Category Archives: Pursuing Love

Jesus commanded us to love one another. The pursuit of love is the highest priority in our Christian lives: without love, all our achievements are worthless.

Living by Faith, Prophesy and the prophetic, Pursuing Love

The Railway Track

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“I am going to lift the train back onto the rails…”

I felt the Lord showed me a railway line going into the distance, except it was going up into the air, like a fairground ride, not along the ground. He says “The train has been bumping along slowly because it has been running over the sleepers, not along the tracks that I have laid down for it. The sleepers are barriers across the path: divisions, religion, unbelief. All the time my church looks at these barriers it remains stuck on them, rooted to the ground and bumping along slowly instead of rolling freely along the tracks that I have set and rising up into the realm of the Spirit. For the track is the twin rails of faith and love. I am going to lift the train back onto the rails, and the train will surely speed up as the wheels roll freely at last. You will look for the sleepers, but they will be flashing by so quickly that you will not see them, and you will just hear the sound of the wheels speeding along the track towards your destination. Listen: can you hear them? Faith and love, faith and love, faith and love, faith and love, faith and love …  The destination is your certain hope, the anchor of your soul. Take your eyes off the sleepers, for it is only faith and love that will get you there. Listen to the sound of train – Faith and love, faith and love, faith and love, faith and love, faith and love …”

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor 13:13)

“For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything, but faith working through love. (Gal 5:6)

Living by Faith, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Right or righteous? Sticks in the Fireplace

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Jackdaws have been building a nest in our chimney…

“I find then a law, that evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” (Romans 7 21-25)

I have been thinking about arguments and the destruction they cause, particularly the ones that arise out of misunderstandings. Also I am reading Paul’s letter to the Romans at the moment, and I have reached Romans 7. Now I have read Romans 7 many times, but have always tended to move on to the next chapter and the glorious conclusions that Paul draws in its verses. This time though, I asked the Holy Spirit to explain chapter seven to me, particularly verse 8 – “But sin, taking opportunity by the commandment, produced in me all manner of evil desire. For apart from the law sin was dead.” I asked the Holy Spirit to explain how it is that the law brings sin. And while thinking about arguments, I was asking how it is possible to love through false accusations that can arise from misunderstandings. Unrelated questions? God didn’t think so. What He showed me was sticks in the fireplace.

Jackdaws have nested in our chimney, and in doing so have dropped a lot of sticks down the flu, so we have a little pile of dead sticks, put there by the jackdaws, like a fire waiting to be lit, in our fireplace. The sticks in the picture are exactly as they have landed. What I felt the Holy Spirit revealed to me was that those sticks are like little bits of law that I appeal to, in order to try and prove that I am right. But by appealing to them I still live under them; I am still “in captivity to the law.” Carry on reading – hopefully you will see what I mean.

If we argue, I am lost in that pile of sticks. I try and use a stick of mine against a stick of yours. Every attempt at an explanation, every effort to refute an apparently false accusation, is just another stick in the fireplace. My stick is right, I say, and yours is wrong! But which law is at work here – the law of the Spirit of Life in Christ Jesus, or the law of sin and death at work in my members? There is obviously only one answer to this one. My flesh is trying to preserve itself by appealing to the law that says I am right and you are wrong, and in doing so is delivering itself to death. The sinful passion that is aroused by this law is the desire to justify myself. It only goes one way if I don’t stop trying to prove that I am right, which of course is where the enemy of our souls is trying to guide it – because if I keep going it will get to the point where he can put a match to it all by tempting me to say something intentionally destructive. At which point the whole thing goes up in flames.

Yet there remains a problem. “Lord,” I say, “What if I am right??”

“Yes you may be right,” He says gently, “But that’s beside the point. Being right has nothing to do with being righteous. The point is this. You all sin. You all fall short of my glory. You are all like china shops, where some of the items in the shop are real, and some are imagined. Some are “right,” after the flesh, and some are “wrong.” What do you do? Should you behave like a bull in someone else’s china shop, charging around in your own direction and your own thoughts, and then trying to justify why you broke some of the pieces; or do you love enough to consider all of their china – whether it’s real or imagined – and walk carefully around it?  After all, who are you to judge what is true?”

When we argue, it brings death. Arguing is carnal, not spiritual. The consequence of an argument within a relationship is always in some way the wages of sin. The jackdaws are the flesh; the sticks in the fireplace are the law of sin and death which is served by the flesh. The law of sin and death  is what the jackdaw flesh nests in. Yes, we can spend our time cleaning out the fireplace, going for prayer at every other meeting; and yes we can repent and seek forgiveness of one another. The grace of God makes this provision. But the jackdaws always come back, and they will always drop their sticks. How much better to realise that God has given us a completely different, brand new fireplace where the fire of His love is already burning in our hearts?

Paul ends Romans 7 with these famous words: “I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.” (Romans 7:25). If we can use our minds to direct us to the fire of God’s love in every situation, we will not lose ourselves in the sticks of dead wood which the enemy is waiting to put a match to, and which, even if he doesn’t succeed, will only ever be used against each other.

