The Love of God — Bill McLeod

The Supremacy of Love Over Spiritual Gifts

I want to read from 1 Corinthians 13, in order to do a good job with that we have to read the last verse of chapter 12, he says covet earnestly the best gifts, and yet show unto you a more excellent way or a far better way, something far better than having all the gifts of the Spirit.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become a sounding brass or a clanging gong, one translation says, or a tinkling cymbal or a clashing cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I can move mountains and have not love, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned and have not love, it profits me nothing. Love suffers long and is kind. Love doesn't envy, doesn't want itself, is not puffed up, does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not her own.

And by the way, if you want a definition of love, you'll find it right there. Whatever it is, whatever love is, it never seeks its own. It is not easily provoked, thinks no evil, rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth, bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails. But whether it be prophecy, they shall fail. Whether it be tongues, they shall cease. Whether it be knowledge, it shall vanish away. For we know in part, and we prophesy in part, that when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face.

Now we know in part, but then shall I know, even as also I am known. Boy, what a thought. And now by faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love. My text is Jeremiah 46, 17. Thou, King of Egypt, God says, jest annoyed, but annoyed.

Nothing but annoyed. There's quite a number of Old Testament examples of people who were just noises, and New Testament as well, and we're going to look at some of these. Remember when Elijah and Mount Carmel had that contest with the prophets, there were 850 prophets altogether, two different groups, and they prayed, and their way of praying, all day long, from morning till the evening, sacrificed.

Well, Elijah had a little fun. He said, hey, what's wrong you guys, cry louder. Cry louder, he told them, you know. Maybe your God is meditating. One translation says, maybe your God is sitting on the pot.

He's really giving them a hard time, you know. Maybe he's in a journey, he said, or he might be pursuing something or someone. Or maybe he's sleeping. You guys better shout louder, you know. They had a hard time.

He had a sense of humor, and of course nothing happened. They jumped up and down, they cut themselves with knives, and they're screeching and screaming all day long, and absolutely nothing happened until he prayed.

His prayer isn't even three minutes long. And the fire of God fell. Burned up the sacrifice. Burned up the wood. Burned up the stony altar. And lifted up all the water in the church. Remember, they poured barrels of water on our stuff, you know.

It was kind of a demonstration, but you know, 850 guys? They figured out their hours. How many hours did they spend praying, you know? Nothing happened. Nothing. And sometimes that's the way we pray. We get nothing for our praying.

We're not getting anywhere. Galatians 2 .17, it's a kind of an insulated part there, that simply says, they made a noise in the house of God. So I presume they were there worshiping, and God said it was just a noise, you know, as far as he was concerned.

It didn't mean anything. If my heart's not in it, God's not in it either. And so it has to come from my heart to His. In Mosiah 7 .14, God said to Israel, You have not cried to me when you howled on your bed.

So praying may be howling. Just making a noise. Now this is what happened then. There. Amos 8 .3, God said, Your songs in the people are howlings. Our singing may be just a noise too, you know. Just a noise.

You hear somebody with a beautiful voice, and they sing so sweetly and great, you know. When somebody with very few singing gifts was singing, he fell asleep, and he'd think, Why don't they let that gal sing, you know?

Why don't they do that? In Doris Hodges' name. Doris Hodges, she's married now. She has a room, I forget if it's a woman or something. Anyway, she had God in the womb, and she never had much of a voice.

The problem with people, though, when she was still singing, I should have seen God committing the song, and everybody in the place knew it. I spoke afterwards. It was the easiest speaking I ever did.

I'll tell you. I knew what God was doing. When I was throwing up to my chair, and I looked at my chair and just prayed, and when I sat there, I got up and said, The concert room's over there. And there must have been 160 people just stampeding out the door to meet with God.

So meet with this gal. So don't make the mistake of judging somebody who doesn't have a sweet voice and can't hit the high notes, or can't hit the low notes, you know. That's got nothing to do with it.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, God has perfected prayer. All those in the temple, God said, Your songs. 23 John says, Take away the noise of your songs. Stop it. Cut it off. God answered. The heart isn't in it.

