6-5-25 Study of Revelation Ephesians Chapter 5:1-7 Walking in Love Part 1

➡ The speaker is discussing a study of the book of Ephesians, focusing on the importance of walking in love as Christ did. They emphasize that Christians should strive to mimic God’s characteristics, living and thinking as Christ did. The speaker also highlights the importance of faith and the rejection of worldly distractions, drawing parallels between the teachings of Ephesians and other biblical texts.
➡ The text emphasizes the Christian journey of striving to be like God, while acknowledging our human limitations. It highlights the importance of understanding God’s character, studying the Bible, and recognizing our sins. The text also explains that we can’t achieve this on our own, but through the Holy Spirit’s work within us, we can embody God’s qualities. It concludes by urging us to live a life worthy of God’s calling, marked by humility, unity, and distinction from worldly ways.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of imitating God’s qualities in our lives, such as humility, unity, love, wisdom, and spirituality. It highlights that we are given many blessings in Christ, including a new life, righteousness, and love. The text also stresses the importance of love, stating that it is the key to everything and should be our main characteristic. Lastly, it encourages us to let go of negative emotions like bitterness and anger, and instead, embrace kindness, tenderness, and forgiveness, which are the true characteristics of love.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of forgiveness as a measure of love. It suggests that holding grudges and speaking ill of others shows a lack of love and forgiveness. The text encourages us to imitate God’s love, which is kind, tender-hearted, and forgiving. It concludes by reminding us that any harm done to us has already been forgiven by Christ, so we should let go of bitterness and resentment.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of forgiveness, stating that our ability to forgive others reflects our depth of love. It suggests that forgiveness is a process that invites God into the situation, leading to peace and joy. The text also highlights that understanding the extent of God’s forgiveness towards us can help us forgive others. Lastly, it suggests that focusing on the spiritual aspects of life, rather than the physical, can aid in forgiveness, particularly in close relationships like marriage.
➡ This text discusses how people who have made significant mistakes in their lives often show the most forgiveness towards others. It emphasizes that everyone has flaws and that it’s important to forgive others as we have been forgiven. The text also highlights the story of a sinful woman who showed great love and humility towards Jesus, contrasting her actions with those of a self-righteous Pharisee who lacked understanding and compassion. The main message is that our ability to love and forgive others is deeply connected to our understanding of how much we have been loved and forgiven.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of forgiveness and love in our lives. It suggests that our ability to forgive others is directly related to how much we feel forgiven by God. The more we understand and appreciate God’s forgiveness towards us, the more we can forgive and love others. The text also highlights the idea that we should strive to be like God, showing love and mercy, and this is possible through spiritual growth and transformation.
➡ The text discusses the importance of love in our relationship with God and others, as reflected in the Ten Commandments. It emphasizes that love is loyal, faithful, respectful, harmless, pure, unselfish, truthful, and content. The text also highlights the importance of forgiveness and personal growth, and the journey of sanctification in Christ. It ends with a prayer for clarity, understanding, help, healing, peace, and joy.

All right, so let me get my screens set up so that I can see what’s going on here. Hang on a minute, guys. Okay, let’s, let’s get rolling. All right, so tonight, this is Thursday night. We are in the book of Ephesians as an adjunct from Revelation. Just as a side note, guys, I’m into January in the substack. This is getting really exciting for you guys, and it’s, it’s going to be quite enlightening, I think. So I, I, from what God is doing in providing details of, of this, that he wants it laid out. I don’t know how long it’s going to be.

You know, this thing is, is ballooning in detail. So anyway, just to give you the side point there, we’re going to start the week from Monday and get, get into that, and it’s going to be a slow roll for a period of time, and then it’s just going to go like the fire hose did before. So, ready and wiped. We’re in. In the book of Ephesians, we be. We’re going to begin tonight in chapter five. We’re going, we’re going to be here for a bit, a few weeks. We’re going to look at verses one through seven.

We’re going to cover probably the first two verses tonight, and we’ll get into the rest of the verses in the coming weeks. Now it, this is one of the most wonderful and helpful passages in all of the book of Ephesians because it finally doesn’t tell you how you should conduct your life. It tells you how you’re going to walk. This is the first time it says you need to walk this way. Okay, so in, in chapter four, we got all of the attributes of our conduct and how that applied. Okay, how that applied to the Christian life.