“When we were in the flesh, the sinful passions which were aroused by the law were at work in our members to bear fruit to death. But now we have been delivered from the law, having died to what we were held by, so that we should serve in the newness of the Spirit and not in the oldness of the letter.” (Rom 7: 5-6)

I am dead to the Law, for I died with Christ, and I am alive to God. God always wants me to love. He wants me to choose being righteous above being right. To do so I have to look into the china shop before charging in with the first thoughts that are in my head: consider what pieces of china might already be there, and consider what effect my words might have on them. If I do that, I will be speaking in love before I open my mouth. Think how much time is lost in an argument, besides other considerations of the fruit that is borne through it to death. It might take a bit longer to think before you speak, but it wastes a lot less time.

“But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all  who believe.” (Rom 3: 21-22)

The righteousness of God through faith in Jesus is apart from the law; it’s a different fireplace. We need to choose to be righteous, not to be right.

Discipleship and witness, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Choose Life: Love One Another.

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Jonathan said to David, “Whatever you yourself desire, I will do it for you.” (1 Sam 20:4)

The love between Jonathan and David is well known; indeed it is the most elevated example of an actual friendship that we are given in the Old Testament, if not in the whole of the Bible – excluding, of course, the friendship that Jesus offers to all who follow Him. I Sam 18:3 tells us that “Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul.” (NKJV) Other versions translate this as “he loved him as himself.” This takes us immediately to the model of love that Jesus teaches when He introduces the parable of the good Samaritan:  “‘You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and your neighbour as yourself.” If we need to see an example of how Jesus wants us to love one another, we look at how Jonathan loved David.

We could study in depth what details that we are given about their relationship and find spiritual meaning in all of them; but what speaks loudest to me is who – or what – David and Jonathan actually represent in the Bible narrative. Jonathan is Saul’s son, and Saul represents the dynasty of the flesh. However David, as we know, is a man ‘after God’s own heart;’ he is a prophetic type and the human ancestor of Jesus, and he represents the dynasty of the Spirit. The anger that Jonathan’s covenant of loyalty to David provokes in Saul is the anger of the devil himself who knows that it is Christ’s rule, and not his own, that will ultimately be established on the Earth:

“Do I not know that you have chosen the son of Jesse to your own shame and to the shame of your mother’s nakedness? For as long as the son of Jesse lives on the earth, you shall not be established, nor your kingdom.” (1 Sam 20: 30-31)

In “choosing the son of Jesse,” the son of Saul chose the dynasty of the Spirit over the dynasty of the flesh. Prophetically, Jonathan died to self and turned to Jesus. When we love, we make the same choice for God. In the immortal words of Deuteronomy 30:19-20, we “…choose life, that you and your descendants may live, that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days.” To love others is ultimately to love God, and there is only one way to do that, which is the way that Jesus tells us to love him. It’s quite simple. He says: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” (John 14:15)

A husband can long for his wife; he can miss her when they are apart; he can love to be around her; he can admire her beauty and her qualities and can enjoy her conversation. He can miss her, desire her, and seek her presence: but unless he does the things that she likes and avoids what she doesn’t like he is not actually loving her. It’s the same with the Lord: we can long for His presence and spend time with Him; we can enjoy His conversation and immerse ourselves in His word, but we aren’t loving Him if we ignore the things that He asks of us and grieve His Spirit by doing what He doesn’t like.

Jonathan said to David, “Whatever you yourself desire, I will do it for you.” In the same way, therefore, we look to Jesus as we make our choices throughout the day and say to Him “Whatever you yourself desire, I will do it for you.”  Colossians 3: 17 tells us: “Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father, through him,” This doesn’t mean we tag “in Jesus’ name” onto everything we do and say: it presupposes that we can’t actually do anything in the name of the Lord unless we know that it’s what He desires. We can’t separate loving God from loving our brother, which is what the apostle John makes clear in his first epistle: “He who loves his brother abides in the light, and there is no cause for stumbling in him.” (1 John 2:10)

To love our brothers and sisters, we need to abide in the light, and we achieve that by doing what He says. As we do, the Kingdom of the Son of Jesse is established on the Earth.

Christian Life, Pursuing Love, Walking in the Spirit

Love Never Fails (Mirror, mirror, on the wall)

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In the last five minutes, I have been frustrated with my internet connection because it has failed yet again, and I have been annoyed by a text arriving on my phone and requiring my attention just as I sat down to write this piece. Of course there is no-one in my study with me to witness these little mini- explosions…

Although that isn’t true, is it? Actually the One through whom the Universe was made is here too. He knows every thought in my head, and every ripple of emotion that ruffles the surface of my heart. He gave his life up in agony so that I might live through him, delivered of the negatives embedded in my flesh and bearing fruit that glorifies Him, and that demonstrates to the principalities and powers of darkness the consummate victory of the cross and the eternal wisdom of God’s Great Plan. Yet in the space of five minutes, instead of spiritually “possessing my soul” by bearing the fruit of patience (“In your patience possess your souls” – Luke 21:19) I have yet again delivered it to to sin and death by yielding to my flesh.