It's not a performance. Dancing is not a performance. And singing is not a performance. They are ministries. And the Holy Ghost has got to be in them, or else they won't do anything. They'll waste our time and God's time and people's time as well.

In Malachi 2 .13, God said, This have you done again, covering the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping, and with crying out, insomuch that what? Insomuch that neither God is not the offering anymore, nor receives it with goodwill at your hands.

So the question is, Why God? Why? And three times He said, Because you guys are dealing treacherously with the wife of your youth. That's why. Now Jeremiah speaks about a woman treacherously departing from her husband.

Any woman may do that too. So God was not interested in their praying, their crying, their tears even at the altar. Because they weren't right with their wives. So they were just a noise, you know, as far as God was concerned, just a noise.

Empty Religious Noise Versus Genuine Worship

In India one time, the three of us, we went to a Hindu temple. We wanted to get inside and have a look at things and see how they did things there. There's a couple of ugly, I mean really ugly, stone gods in there.

And people were leaning all around and screeching and screaming to these things, you know. But to get into the temple you had to walk through a thing that's probably as long as from here to the back wall, kind of an arbor, you know, with branches and stuff on it to get in.

And on the top of this thing there were bells. Little bells about this size. Well, let's knock them. And a lady came along with a baby. And so we thought she'd hit this bell. She hit the next bell. And then we thought this is to waken them.

God, they might be sleeping, you know. But at the end there was a big bell, about this big, you know. And so she lifted this baby up. Right away the baby should hit the bell. The kids didn't know that.

So she takes the kid and rings the bell with her kid, you know. I mean, the God might be asleep. You've got to make sure he's awake, you know. What nonsense. Today, you know, millions are still doing it.

But sometimes we're doing it in evangelical churches too in a slightly more refined and cultured and evangelical way. In the New Testament, Matthew 6, Jesus said, we're not to use vain repetition like the heathens do.

They think they're going to be heard for their much speaking. I suppose for their loud speaking. And sometimes, I've seen this in some countries too, where they have a water wheel and it's a prayer wheel.

It's really a kind of prayer. The wheel turns. It answers the prayer for somebody or it has something to do with getting prayers answered. And sometimes they have the same kind of wheel just in the wind.

And as the wind blows it, blow it then. But, you know, sometimes what we're doing is no different. It's just a little more refined and cultured, you know. God isn't listening. In Santiago, Chile, you know, in the Catholic Church, they worship the Virgin Mary, but they say it's not real worship.

It's the difference between patria and latria. And I think it's latria, not patria, whatever that means. And so, but I saw some people. So I got in my movie camera and got some movies. And there's a statue of the Virgin Mary probably 15 feet high, about 6 feet off the ground, by a sidewalk.

And people were kneeling down there and they had their arms stretched and they were screaming at the tops of their voices, you know, to Mary. Now, tell me they don't worship Mary. They were acting as if she was their God.

Again, big noise, nothing happening. Then I speak with a ton of men and with angels and have them laugh. I'm a clanging gong. I'm a clashing cymbal. I'm just a noise. He's talking to Christians. I speak with a ton of men and with angels and don't have the love of God in my soul.

I'm just a noise. People were told in Ephesians 4 let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor. Jewish people are making noise to be seen. Down in, I think it was Binghamton, New York, I had a crusade and preachers got her.

She was a, I mean, there's 60 people in the room that knows her first because she was always talking and laughing and punching people in the ribs and having a great time. And God got a hold of her. And I forget her testimony.

She said, I was the noisiest person in the place because I wanted to be noticed. We don't want to be noticed. We want Christ to be noticed. I'm sure most preachers do this, at least if we love God, like you and me.

We pray, Dear God, don't let the people see me. Don't let them remember me. Let them see Jesus. John 12 says, Sir, we would see Jesus. And that's why we're here, is to represent Him and not just me. In 1 John 4, 18 and 16, God is love.

God is love. I remember a couple of times we were having some, I think it was her parents were coming to stay. They weren't Christians. And so one thing they did, because they wanted to impress the parents with how wonderful it was to be a Christian, they practiced smiling all the time.