Well, in Ephesians 5, in verse 2, at, at the very heart, it touches on what the Christian life is about and how you should walk. And it says you need to walk in love. There’s no other way to walk. You can’t walk in anger. You can’t walk, you know, in any other form other than in love, because you’re walking as Christ walked. All right. We learned all about the conditions of Christ’s conduct. And we’ve talked about that on, many times. And I did today on, on the Sovereign radio. Again, we talked about the, the, the similarities between Christ turning over the tables and what’s going on the world today.

And we tied it back to the fact it’s of the same families. It’s the same thing about money. It’s all the same stuff, but it’s just on a more grandiose scale. So we’re to walk in love. Nothing could be more beautiful or a direct definition of how we are to live as Christians and in the terms of believer than that. Now I’m going to read all seven verses to you so we can just put this into a perspective. And we’re going to. We’ll read these seven verses while we’re, while we’re in this area over the weeks to come.

And it starts this way in verse 1. Be ye therefore followers of God as dear children. Didn’t say adults as children. Okay, that’s key. Why? Because you need to come to Christ as a child’s mind. So you need to walk and come to Christ as a child would be. Why? Because they have not been programmed in this world. All right? You need to be so broken when you come to Christ that this world has no capacity over your life. And that’s a child’s point of view. And walk in love as Christ had also hath loved us and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling savior.

This goes back to numbers, guys. In the Old Testament we were in numbers. He told Moses how to manage the people and what sacrifices and what the sacrifices were about. Christ came to fulfill the law, right? That’s what scripture tells us. And the law went away and we then inherited the inheritance that Christ was given by his Father to allow us to gain salvation through a face faith based process. Not from a. An ongoing sacrifice of blood for an atonement. And in there it said that you were to do that as a sweet smelling savor to God.

Right? That’s what it said. It said God smells those sacrifices. Well, it does the same thing with us every time one of us comes to the knowledge of the Lord through faith that is a sweet smelling savor to death. And it’s done from the offering and sacrifice of who? Jesus Christ? Okay, let’s continue. But fornication, all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once named among you as become a saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolish thinking, or talking, nor gesturing which are not fitting, but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor or covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

Let no man deceive you with vain words. For because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon The sons of disobedience be not, therefore, partakers with them. Now, obviously, this is a practical passage of scripture. There’s really no ambiguity in the scripture. And it’s pretty much you can take the words for exactly what they mean. Instead of trying to interpret the definition of the words. You can pretty much gather exactly what we’re being told by the words that Paul used. So just as a. Just as an overview, let me say this. It’s my belief that God knew how mankind could be educated, okay? An education in our physical realm happens by repetition, all right? Even in.

When. Even when I studied or went to class to get certification to teach at college my first time, right out of. Right out of getting my master’s degree, one thing they. They taught us was the art of duplication, the art of replication. How do you do it? You know, so forth and so on. And I think it’s my belief that God is really teaching us the same lesson over and over and over again. Because we hadn’t got it the first time. He’s going to give it to us again. He’s just going to do it in different ways.

So that basically whoever reads the scripture, and that is the way that they can interpret the scripture, they’re going to get it. And it’s not calculated. It’s not really a calculated position on my part because we just keep running into the same thing everywhere we go. When we’re in the Book of Acts, we talk about Ephesians. When we’re in Ephesians, we go back to look at Acts. When we talk about the church, we’re talking about individual. Okay? It’s just all over the place. Just a repetition of the same teaching over and over again. Now I’m gonna.

I want to pull this phrase out. The phrases, followers of God. The Greek word is mints mims M I n t s from which we get mimic. The root word of our. Of the English language. Mimic is the Greek word. Myths be mimics of God is what he’s saying. And a mimic is not someone who picks up general patterns, but someone who copies specific characteristics. Be imitators, Be mimics. And beloved. Let me say this to you. The whole of the Christian life could be summed up in that one statement. Be mimics of God. Why? Because he were to put on Christmas.

We’re to live like Christ and we’re to think like the mind of God. The only way to do that is to mimic him. Reproduce in you everything that is true of God. It all began that way. When we Looked, if you look In Matthew, chapter 5, verse 48, when our Lord said, be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. That’s not a if then statement. That’s a command. Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect. The only way you can do that is mimic Him. And you can’t do that if you’re not sanctified, because you don’t even know which way’s up yet.

