devotional

20MAY
2012

Truth and love

 

     Love is the driving force and guiding light in the Christian religion. Without it, every doctrine, every effort and every conviction becomes absurd. There are many among us, either by action or omission, who pervert love by declaring it free to accept everything the world wishes, but this isn’t love. We love only when we love through the Bible. Love is truth, and has its parameters. A lying love is not based on truth. Love without limits is nothing more than a disease infested prostitute proclaiming loudly to all who pass by the passing pleasures of sin for a season. It may appear as love to some, but death alone is its fruit, Proverbs 5:5.

     The love of God, rather, is pure, holy and clean. It is Bible truth. Every Gospel writer recalls by the grace of God the Holy Ghost the sweetness of Jesus’ teachings on love. It is love that Jesus said would identify Christians among their brethren, John 13:35. It is a fervent love that Peter says would cover a multitude of sins, 1 Peter 4:8. It is love that John said is being perfected in every believer, 1 John 2:5. It is love that James proclaims is the fulfillment of the King’s law, James 2:8. Jude reminds us that even our feasts are now rightly called love feasts because of salvation, Jude 12. It is love that Paul said should be the highest aim. He said literally that without love he would be “nothing!” 1 Corinthians 13:2. He said this in light of the same truth that once blinded him on a roadside, Acts 9:1-6.  

     Truth is lovely. “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God!” 1 John 3:1. “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us,” Romans 5:8. “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved),” Ephesians 2:4-5.

     Bask in the love of God, Christian! Seek assurance for yourself through the Scriptures that it is the love of God alone that keeps you. Pray for God to reveal this to you. If you love, it is that to which you were predestined from before the foundation of the world, Romans 8:29-30. Do not concede just any love to the world because they swear that they know it as well as the Christian. They say, “I love, it’s just not in your way.” No, the world hates love. They will have none of it. The world would lunge at the throat of love like a starving lion again if given half the chance. When love told men the truth they shouted, “His blood be on us and on our children,” Matthew 27:25. Truth, then, must become an indispensable part of our love. The Beatles were wrong. Love is not all you need; you must have truth. Pilate asked, “What is truth?” in John 18:38 because he could not hear the truth’s voice a moment prior, John 18:37; cf. John 14:6.   

     “If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you,” John 15:19. The reason our love is not theirs is because the world’s “love” is not of the Father. They do not love truth. Our love is inextricably tied to truth and the Bible is truth! As you spend your time therefore, as by necessity, laboring in the truth, please remember that love by which you were ransomed, and to which you are beckoned.

     “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” 1 John 4:8. 

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