In front of the mirror and all this kind of garbage, you know. So they'd be smiling when they looked at it. It was crazy. They thought it was the way they do it. And so sometimes when you put on a face, you know, that doesn't agree with the heart, and the heart starts complaining because the face isn't right, you know.

And I can understand that as well. Anyway. God is love. He doesn't have to try to love. He doesn't have to practice. God is love. Sometimes we have to practice. It shouldn't be that way. And we'll talk about that a little later on.

Partaking in the Divine Nature of Love

2 Peter 1 .4 says that we have become partakers of God's divine nature. It doesn't say to what extent, but to some extent we have become partakers of God's divine nature, which means that we ought to be a loving person.

A person in whom God can pour His Spirit. You know, for that reason, God should serve us and take us all home to heaven. That is what happens in His plan. He leaves us here so we can be a channel for His love and for His grace and power.

God is love we're partakers. Let me give you an illustration of that. In China, when Mao was in power, there was a thing called the Red Guards, a group of people. They were young people. They were given permission from the government to go to China and murder or beat up anybody who was religious or wealthy or intellectual.

And they murdered thousands of people all over China. And finally got a little bit out of hand so the government stopped it. In the meantime, tens of thousands had died. A bunch of these Red Guards broke into a house a Christian home they made and clubbed everybody to death.

The mother recovered. She recovered, but all her family were dead. Well, when the thing fell into disrepute, she found that the leader of the gang that murdered her family was living just two or three blocks from where she lived.

How did that happen? She started praying for this guy. And then she heard that he had a son that was sick and he didn't have any money, couldn't get a doctor to go to hospital. And so she prayed about the Lord telling her what to do and she went down to this man.

He did not, of course, recognize her. She said, nothing of that would have happened that night. And she said, I heard your son wasn't well and he didn't have any money. She said, I don't think we can rush your son back to hell.

So he didn't have a wife and he was so rejoined and couldn't understand. But she took this child home and rushed him back to hell. And she took him back to his father three weeks later and then she told him, we can't do that naturally.

Supernatural, yes, by the grace of God. But the potential is there because the Spirit of God lives within us. Partakers of the divine nature, the Word of God says. Now it says in 1 Thessalonians 4 and 9 that we are taught of God to love one another.

How are we taught? How do you think we're taught? We're taught in three ways. By precept, command, and example. Precept, 1 John chapter 4, there's a verse that says, Beloved, the word beloved means divinely loved ones.

Beloved, let us love one another for love is of God. And everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. Listen carefully. He that loves not knows not God. There are twelve places in 1 John where lovers made the acid test of reality in the Christian life.

He that dwells in love dwells in God and God in him. Twelve places like that. This is the acid test. He that loves not knows not God. Then there must be a lot of people in our evangelical churches that don't know God.

Paul has said probably not more than 20%. Where do you know God? I don't know where he got the statistics from. I know where I got them. He that loves not knows not God. This is his commandment. That we should believe on the name of his son Jesus Christ.

Okay. We evangelicals, we've all managed that. What about the rest of the verse? I love one another. That's the Lord's commandment. It goes together, you know. You can't separate the two. Well, we've managed to separate these two in evangelical churches.

We believe on Jesus. We believe on Jesus. If I can't love my brother and sister in Christ. Well, people say, well, yeah, that's fine. But you don't get it when you get converted. It takes maybe 5, 10, 15, 20 years before you get into this love thing.

Is that what it says in 1 Peter 1? Precept, communion, example 1 Peter 1. Hereby we perceive the love of God because he laid down his life for us and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. That's how it is.

That's how it ought to be. That's what he was saying. Just a noise. Prayer can be a noise. Singing can be a noise. Waiting in a temple. Well, we don't go in. God said he hated and despised their assemblies.

That's putting it pretty strongly. For a purpose, he said. For a purpose is the multitude of transgressions. They dedicated the temple. How many animals did they kill? Was it 140 ,000? Something like that.