This is essentially what Peter was saying in 1st Peter 1:15 as well in 16. And in that wonderful passage, Peter says this. But as he. As he who hath called you is holy, called you, called. When Ephesians 1 predestined you were called for the foundation of the world. And the person who called you is holy. So be ye holy in all manner of life. Because it is written, be ye holy, for I am holy. Peter said, you be like God. The apostle Paul said, you be the followers of me as I am of God. The apostle Paul also said, gaze into the glory of the Lord and allow the Spirit of God to change you into his image.

Sanctification. The ultimate goal of the Christian life in First John in chapter three, is that one day we should be like him, for we should see him as he is. And the only way you can see him as he is is be like Him. I want you to think about that. When you look at somebody in this physical realm, your baseline judgment is yourself. You understand that you have nowhere else to go of getting a baseline to. To determine any thoughts about the individual that you’re looking at. We can’t see Christ in His holy form. Why? Because we are mankind, sinners.

But in the original, God communed with the Spirit, celestial beings in heaven constantly. So the only way that we can see him as he is in his holy form is to be like Him. In other words, the whole of the Christian life is summed up in this. Be imitators of God, be like God. If you’re fumbling around trying to get a handle on what God wants out of you, which, which means that the more you know God, the more you know what you’re to be. Sanctification. And so what is this primary pursuit then of any believer to know who God.

No wonder Paul said that I may know Him. It’s interesting that we separate because this is how we’ve been taught. We separate the sonship from the Father. Instead of looking through the sonship to the Father and know that they’re one in your separation, you delineate the cohesive situation that they’re one Godhead and they’re one in the same Christ is God. But in our characteristic of understanding, we separate him because we think that gives us a alternative to this physical life instead of work looking through him to the Father as that’s what he told us to do.

If we’re to be like God, we must know what God is like. If we are to know what God is like, we’ve got to study God, God’s character, not Jesus Christ’s character, God’s character. And so we, as we study the Bible, we see unfolded God’s character. By the way, the whole Bible is the revelation of God. The whole Bible is your history. And my excitement the other day when I said to you that the prophets were historians, I just proved that today by Scripture. So everything about the Bible is what you’ve already lived foreign. It’s telling you your history and giving it to you in a prophetic manner by that which is to come.

In this physical realm, it’s God’s self disclosure. Now this isn’t just a New Testament principle. Be holy as I am holy. It comes out of the pentateuch in Leviticus 11:45. That was the way it was from the very start. God says, you’re my people and I’m your God. And this is where it all begins. Be ye holy as I am holy. So Leviticus 11:45, it all started there. And it’s the same all the way through the Bible. You say, well that’s easy for you to say, be imitators of God. That’s really tough to do. Sure it is.

Nobody said this was easy, okay? And you can’t do it on your own strength. You can’t just grit your teeth and grunt and muster up all of the courage that you have and be like God. You see, what Jesus was saying in the Sermon on the Mount was, do you know how you start to be like God? You start by realizing you can’t be like God. You start with a broken and a contrite spirit. You start mourning over your sin. You start in meekness. You start with such an overwhelming sense of sinfulness that you hunger and you thirst.

For what? His righteousness. That’s the reason why I said to you guys, as we been studying Acts and Ephesians in your self assessment, if you do not long for his righteousness, I would suggest that you look at your salvation because your number one goal should be that. And so there’s a fabulous paradox here that we need to go through. On one hand, you’re to be Like God. On the other hand, you were to know that you can’t be like God. Okay? Why? Because if you try to be like God, then you’re producing an idol of yourself.

Okay? If you want to be like God, putting yourself in the same position as God is. Was no different. Different than what Lucifer started in his overtaking of God himself. He wanted to be God and you just, you can’t do that. And that’s just the point, okay? When you know you are to be like God and you know you can’t be like God, then you know there’s got to be some other power to make that possible, okay? He’s telling you to think like God. He’s telling you to put on Christ. He’s telling you to be like Christ, but you can’t be like God.

So somewhere in this middle, if Christ is telling you one thing and we know we can’t do it because it’s of an idol worshiper, if even if we try, something has to be in the middle to give us that ability to do that. God’s not. That Jesus Christ is not going to tell us to go do something that we don’t have the answer to. And that’s the beauty of chapter three of Ephesians and specifically verse 17 or it. Let’s start with 16 where, where Paul prays that God would grant us to be strengthened with might by his spirit, Jesus.

