(Om Orientation) Our Motive Love - Part 2 — George Verwer

Loving Enemies as Revolutionary Christian Teaching

For with the same measure that ye made, with all it shall be measured to you again. Oh, do you see the revolutionary teaching of this portion of the Word of God? How far we are from this. Love your enemies.

Loving Those Who Do Not Love Us

Close friends. Be thankful to God that he's put a love in our hearts. We love to play with them. We love to be with them. We love to talk with them. A message we do no better than the sinners. Because in most cases you're going to find that the people you love, the people you go with, the little cliques you've organized, are mainly with those people that you love and that love you.

People that think you're rather keen. People who are willing to be obedient to you. People who accept your ideas. People who accept your mode of living. Sinners do the same. The sinners do the same. Well, we begin to love enemies because you see, the only ones Jesus ever loved were his enemies.

The Bible says we have little so-called love relationships. How different than this love that we have for people because we have an affinity, we have a liking, we have an equal personality. We begin to love those who don't love us.

Unless we begin to love those who are against us. Unless we begin to love those who persecute us. Unless we begin to love those who misunderstand us. We haven't begun to love as far as God is concerned.

What a challenge for you there in your college. What a challenge for you wherever you are. To begin to love those who don't love you. To begin to love the unlovers. The unlovers of the Christian faith will turn the world.

Practicing the Golden Rule in Daily Relationships

Because we could never touch the depth of the love that is expressed here when God tells us to do unto others as we would say, do unto us. To do unto our team leader as we would want our team members to do unto us.

To do unto our teacher as we would want our pupils to do unto us. To do unto our parents as we would want our children to do unto us. To do unto the bus driver or the maintenance man. Is this the daily practice of your life?

Christian Maturity Requires a Life of Love

Is this a part of your very nature, your very being? Still not in the revolution. Oh, you can be a Christian. You can be baptized. You can be in the church. Some of the most unloving people I've met in all the world are in the church.

You've taken hold of these promises. That doesn't mean you've entered into this life of victory. This life of love. This life of faith. God tells us in the word that there's babes and crooks. They've never come into maturity.

And today our churches are filled with spiritual dwarfs and spiritual midgets. Our Bible colleges are filled with people that have even been 20 or 30 years as Christians. And they're still babies. They're still toddlers.

They're still wearing their diapers and their nappies. Because they've never come to grips with the life of Jesus Christ, which is basically 11D times 7. We go holding our grudges against this person and that person.

Broken Fellowship and Walking With God

And we think that we can hold things in our hearts against our fellow men and still walk with God. And God says it's not possible. God says if you cannot love those whom you have seen, how can you love him whom you have not seen?

And as long as there's broken fellowship between you and some brother in Christ, as long as there's a broken fellowship, a broken strand in the cord of love between you and some brother in Christ, there's a broken strand between you and God.

We can pass over it. We can think that we're getting through in prayer, but God says we're deceiving ourselves. And in the book of Galatians he says, Be not deceived. God is a mock. So these unloving feelings, when we show these jealous thoughts, nothing of this world will go on with us.

And we can go counting decisions, counting decisions, counting decisions, supposedly and get what some of the others did. Go on to walk with Jesus. Why do they sell their possessions? Because they love, love.

Love as the Fruit of Abiding in Christ

No specific rules about selling possessions. No specific rules about how much you must forsake or about living you can dig up. This is something that you can even pray up. He says, Make it not a shame, because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts unto us.

You see, love is a fruitful spirit in us as we abide in Jesus Christ, as we rest in Him, as we trust in Him, as we turn from all sins, as we repent of all sins, to be filled with the Spirit. To meet all these people in America and England today who claim to be filled with the Spirit, and they talk about all these different experiences they've had with the Holy Spirit, and yet we don't find the love, that love that forsakes all, that love that'll reach out to the ends of the earth, that love that esteems the brothers better than ourselves, that love that brings about patience and gentleness and meekness and kindness.

We don't see it. And when I don't see those things, beloved, I don't care what kind of experience the man claims to have had, I doubt that he's experienced anything with the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost, first of all, I want you to look at 2 Corinthians 5.

Unity and Abounding Love

Jesus was moved with 21, and grounded one through four. That tremendous unity that God wants us to have, how He wants us to be in one love, through 14. Study those verses. And then 1 Thessalonians 3 .12, where Paul tells us that we need to abound in love.