They had to have a special place. They didn't have the altar. It wasn't big enough for animals. I mean, when he was born, because he was speaking of the coming of Christ, one sacrifice would have been plenty.

And because there was not many, I suppose, they thought they'd get nothing with God by killing more animals, you know. But God said for a purpose was all of this, you know. What are you doing? What are you at?

Why are you doing these things? Where is your heart? He set command examples taught of God. 1 Thessalonians 3, 12 goes like this. The Lord make you to increase and abound in love one toward another and toward all men even as we be toward you to the end.

That is, for a purpose, to the end. Listen carefully. That he may establish your hearts on vulnerable unholiness before God as my Father at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ with all his saints. You are not ready, am I?

You are not ready for the coming of Christ. That's what it's all about. So when Christ comes and he can meet the church, walking in love and with thanksgiving. And right then, to go back to 1 Corinthians 16, 14, he says, Let all your things be done with love.

Everything you do, do it in a loving way. Sometimes we do things and we grind our teeth. We don't like doing it that way. He was a high school teacher for many years and then wound up as a university professor.

For 25 years, he told me, he never won a soul to Christ. Although he was known to be a Christian and evangelical professor, I know no student ever came to talk to him about God. For 25 years this went on and nothing ever happened.

He prayed for God to kill him. He meant spiritually, you know. He said, Oh, God, kill me now. Dead, he said. I'm already dead, God. Kill me, little guy. And then he spoke in the Baptist church and half a year soon, a lady came up and said, Sir, can I start preaching?

I have to get to the office and meet with my God. And I gave him an invitation. And he was just crowded with people. He phoned me that night. I really never thought it was the loving God said. The phone...

You know the guy, I think his name is Sheltz, that does the Snoopy comic. Anybody read Snoopy comics? You know, he's not a Christian. He said he is, but he doesn't even believe he's being born again. But there's an old saying, the stop clock is right twice a day, right?

So now he's wrong, you know. And you're still thinking of him too? How about this top clock? And one day he did a cartoon, which I saw. And here's Snoopy the dog. He's wet. He's cold. He's lonesome. He's shaking.

He smells fine. He's all by himself, shaking. And then the kids all come. And he sticks their hands on his head. And he prays for God to bless him and walk away. The Bible speaks about that. Maybe he got it.

I think he got it from the Bible. If a brother or sister be naked and destitute, and they send him, but you give him nothing. But he's a prophet. What's that all about? Because sometimes we like this.

Sometimes the people we pray for, what they want to eat is a kind of dollar bill. You know. 3 .18 says, My little children, let us not lack in word, neither in tongue, but in deed. This might be a takeoff from Ezekiel 33 .39, which says, With their mouth, they show much love, but their heart goes after their carcass.

So they can talk. I heard about a couple. And he defended her. And she froze up. And he couldn't make her talk. And so on. So one day he wanted her to go for a walk. And she went with him. And so they were walking along.

You know. And she wouldn't talk. He tried. She wouldn't say a word. So what about sin? And she stopped to listen. And he said to her, Do you know what I think that word is saying? She said, No. I think it's saying, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, I think that in first John there's 40 references to love. There's only one reference to love in the whole of the Quran. Just one. But there's almost 600 references to hell and eternal punishment.

These people are living in terrible fear. And if you die a suicide death and kill others, it's a normal thing. That's why it's almost only men who do it. Occasionally men wouldn't. I don't know what their promise to women.

You know what their promise to men is? He's going to wind up with a beautiful castle on the shores of a beautiful river. All kinds of wine to drink. And 30 virgins to take care of his sexual needs. And God will give you such sexual ability that you can take care of 40 virgins.

That's what the guys are dying for. It's a normal thing. Absolutely. What's the word? Somebody got a word for it? He has eternal life abiding in him. I feel so sorry these people die and find themselves not on the banks of a beautiful river.

They find themselves in hell. No murder has eternal life abiding in him. They don't know that. Somehow we need to tell them that so they'll understand. Interesting story from India. A Christian worker walking down the street saw a blind man sitting there and he just walked by him.