Jesus Christ. Spirit in the inner man. In other words, I’m a vile, evil sinner. I can’t be like God. God says I must be like him. If I can’t be, but I must be, then somebody’s got to get inside of me and do what I can’t do. The Holy Spirit is the one who strengthens us and with might in the inner man. And you know what the result of that is? The result is at the end of verse 19 of Ephesians 3. And it says this in order that, okay? In order that in Greek is henna H I N A And it, it is defined as the purpose.

Okay? So this in order, that is a purpose clause. In order that, or with the result that, or to the effect of that you would be filled with all of the fullness of God. So if God wants you to be like him, we know he can’t be like Him. Then he puts a spirit in us that works from the spirit side through us, managing us, which gives us the fullness of God inside of us. We are the temple. So Paul, Paul is saying here that you can be like God and you can be filled with the fullness of God.

You can be every wit in terms of God as far as his qualities are concerned, his nature, his character. But you can’t do it on your own. You must be strengthened with the might by his Spirit in the inner man. It’s the Spirit’s work inside of you that does that. So there’s the resolution of the paradox. Oh, God. Oh, God, I’m broken over my sin. I mourn over my sin. My sin is ever before me, said David. And in meekness I hunger and thirst for that which I must have but cannot have. And it is in the midst of that brokenness that you depend upon the work of Christ and the ministry of the Spirit to do what you can’t do, but must do.

That’s the heart of it all right there. So he says, you be a mimic of God, but realize that that’s God’s work, not yours. This is, this is all built upon your sanctification. And therein lies the dependence on the Spirit of God. And by the way, if you’re really a Christian, the Spirit is at work in you, is it not moving to make this a reality? Moving you to make you like Christ, moving you, to conform you to God himself. That’s a Spirit’s job. Now, you might even take that little thought in, in Ephesians 5:1, and you could kind of spread it in both directions.

In chapter four, verse one, this whole section of Ephesians, the whole second section, which is the practical section, you guys know that the first is doctrinal. It’s. It’s the planning of God and gives you the baseline of his plan. And in the last three chapters is the application. That’s the reason why this whole section here is practical. And, and what Paul says is, I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you that you walk worthy of the vocation of which you were called. That was in chapter four, verse one. The walk concept is the whole deal.

In the last three chapters, you’re to walk. That’s daily life. That is your lifestyle. That’s your conduct. That’s how you roll. This is your doctrine in chapters one to three. Now, here is the practice. This is who you are. This is how you live. This is what God has done. This is what you will do. Walk worthy. And what does that walk worthy involve? Well, it involves a lot of things. It involves a walk in humility. We learned that in verses one through three of chapter four. It involves a walk of unity. We learned that in chapter 4, verses 4 through 16 it involves a different walk in chapter 4, verse 17 to 32.

Different from what? Different from the world. And we get that in, in verse 17 when it says walk not as other Gentiles walk. So it is a humble walk, it’s a unity walk, it’s a different walk. And now in chapters five, it’s a love walk. In verse eight it is a light walk. And then in verse 15 is, it’s a wisdom walk. And then in verse 18, it’s a spirit walk. And then in chapter six, verse 10, it’s a warfare walk. What he’s saying is every condition of your life, you have a walking pattern. But at the heart of it all, it’s what? Right at the heart of it all is this beautiful phrase, be imitators of God.

That just brings it all down. If, if God is humbled himself in Christ, which he is, you got to be humble. If God is his Trinity is one, then you have to be one with what? The Trinity. If God is different, set apart from this evil world, then you must be different. If God is love, then you got to be love. If God is like, then you got to be light. If God is wise, then you got to be wise. Okay? That’s how it works now. If God is guided and directed by supernatural spiritual principles, then you’ve got to be your spirit being first, living a physical life experience.

You can’t apply these principles to a physical life. It doesn’t work. You have to be like him. Your self assessment is, is, is a way that we could stop you from to think about everything you have in Christ. That was a way to do that. Now I thought, I thought that process is incredible because you’re dealing with you in your own little environment. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder. You can be as you can be truthful. You can. You can put some imagination to it, whatever. So I felt it was, it was an incredible process to show you what Christ has given you.