Are you tonight, are you this morning, or this afternoon, or whenever you listen to this tape, are you abounding in love? Love is flowing over you. One of our conferences we met in Texas wasn't the preaching, it wasn't the evangelism, it wasn't all the activity and the distribution of thousands of pieces of literature, but the thing that shook his life was the love he saw in the young people.

And he said, I learned more in two days than I've learned in all the past years of my Christian experience. And I found this everywhere. What youth is looking for, what people are looking for today in the realm of reality, is love.

Love Demonstrated Through Christian Example

They hear about a church that's preaching a message of love, but they aren't seeing lives of love. This is what's needed on your campus. This is what's, well, sweeping our evolution. It isn't your preaching, it isn't your knowing it all, it isn't your OM vision, it isn't your forsaking all, and all these other things.

The thing that's going to make an impact on your campus, in your college, wherever you go, is love. First Timothy 4 .12 says that we're not to allow people to despise our youth, but we're to be examples.

And one of the ways we're to be examples, according to this verse, is in love. Study that little verse, how powerful it is. And then Second Timothy 2 .22, where it tells us to flee lusts and then follow after certain things, righteousness and love.

Love Joined With Truth and Correction

Oh, might we see distance Christianity in the eighth verse and onward. Just the message of love in that little book. 1 .4, verse 12 .6, and there's one thing I noticed about that verse, where it tells us that because God loves us, He chastens us.

Remember, love isn't just a wishy-washy thing. It's going to be love at times that leads you to go to a brother in gentleness and humility. And if you can't go like that, don't go. But it'll lead us to a brother in gentleness and humility and love, to correct him, to help him, to love him.

Meekness, esteeming him as better than ourselves. Love and light go together. You can't separate truth and love. Don't fall into the pitfall of a modernist who thinks that love is the answer, even though he knows nothing of real, sacrificial, God-sent love.

Separate love from truth. You can't, and we see that in the epistles of John and many other places. And then read the book of James. What a love story. Especially James 2, 1 through 8, about how God condemns this thing of being a respecter of persons.

Love Without Partiality

How God condemns this thing of seeking a special place to those who are rich. Oh, what God says concerning this is very, very powerful. Read James 2, 1 through 8. And then that verse I want every one of us to meditate on, so important.

1 Peter 4, 8, where it says that above everything else we're to have love, for love will cover a multitude of sins. You must see this as you go out on your team. You must see this as you work together there in your college.

You must see this wherever you are. Love covers... Peter, the matter separates the very best of friends. But love covers... Memorize it. And the next time you go to back fights, the next time you go to gossip, the next time you begin to gripe about something someone's done wrong, remember God says that love covers sin.

Christ's Sacrificial Love as the Pattern

It was the love of Jesus Christ that caused him to cover our terrible sins with the blood that he shed on Calvary's cross. And it's that same love shed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit... Love people, so that we'll cover their sins and we'll seek the good, and we'll believe the good.

Love believes all things. Above the other, it talks about love and I want us to close by just looking at 1 John 3 .16. We all don't like John 3 .16, but here's 1 John 3 .16. And everything I could possibly say is summed up in these powerful words.

Laying Down Our Lives for the Brethren

Hereby receive we the love of God because he laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. How thankful we are today that God loved us and gave his life for us. He redeemed us.

He reconciled us. He brought us back to himself because of Calvary love that was expressed on the cross when Jesus Christ laid down his very life. We love it. We sing about it. We enjoy it. We study about it.

But it's only half the message. The second half of the message is found in the second half of the verse. And that's what we've been talking about today. And we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.

And the 17th verse follows up on it and makes it more practical. But whosoever hath this world's good and seetheth his brother hath need and shutteth up his bowels of compassion from him how dwelleth the love of God in him.

From Words About Love to Acts of Love

My little children, no doubt many of you have been listening to my voice. Up to now you've loved in tongues. You've loved in words. You've talked about these things. You've meditated on some of them. You've heard messages on them.

But the challenge today is to begin to love indeed. To begin to allow this revolution to take place in your life where you begin to see the other as better than yourself. Where you begin to love your neighbor as yourself.

Where you begin to do to others as you would have them do unto yourself. Where you begin to care for others as you care for yourself and in which you're consumed in the love of God. Loving with all your heart, all your soul.

Spiritual Revolution Through Obedient Love

This is the revolution. Mexico, in Europe, within. You'll bring about a spiritual revolution wherever you go. Each and every command in the word. Be for thine word like a double-edged sword. We say and see that God loved us and we understand his love through seeing Jesus Christ laying down his life in like each one of us in our prayer, even now, laying down our lives for God and for the brethren.

That we might see spiritual revolution.