He had to walk by him a couple of times and the Lord said, I want you to just sit down and talk to him. So he sat down with that big guy and introduced himself and started preaching the gospel. The gospel guy came and spit in his face.

How did he handle that? He got up and got out of there. Man, he felt terribly, really mad. The Lord said, go back again. He argued. Oh, I can't go back again. He was in the same city. I don't know how he got back.

I think he went back four times and each time he got spit in his face. But the first time, back to the village from whence he came, he was in the city because he was begging. He went back to the village from whence he came and he led about 50 people to Christ.

Now this Christian worker didn't know what God was going to do with this blind fellow. And he couldn't understand why it was so important he get back there and talk to him. But God had a larger plan. He always had a larger plan.

It's a lot larger than ours is. I want you to find out. Now Bok-Singh in India, I never met him, but he wrote a book. It's called The Return of God's Glory. He's not a great writer. He was poorly written.

I don't think you can get the book here in Canada. I've got a copy somewhere in my library. I'm so glad I read it. You know, they used to call him the Billy Graham of India. And most of the listeners used him and thousands of people from Christ they served with.

And finally Bok-Singh came to the conclusion this was not the way to reach India's needs. So he broke with the missionaries and make-a-believe, well some of the missionaries were angry because he did this, but he went on his own.

Here's what he did. He got together half a dozen godly people and said, look, we're going to find what God really wants us to do. We're not going to do anything until we find what He wants us to do. And they fasted and prayed for several days and God made it clear that if the goals attained to a certain marketplace, an evangelist, the marketplace, the evangelist, then nothing happened.

So they went back to fasting and praying again, which is the right thing to do. And God showed them, when you go to a marketplace, you don't need to know God, you just did your own thing. So they went back to the marketplace, they had a plan, and God had them, and the time began to move and souls accepted Christ.

And here's what he said. When we started doing God's work, in God's way, the glory of God returned. He said, we have had many people every bit as powerful as any kind of mini-church since we've ever had.

He did, and I last I heard, I think he was 83 or something. They had annual conferences, 20 ,000 people showing up. He probably had the start of about 700 churches in India, and suddenly running into thousands of people, like saying, do you know where he found Christ?

In Manipur, Canada. The great evangelist in China. Guess where he found Christ? He found Christ in the United States of America. In the church of Thessalonica, he said, among other things, your faith grows exceedingly, and the love of every one of you all towards each other abounds.

And he was so pleased to know this was happening in the church of Thessalonica. They were a godly church at that time. There's still a church in Thessalonica. It's not as it was then, although a friend of mine was there.

He said the singing seemed to be great, and he said at one point he couldn't go along with it, he just sat there and wept, you know. So maybe there's some good things happening at Thessalonica yet, and I don't really know.

Loving Neighbors Through Practical Service

Okay. So sometime, let me give you an illustration. It's wintertime, and here's somebody, they're stuck in a snowbank in front of their house. It's a neighbor, you know. So you all go to the window and you look up and watch him, and God looks at his watch and says, I wonder how long it'll take him to get out of the snowbank, you see.

Eighteen minutes. Look, in eighteen minutes, his wife is out there pushing, the kids are out there pushing, and he sees you standing at the window, you see. Well, next spring, you're having a little day of education, but he's got a bunch of kids, so you go over and see his dad and put on your best smile and ask him to think about sending his kids to your Sunday school, and his answer is, roughly, you don't understand why.

But he saw you looking at the window. He doesn't know it took eighteen minutes, nor that, but you should have been out there helping him. Once in a bank, my wife and I found ten dollars lying on the floor, so we picked it up and said to the teller, it's not ours.

Whose is it? She said, huh? Do you keep it? No. Somebody's lost it, you know. So we gave it to the teller and said, let us know if somebody comes in looking for it, and so she finally said, oh, there's an old man here, and he was so concerned because he had so little money, he was so glad he got his ten dollars back, you know.

Well, he could have stuck it in that pocket and gone home, and, hey, thank you, Lord, for the ten bucks. But that's not really what I wanted, you know, into this person. How can I help them? How can I encourage them?