First three chapters again, tell us these things. We have a new standing before God. We have a new life, a new righteousness, a new father, a new inheritance, a new citizenship, a new master, new freedom, new victory, new security, new peace, new unity, new fellowship, new joy, new spirit, new power, new abilities, new calling, new purpose, and a new love. He’s giving you a lot of things. That’s a lot of stuff, guys. And that’s all ours in Christ. You can’t help but see this concept of love woven through the first three chapters in chapter one in.

In love, having predestined us in chapter two, why did he show us mercy? What’s mercy for his great love were with. He loved us. In chapter three, to know the love of Christ which patheth knowledge, see, woven through the whole deal. Our whole position is predicated on God’s love. And if that is true, which it is, he says in chapter five, you better walk in love. This ought to be your characteristic. In fact, we find in other places of the Bible that it tells us love is the key to everything. Now, I’m not talking about this, you know, communal, you know, unselfish love.

This. That’s not what we’re talking about here, all right? We’re talking about the nature of Christ as your nature. And now abideth faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is what? Love. Love is the greatest. So we are to walk in love. Now, I want to show you some points here out of these seven verses, and we’re going to talk about as many of these we can. And before the night’s over, I’m going to close with some sort of a warning for you, and we’ll get to the rest of these over the next course of the weeks.

The. The first four points deals with a plea. Remember, Paul pleaded with the people, deals with the plea. The second is the pattern. The pattern of what? The pattern that you walk as Christ, walk the pattern. The fourth is perversion. And I mean, the third is perversion. The fourth is punishment. What we see here is a plea, a pattern of perversion and a punishment, and then a final warning from Paul. So we say the first two points are positive and the second two points are negative. You could see that as I read the first seven verses.

So verse 1 and 2 are very positive. Verses 3 to 6 are negative. Verse 7 is a warning. The plea, first of all, verses 1 and the first half of verse 2, Be ye therefore, followers of God, which means mimics of God as dear children. How you get to Christ and walk in love, that’s a play. The plea is for us to live a love life. Now, we talk about this a lot, and. But we can’t help it because that’s the way the Bible is set up. Now, I want you. I want you to pay attention here.

Remember this preaching or teaching in the church is not designed to impart to you information which you’ll retain the rest of your life and in a card with which you will live. That just isn’t how it is, okay? I can’t do that. The secret to teaching is to keep telling you the same stuff you heard before, but you forgot in terms of your behavior. Repetition. So we never apologize for saying something we said before. You might get tired of it and why, you might say, why don’t you move on? But I need to make sure that everybody has a chance to get it.

God doesn’t apologize for it in the Bible. You write, you could pick up any book in the Bible and it’s going to talk about love. So he doesn’t apologize for it. And we, we can’t either. So I don’t want you to think because you hear the word and you hear the term and you know it intellectually that it isn’t for you. It is an operative portion of your life. You better listen a whole lot more because you’re more accountable than you used to be, right? The more you know, the more accountable you become. And the more you know, the more you forget.

But your health still hang highest standard. So you got to hear it over and over and over and over. Make sure you’re still getting it, because you’re going to be held accountable for it. The play is simple. Look at verse one. It’s a command. As I said, it’s. It’s a command. It’s not an if statement. He’s telling you what to do. Be imitators of God. It is not a suggestion. It’s a command. And you have to start from that point of sinfulness. For sure. You have to start from that fact that you can’t do it on your own.

But that doesn’t change the command. You’ve got to be what you can’t be. That’s where the spirit of God comes in. You got to notice the therefore in the first part of that first verse. Which way does that take us? It takes us backwards. All right, A tidbit of studying scripture. When you see the word therefore, you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards. So you need to consider the backward point of, of the scripture to know what it’s talking about, to move forward. I said you can’t just take one piece of scripture and read it and understand what it means.

You got to go one backwards and one forward around it. To know what was there before and what comes after what you’re reading, to understand the portion of scripture that you’re studying. That’s how you do it. And if you do that, you’ve got to deal also with the paragraph before the paragraph, before the paragraph, before the paragraph. In other words, you’re always going to go backwards to understand what’s in front of you. Because it all hangs together. What is the. The therefore. Therefore to take you backwards. Now watch what’s going to show you. Verse 31 of chapter 4.

