found in God. Human love is nothing but vanity; only God’s love can satisfy the desires of a believer. If he seeks affection outside of God, his spiritual condition will immediately deteriorate. He can only live by God’s love.
He wants to direct our love. He wants us to love others not for ourselves, but for Him and also in Him. Our natural goodness and wickedness have no place here. Natural affection also loses its power. God wants us to be directed by Him because we love Him. When He wants us to love a certain person, we can obey; when He wants us to terminate our relationship with a certain person, we can also obey.
This is the life of the cross. Only when we have the Holy Spirit deeply applying the work of the cross in us and causing us to experience the putting to death of the soul-life can we lose the self in our affections.
God wants us to have new relationships in Him with those whom we loved in the past. God will either work to make our heart submissive, or He will strip us of what we love.
When He uses the latter method, He causes our loved ones to change in their love toward us, or He causes the environment to hinder us from loving them. Perhaps our loved one has gone on a far journey, perhaps he has deceased, or perhaps there are other circumstances. If our consecrated heart is honest before God, God will strip us of everything until we have only Him left. If the believer wants to obtain a real spiritual living, he must willingly abandon all that is dear to him. God requires anything that conflicts with a heart that loves Him to be abandoned.
He will not love what he loves but what God wants him to love. Since he loves himself in God and for God, he also loves others in God and for God. Therefore, he can love others as himself.
Believers should know that letting God direct their affection is an essential prerequisite to their spiritual growth. How uncontrollable our affection is! If it is not subdued under God’s purpose, there is a possibility of endangering our spiritual life at any time. It is easy to correct wrong thinking, but it is hard to handle wrong affection. We should love the Lord with all our heart, allowing Him to direct our love.
Moreover, if we look at the fruit of this love, we can also tell its source. If it is soulish, this kind of love does not have the power to help a believer to be permanently delivered from the world. He has to labor and struggle to stay away from the attractiveness of the world. However, if the love is spiritual, worldly things and matters are naturally abandoned because of this love. The believer looks down upon them and reckons them as something to be hated. He no longer has his eyes on the world because the glorious light of God has blinded his fleshly eyes. After having this experience of loving God, he does not esteem himself highly because of it; rather, he humbles himself, as if he has diminished before men.
The nature of God’s love is forever changeless. Our love is very changeable. If we love God with our own love, our love toward God grows cold when we feel unhappy. After a long period of trial, it surely fails because the believer loves God with his own love; he loves God for his own sake, for his own happiness, etc. Therefore, when he cannot obtain the expected happiness, he shrinks back. If it is the love of God, no matter what situation or position he is in, he still loves God without any change. “Love is strong as death;/jealousy is cruel as the grave/…Many waters cannot quench love,/neither can the floods drown it” (S.S. 8:6-7). If a believer truly loves God, regardless of his circumstances and feelings, he still loves God. Soulish love ceases when the effect of the emotion ceases; spiritual love is strong, cruel, and does not let go.
The Lord often causes a believer to experience what he considers to be painful in order that the believer would not love God for himself. God wants the believer to believe in His love. In the beginning of one’s Christian life, the Lord always attracts the believer to feel His love in many ways. After the believer experiences this, He leads him to take a much deeper journey. God does not let him feel His love, but He causes him to believe in His love. We should pay attention to the fact that deeply tasting the Lord’s love is a step which must be experienced by every believer who desires to go on in a deeper way. Only by the attraction of the Lord’s love can the believer leave all for the Lord and come forward to the Lord.
After the believer feels the Lord’s love, the Lord wants him to believe in His love; therefore, shortly, but not immediately, after he experiences the feeling of His love, God no longer causes him to sense His love. Then He wants him to believe that His love is still unchanging. If, after an experience of feeling the Lord’s love, a believer suddenly does not have the same feeling, he should realize that this is the time for him to believe. He should not be alarmed.
If we want to walk according to the spirit, we should keep our love calm; otherwise, we cannot hear the voice of the intuition directly. If our affection is not entirely subject to God’s purpose, our heart is often disturbed. This hinders the leading of the spirit. The believer should continually pay attention in the spirit to the people and things that stimulate his affection.
We have previously said that it is very difficult for believers to consecrate in the matter of love. Therefore, the consecration of this one thing is a sign of true spirituality. The extent to which a believer dies to his affections and his seeking for love is the extent to which he is spiritual. This is the biggest test. Without dying to the affections of the world, we are not yet dead to anything. Being dead to affection is being dead to the world. Desiring friendship and a lover’s love indicates that we are not dead to the self-life. Real death to the soul- life can be seen in the giving up of our love, except the love for God. How transcendent is the spiritual man, walking above the love of man!