What can I do for them? And some of you will be saying, that's not practical. There's a lot of things that aren't practical that are good, and right, but they're not practical because we have to get back to self, you know, at that point where we're willing to go back to self and live to the glory, to the glory of God.

Spoken so, praising God with all of my might, in the sea of God's delight. Self is God, and I am free. That's what it's all about. You know, let's hear, if they have room under the oven, I'm going to go and preach.

Maybe spread them a few others beside. I wouldn't know who you believe from, the others. Well, I saw him take one time. But Whitfield, he was so filled with the love of God that many times he was overcome in his sermons, and he'd stand there, or he said sometimes he'd walk around in a little circle, stamping his feet, and wringing his hands, and cry, cry, cry, to preach the gospel.

He was kind of in this, and we had some, we were proud of him. But Leslie preached in a number of sermons for Whitfield, and somebody asked him, why do you think he'd be in the Heaven News Academy, you know?

And he said, Leslie said, listen, he'd be so close to the throne, I mean, where did he see him? He read it right, you know. Yeah. But it must have been something to hear him. When Whitfield hit a town, word would spread like wildfire.

They didn't use telephones in those days. I wish we didn't have them today. But there were, you know, but word would travel like wildfire. And if he was to preach in some open area, an hour later, there'd be 2 ,000, 5 ,000, 10 ,000 people.

Everyone closed. All the stores closed. The schools emptied. People came running from the fields. Whitfield's here, and he preached one sermon. And they got on his horse to another place. He might preach six times in a day.

When he was not feeling well, a doctor told him that he shouldn't preach more than four times a day. And he said, but preaching is my medicine. I get better when I preach. But after he left, they said for months, there'd be waves of spiritual power moving out in all directions from that one sermon.

And the last two years of his life, they hired a young man to stay with Whitfield day and night because they knew he was very close to death. He died at the age of 56. He had TB. He split blood the last few years of his life.

After he died, the young man said, it's all true. He's exactly what you heard at night. He was up many nights looping for so long night. He says, I'm fine. It's all true what I've been through. And so, I guess God took him home to the kingdom of love.

Wouldn't it be nice to give that old man that he could see Whitfield when he hit heaven? Forgive my slight imagination. It's in the Bible that you'll find this phrase, the love of the spirit. I have to teach you about it.

For the Lord Jesus Christ's sake and for the love of the spirit, that you strive to get with me in the place of God for me, Romans 15 and 30. See, in that place we read about the love of the spirit. Then in Colossians 1, we have this phrase that only occurs once in the Bible, more love in the spirit.

You'll find we read this. It says, the love of God is shed upon or poured forth in your hearts by the Holy Ghost who has given him to us. So the work of the spirit in our hearts is to pour out the love of God in our souls.

That's what he's doing. That's what he's trying to do. Many times we can't do it because we're not really interested. We get our own program to work. We have done it many times against anybody else. If you got that kind of a job, you better get a better job or you have no time.

That's possible too. It's not a money thing, you know. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things that you possess. Jesus taught us that. We've forgotten that. You know, the Samaritan dream thing doesn't mean a thing to God.

It's not a dream. It's a nightmare. I don't have to have a house with four bedrooms and three bathrooms. I know a guy. Matter of fact, I heard him at the cross many years ago. He was a national plumber here in Transcona.

He moved down to the states and he built himself a shack. 12 ,000 people square feet. He said there were 12 bathrooms and he said, I want to go to the bathroom. I don't want to go longer than about six feet, you know.

So he soon built a house on the same property and it kind of sort of slid almost, he said, 2 ,000 square feet. A little shack, you know. He's dead now. And he's judged. I'll tell you something. He was a great witness for God.

No matter what. He was always... No one could understand him. He didn't know how to talk to a gal. He didn't have a clue. The reason being, when he left home, Central Ontario, he was 14 years of age, he was running for his life.

His dad was chasing him with a pitchfork. He said, if the old man had caught me, I'd have been dead. He ran for his life and never saw him start again. That's how he started. So he didn't know how to talk to people, but men would listen to him.