Let all bitterness and rat and anger and public yelling and private whispering be put away from you along with all other malice. Now let me tell you something else. Those are the complete opposite of love. So when it says therefore, you got to go back into chapter four to see what he’s telling you so that you then can understand that that what he’s telling you is not what you fix be told to do. You see, all of those things preclude the fact that there’s no love. If you’re in walking in those conditions, you’re not walking in love.

When you’re bitter towards somebody, you have a grudge against them and you are angry. And there’s two different words used there. Whether it’s an outside blast or a display of anger or internal smoldering anger or whether it’s clamor, whether it you slander somebody publicly or whether you whisper behind their back whatever kind of malice it is. That’s the opposite of what he’s talking about now. So on the other hand, those things shouldn’t be there. What things? All of those worldly conditions what should be there? It comes in verse 32, kindness. Be kind, one to another. Excuse me, tenderheartedness and forgiveness.

Those are the characteristics of love. Love is kind, love is tender. And most of all, love is what? Forgiving. You see, it is a lack of forgiveness that makes bitterness. It is an inability to forgive that makes wrath an anger. It is an inability to forgive that makes you slander people, whisper behind their back and hold malice against them. Gossip. It’s because you don’t forgive them that you hold those bitterness and those grudges. And the reason you don’t forgive them, folks, frankly, is that you don’t what? You don’t love them. So what he’s saying here is put away all of the anti love stuff.

Don’t let that characteristic be manifested in you don’t have characteristics of unloving heart but have characteristics of a loving heart. He doesn’t mention love in verse 32. He mentions kindness, tenderness and forgiveness. And just to be sure you don’t miss what that comes for what that comes from. He says, therefore in order to be kind, in order to be tender hearted and in order to be forgiving, you must imitate God in this regard. You must walk in what love. Because it is love that is kind, it is love that is tender hearted. It’s love that is forgiving.

It’s non love that is bitter anger, wrathful, clamorous, vicious and and malicious. So it’s therefore that takes you right back to the central thought of forgiving people. And let me take that and kind of force it into your mind a little bit more. I want you to measure your love today. Okay, there’s a lot of ways we could talk about it, but let’s deal with the text as it appears. Measure, it says, measure your love today by the thought of forgiveness. Because I really believe, and I want you to hang on to this. I really believe that as far as we concerned, the greatest measure, measuring rod of love in your life is forgiveness.

I mean, that’s the way God presents it. So if he presents it that way, you should present it that way. You see, we can say, oh, God so loved the world that he made pretty flowers or God so loved the world that he made beautiful ladies or handsome men. God so loved the world that he made. What delicious food. Well, God so loved the world that he said nice words. God so loved the world that he made trees and mountains. Well that’s nice, but it doesn’t. Something’s missing. God so loved the world that he took a whole bunch of dirty, rotten, vile God hating sinners and died on the cross to hear.

To hear their sins so that he could what? Bring them into eternal heaven and fellowship with them forever? Let’s go back to reality. We’ve studied this in our substack. We were once angels. We were lured to this earth by Satan and luring into this wor. Sinned against God. Those sin we’re born in this world of sinner that tells us in Ephesians 2 what with a demon spirit controlled by the prince of the power of the air, with nothing but chaos is our goal. And he gave us the ability through a process that once we were reconciled to him through faith, salvation came and it gave us our ticket home.

What more could love be that’s better than anything? You see what I’m saying is this. Love is best measured in its ability to forgive. If you put on your list anybody that you have absolutely vile thoughts of or did something so vile to you in your history of your life that you can never forgive them. You see, here’s what he says. It is God’s ability to forgive that tells us his law. Well, it’s your ability to forgive to show somebody else love. Even when we were dead in trespasses and sin, God made us a life together with Christ.

And why did he do that because of his great mercy, because it was based on his great love with which he loved us. The most magnificent act that love can ever do is forgive the greatest evil. Measure your love. Ask yourself, do you love the children of God? Love. If you don’t love first John 4 says, you’re not of God. You say, well, how do I know if I don’t love? Well, just ask yourself a question. Do you still hold bitterness against somebody for something they did to you, no matter when they did it? Do you get angry with people and does it smolder on the inside? And do you speak maliciously behind their back? Do you verbally assault them, you know, glamorously? Those are the characteristics of non love.