As if to reinforce the point, Anne has just come upstairs with the landline phone in her hands: a friend from church wants a chat to arrange a cup of tea together. This time I smile. I smile because I am writing about love: the love that never fails. How far I am from that love! But as Paul famously writes, I can thank God for Jesus, who delivers me from “this body of death” (Romans 7:25). I may not have offended anybody mortal, but I offended Him.

The Light of Love

Love never fails. One day the sun will dim and the light of the stars will fade, but God’s love endures forever. As part of creation, even the sun and the stars are “subject to decay,” as Paul writes in Romans 8:20. But when The Perfect is come, the New Jerusalem will be coming with it, with “no need of the sun or of the moon to shine in it, for the glory  of God illuminates it. The Lamb is its light.” (Rev 21:23). The love of God is not like the light of the sun: it cannot decay. It cannot be dimmed. It’s not the created light that God separated from darkness (Gen 1:4); it’s the light that created the darkness and shines in it, which the darkness cannot put it out. “This is the message which we have heard from Him and declare to you, that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all,” writes John (1 John 1:5). Uncreated eternal light is the light of love; it’s God Himself.

I’m not writing this because I think you don’t know it, because I’m sure you do: what I’m trying to put into words is the sense that the love that God pours into our hearts by the Holy Spirit is totally outside and beyond anything in the Universe that could diminish even a single spark of its light and power within us. Not just the abstract idea, but something of the experiential knowledge that it is the power of Life itself, it is the power that raised Jesus from the dead, it is the power that created the universe, and it is the power by which we were born again to eternal life and by which our spirits were resurrected with Christ to be seated with Him in heavenly places. Can anything separate us from this love? (Romans 8: 31-39)

“No!” we say, because we know that this is the truth of the Word. Yet how much of our lives are actually spent in the experience of this truth? When I lost my patience with the internet, then again with the person who dared to send me a text while I was writing, was I living in its glory? The new creation walks by faith and not by sight; after the Spirit and not after the flesh, bathed in the light of this love. It wasn’t the new creation Bob that lost his patience; it was the old one that is supposed to be passing away. Although nothing can separate us from the love of God that is ours in Christ Jesus, we can lose contact with it oh, so easily. And the more we live outside of this contact, the less we see it working through us and wonderfully touching other people. ”You are restricted by your own affections,” as Paul writes (2 Cor 6:12).

Treasure in Earthen Vessels

Yet  “It is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” What is shining in our hearts is brighter than the sun, and it is not subject to decay. We have this amazing treasure in the earthen vessels of our lives (2 Cor 4:7). But what do we see when we look in the mirror: the treasure, or the earthen vessel? Paul says “We all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.” (2 Cor 3:18) Can we really see the glory of the Lord’s blazing love in our own eyes when we study our reflection?

Paul had already written about reflections in the earlier letter to his church at Corinth: “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known,” (1 Cor 13:12) Perfection hasn’t come yet, but it’s on its way. And as we allow the Holy Spirit freedom to work in our hearts, we keep moving closer to its glory. We can catch a glimpse of it even now, burning undimmable in the depths of our unveiled hearts – for “when one turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away” (2 Cor 3:16) – and He changes us from glory to glory as we become more like Him.

Before I formed you in the womb

The wonder of all this is, that the light of Christ within us is already part of who we are as the spiritual beings who have been raised and seated with Him in heavenly places. In that place that is outside the realms of time, we are already glorified: “For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.” (Rom 8: 29-30) Our heavenly body already exists: “we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1) Paul doesn’t say that “we will have” an eternal heavenly body (“building”); he says we have already got it. Since it’s eternal, it actually existed before time. God said to Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; Before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a prophet to the nations.” (Jer 1:4) When “this corruptible has put on incorruption, and this mortal has put on immortality,” (1 Cor 15:4) we will finally be stepping into the eternal self that has been waiting all our lives to receive us.

Is this what we see when we look in the mirror? Because it’s what the love of God planned for us before He created time itself. Before He called creation into being and subjected it to decay, our glorified selves were already raised with Christ, and the works that we would do on Earth as we move in contact with the fire of that love were already prepared. (Eph 2:10) To walk by faith is to step through eternity, in the blazing light of perfect love by which we are being transformed from glory to glory.

If you want patience – and love, and joy, and the rest of the fruit of the Spirit – take a step of faith now and look at yourself as you really are. I am an amateur photographer, and I long for images that are ‘pin-sharp.’ What you will see will not be pin-sharp yet, but the more you long for it, the clearer it will become. Meanwhile it is no less real, and the light that you see it by is “the light of the knowledge of the glory of the Lord in the face of Christ.” (2 Cor 4:6) Look, there He is, burning with unfailing love: Christ in you, the hope of glory.