Everything Is About Love

The book of 2 Chronicles 25:2 tells us about a king called Amaziah who did right in God sight but not with a perfect heart.He was a man who did all the right things he was expected to do in relation to worshipping God but he did all he did with the wrong motives. (I wrote a blog post earlier about motives which you can see here (http://herstheword.blogspot.com/2013/10/we-all-have-agenda-whats-yours.html). Technically that means that everything he did not meet with God's standard. If Paul were the one referring to him, he would have said that his works were put on a scale, burnt and all that was left was ashes.

Jesus took the Ten Commandments that God gave to Moses and distilled them into two new and distinct commandments which said love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and strength and love other people as yourself. We understand that the central story of the Bible is all about God's love for and search for mankind and about how we are to receive his love and share it with others but at times we seem to forget that. I was struck by this this thought recently while going through some of the chapters of the book of Corinthians. As an aside, most times as Christians, we take a verse of Scripture in isolation that corresponds with our feelings and we ignore the the rest of the verses. At times, we need to read more than one verse or the whole chapter to be able to get the meaning of the verse.

Church historians and theologians tell us that the books of the Bible were only recently divided into chapters for easy understanding. I was reading 1 Corinthians 14 and I found out that if I wanted to fully understand it, I needed to read Chapter 13. Then I found out that Chapter 12 was also needed as well. In a nutshell, what Paul was saying in those chapters of the Bible is that not only is love the most important thing, your motive for doing anything must be love. Therefore it's not enough to believe that something is a calling or that it's your purpose in life. You must be motivated by a love for God and a love for people.

Therefore it's not enough to want to be a pastor because you believe you have a pastoral calling. You must be motivated by love. It's not enough to join the volunteer workforce in your church because there are not enough workers or because you want to give something back to your spiritual feeding place. You must be motivated by love. It's not enough to desire to speak in tongues or prophesy, your desire must be backed by and propelled by love. If your desire is not as a result of love then the motive is fuelled by a selfish desire for self aggrandisement or duty. God is not looking for people bound by duty. He is looking for those moved by love.

The Bible tells us that our works will be tried by fire. I believe that when our works will be tried, it is not the quality of the work we do that will be judged but the heart with which we do it. When our works are tried by fire, I honestly believe that what will determine whether our works survive will be determined whether or not our hearts were moved by love or a sense of religion or duty. The Bible tells us that love is the evidence of being perfect, of being mature. We should grow up and leave duty and thoughts of the praise of men behind and focus on love. I believe therein lies our salvation. Doing anything else, like Amaziah, we might find out too late that we didn't walk before God with a perfect heart. Today when the world celebrates a love that is different from that which God says, we need to let them know that there's something more.



JC Cruz is the author of DECEPTIO published by WestBowPress, a division of Thomas Nelson publishers, http://bookstore.westbowpress.com/Products/SKU000194087/Deceptio.aspx and LOST, BUT FOUND available at http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DPLLEUQ/. You can follow him on Twitter @Cruz_JCReal.  

How Do You See God?

While doing my devotion a few days ago, I came across the premise that while there is an innate desire to worship God in every man, we will not be able to truly praise or worship him with our lives or in word, song and dance like the fathers of the faith unless we get a true understanding of who he is. According to the writer, if we think God is some faraway being who is not too concerned about our lives but just wants obedience from us, we will never be able to truly worship God. I agree.

Moses grew up realizing that there was something special about him. His real father was a prophet while his mother came from a family of prophets. He grew up in Pharaoh’s palace where he learned governance and administration but he always knew where he was from. He felt the desire stir in heart to deliver his people but he missed God’s leading and timing. In the end he ran away from Pharaoh’s wrath and ended up tending sheep, a far cry from being a prince of Egypt. Moses must have been traumatised by his experience. However, when Moses met God his life changed. From an insipid cowering shepherd, he became a god to the most powerful monarch in the then known world. He led millions of Israelites from Egypt in one while ruining the economy of Egypt. He spoke with God face to face. The Bible says God showed his acts to the children of Israel but to Moses he showed his ways. God later described Moses as the meekest man that ever lived.

One of my favourites in the Old Testament was Elijah. Elijah definitely knew God and had a right perception of God. Whenever Elijah spoke to a king in his days, you would usually find the expression “the God before whom I stand” as part of his comments to that king. He was always conscious of the fact that he stood before God whether in the palace or pit. He famously called down fire not only on a sacrifice to God but on two different battalions of soldiers that came to arrest him. Even though somewhere along the line Elijah got afraid of Jezebel, from the Bible we know that along with Enoch, Elijah was not allowed to taste of physical death.

Peter and ten of the Apostles walked with Christ for three and a half years. By the time he died, resurrected and went to be with the Father, those who met them realised that these men had changed. Before meeting Christ, quite a few of them were uneducated. However by the time the three and a half years were over, something had changed. Paul never met Christ physically but by revelation. From being a zealous persecutor of the church, he became the pre-eminent teacher of the Gospel of the Kingdom. From their letters that we read in the Bible, we know that all of them were worshipful, thankful men. Their lives and the things they did by obedience were acts of worship. All these men had something in common. They either met God physically or by revelation. And their lives never remained the same. According to Dr. Mike Murdock, you cannot meet with God and remain the same, unless you met with an impostor. I believe they were able to do the things they did because they had a right perspective of God which led them to worship and obedience.

The book of Revelation shows us a picture of everything in heaven, from the elders to the four living creatures, from the innumerable company of angels to the saints in heaven; we see a picture of never ending worship. However, we haven’t yet reached that zenith were we know God totally and we are known totally. While on earth, the Bible tells us that we see darkly as if in a mirror. However, that is not an excuse to press on to know more of God, to have a right perspective him. Paul, as great as he was still pressed on to know more of God. The Holy Spirit has been sent to us to show us Christ and the father. The thought of whether I have the right perspective of the father is one that has continually engrossed my mind these last few days. Like Paul, I want to know him, even as I am known that I might worship him like Michael W. Smith said with my love, my life, my all.