That’s the old life that we’re supposed to get rid of with, right? That’s what it says. Take the old, throw it away, put on the new. That’s gone. Look at the end of verse 32 of chapter 4. We are to forgive. And here’s the key to this whole passage, and it’s used twice in verse 32 and once in chapter 5, verse 2. We are to forgive as God for Christ’s sake, has forgiven you. The thing that jumped off the page and hit me when I was reading this, preparing for this, and I’ve. And I’ve thought about it many, many times, but it never really crystallized.

And I don’t know if I can say it like I really want to, but you know, what I saw in this, I think I saw it for the first time this clearly in before I wrote before. And part of the adventure of teaching is you learn as you go, you know that. So I learn as I go as well. But, you know, I never really thought of it this way, no matter what anybody does to me. Now that’s quite interesting because you know a whole lot about me and know a lot about what’s going on. That’s really interesting.

No matter what anybody does to me, in whether or not it’s my family or the family of believers, in the community of believers or in this community, no matter how they hurt me or harm me or slander me or crush me or bruise me or wound me thin me or whatever it is, I found out today that Christ has already paid the penalty for that sin. I don’t have to worry about it. I’ve always said that I really, in all of my practice of my career, coming to corporate life or whatever, and I didn’t want to play corporate politics, so I never got really concerned about what somebody thought of Me, or said to me or did to me, I just like water rolling off the bat because I didn’t.

I didn’t want to play that game. But it really hit me today as I was going through this, that that sin is already forgiven. So if that sin’s forgiven, then I can’t, I can’t be hurt. There’s nothing that that could do to me. Well, you might say, well, you really don’t know what they did to me. Or you know what? Because of that, I’m going to make them suffer. Well, you got to know something. You better really think twice about that because why Christ already suffered for what they did to you. And what more do you want? Well, I thought in my revelation today that that concept of understanding that doesn’t matter, whatever happens to you, God has already forgiven the sin is a revolutionary thought.

What are you asking out of God? Jesus bore his own blood for all sins. If somebody sins against me and somebody violates me and somebody offends me, my reaction in the human flesh would be to be angry and bitter and wrathful, malicious and slanderous and all the other things we talked about. But I sit back and says, I said, wait a minute, I don’t want anything out of them. They can’t hurt me. After all, Jesus already bore that sin in his own body on the tree. Jesus already spilled his blood for that sin. So what am I going to ask him to do? You ever think about that somebody harms you and you know that Christ went to the cross and he bore his blood for all sins for all time, and somebody comes and harms you and you, you want now, you want to now go to Christ and ask him to do what? To do what? So the next time you think, you think you ought to have a vengeful attitude, next time you want to lash back at somebody, and the next time you want to say an unkind word or you want to be bitter towards somebody, next time you want to slander somebody or whisper behind their back or retaliate, seek vengeance, remember that, that very sin that they used against you, that very thing they did to you, Jesus already bore in his own body on the cross and that sin is paid for.

And you don’t have to add any more to this, to the suffering and the consequence that that sin should bring, because it’s all been taken by Jesus Christ on the cross. How many times have we thought that what somebody did to us or say to us, you know, is. Is going to harm you in some way? And you got to figure out how to protect it. Protect you? Why? Because you’re afraid of what it might do. Well, if you’re obedient to Christ, Christ has already forgiven that sin and taking it away and you’re not harmed. It’s only when you think that and pursue it in the physical realm, taking away the protection mechanism that Christ gives you in spirit, that you get involved in it and it causes you an issue.

It’s already dealt with. So we are to forgive, verse 32, even as God, for Christ’s sake, has forgiven you. You know what God says? You know, you and I offend God a lot. I’m just going to be truthful. We offend God a lot. I know I do. And I know if I do. I know you do. Okay. And God doesn’t say to us, hey, pew, I’ve taken as much as I can take out of you. That is the last time. He doesn’t say that. Take that now. You know what he says? He says, what can I do for you, my son? He already bore the blows.

There’s nothing left to do. It’s over. God, for Christ’s sake, forgiven you. You, for Christ’s sake, forgive each other. And the measure of your love is the extent of your ability to forgive. Now, that’s got to be a fantastic truth. Well, you might say, you just can’t go on forgiving forever. The guy does it every day. Well, you can go on forgiving forever, because in First John 2:12, it says, My little children, he has forgiven you all your trespasses for his Name’s sake. Colossians 2. He says he’s forgiven all your sins. Ephesians 1, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.

