1 John 3:14-15 TPT
14 A loveless life remains spiritually dead.
15 Everyone who keeps hating a fellow believer is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him.”
When you hold offense, you will be declared a murderer. Why? Because you will withhold God’s love. You respond in humanistic love out of obligation or obedience, and define you have forgiven and are loving, but you will fail to allow God’s Love to flow from you. Our deeds and actions of love will be biased, limited, and prejudiced. I see this problem among married couples, even our church couples, but not limited to married couples. With some good days, you define yourself as loving God’s love even though you may have frequent bad days. What about the bad days? You intentionally bury and ignore the problem, hardening your heart. On the bad days, you have chosen to ignore and not engage with each other, and because you did not end up in a big fight, now those days are defined as good days? Do not be deceived!
Then what will happen?
You will feel guilty. There is always this guilt plaguing you. Or you may wonder and imagine if only you had married someone else. You do feel something is off. You only do and go through the motions because you have no choice. When we read further verses in this chapter, it promises that when we follow His commands, our prayers are answered! But when our prayers are not answered, we need to figure out we are breaking His commands, especially to love.
You say you are loving? Are you willing to give up your life for another? What about a non-family member? Can you really give up your life when you have your own immediate family? What if those we help appear to be a danger to our own family? I say, “appear.”
I believe God is forcing our leaders to take in and help the spiritual orphans and widows, not just to train the leaders, but to observe whether they possess His Love. Or is it just lip service and toward easy manageable people you can control? Then there are the rest of the members who refuse to mature, being afraid and turning away from being His hands and feet, because they do not want to get their hands dirty or inconvenienced.
Part of Verse 14 states “a loveless life remains spiritually dead,” therefore, how can a spiritually dead person pray to have anything he/she asks from God answered?
We need to think deeper about this matter of whether we possess His Love.
Just saying, “AMEN,” out of reflex, but skimming the readings, or not really reading the Band posts, not listening to the sermons, not praying or reading consistently, being late on a Sunday, watching shorts all day, and not taking any of God’s business seriously shows we have God’s love in us? Just because you fed or helped some homeless person, are you justified?
Additional Comments:
Anyone can feed a homeless person. That’s so easy! Happy meal? Left over? Church’s left over?
Trying to take care of a person who just got here, who God sent into your own home. Think how hard that would be, and moreover, we need to pass that season besides just taking them in.
Welcome to the club! Welcome to the Church of Jesus Christ!
Leaders, just because you’ve taken people, does not mean you have God’s love. You can just be operating on a higher level of humanism, waiting for the day to get them out of your house rather than getting them healed, delivered, and matured. Then collect on your blessings.
God’s love must first flow within the married couples – inside from them and out to others. But how is that possible if couples love from a position of humanism?
Senior Pastor Steve Kim