If we are the ones confessing our sins, then we are the ones being forgiven. And that is a constant cleansing. First John 1:9 says this. Just constantly be cleansed. And God looks down at me and he says, you keep sinning, but I can’t do a thing to you because Jesus already took the punishment. And then he says to us, now that’s the way I want you to walk. Why? Because we inherited Jesus’s blessing of love from his Father. I want you to walk in the same kind of love that never holds bitterness, never holds a grudge, never holds anything against anybody, because you know that that thing has already been dealt with by Jesus Christ.

What more could you want? And if blessed God, holy God, righteous God, can forgive that person and take that sin and put it on his dear son. Who are you to demand blood out of anybody that’s what happens on this side of the cross, folks. Now, when I give you another thought, the fact is this, and we can split this concept into two parts. The depth of your love is indicated by how much you forgive. Look at your life. How much do you forgive? In Proverbs 10:12, it says this. Love covers all sins. Love covers all sins.

In other words, total love is total forgiveness. Peter, put it this way. In First Peter 48, you are to have stretched love, fervent love. And that is in Greek, ekten. It is E, K, T E n. And it speaks of a muscle stretched to its limits. You are to love to the very limit of your being. For love covers what, all multitudes of sins. How big is your multitude? Well, however broad your love is, that’s how big the multitude is. God knows if you love, you’re going to have to let people off the hook. God knows if you love, you’re going to have to forgive.

God knows love has to deal with sin. But love does what? It covers it. It means just throwing a blanket over it, removing it, putting it out of sight. So first of all, the depth of your love is indicated by how much you forgive. Now think about it. Do you hold a grudge against somebody in your house? It isn’t their problem. That’s your problem. Your inability to forgive bellies your love. And I say this, it. If this is characteristic of your life, you’re not a Christian. Because if you don’t have love, you are not God’s child.

Yeah. Billy R. Okay. Yeah, you do you. What you just said. We’re the ones who suffering. When we, when we hold on to that unforgiveness. Forgiving is very difficult. It is a process. It is a supernatural thing, just. Just like love. But the point I wanted to add here is that when we forgive, we invite God into that situation. And this goes along with your teaching in Acts. Stephen forgave those who stoned him to death. He forgave Paul, the leader, and that invited God into that situation. He turned it all around for. For his glory. And then the Gentiles were recipients of salvation.

And you know, you talked about Paul. We don’t have to go through that. But forgiveness invites God in the situation. Another example that you gave is when Jim Elliott was slaughtered by the AKA Indians. Okay? His wife, Elizabeth Elliot, chose to forgive that Indian chief. And her forgiveness invited God into that situation and an entire nation was born again. Yeah. So forgiveness sounds so simple. Forgive, forgive. We forgive because we love. But we have to make the choice. I’M going to forgive. Yes, it’s going to be difficult, but I’m going to forgive so God can move into that situation and get glory.

And then the benefit to me is that I am no longer hurt when, when that event is recalled to my memory. I no longer feel hurt and I no longer feel animosity toward that person. It’s as if God has removed me. Yes, it happened to me, but God has removed me. And now I can go on in peace and joy. But I didn’t know whether to stop here and say that or wait till the end. GM no, thanks again. It’s. It’s huge and it’s used. It is huge to those that are closest to you. Yes. Okay.

It’s easy. It’s more easy dealt with for those that are far away. But the more closer you get to one another, the more hurtful it comes and the more difficult it is to forgive because you’re seeing it every day. Yes, that’s true. Yes. And when, and when you, when you think about it in the manner by which you are not living a physical life with a spiritual experience, you’re living a spiritual life in a physical experience. And if you do not keep your thoughts on the things above, but your thoughts are on the things of this earth, you will never, ever be able to forgive and remove it from you.

It’ll never happen. Marital issues, you know, are the biggest things to deal with. And I, I don’t, you know, even in my own life, I can, I could go on and on and on about those, but marital issues, the biggest. But if you got. If the two p. Parties would actually seek out the spiritual side of their life as they’re supposed to in the start of a marriage, then God protects that marriage because you’re being obedient to him. So all along the way of marriage difficulty, I would, I would state this, and then I’m going to move on is forgiveness can only come when you understand you do not control that situation.

God’s the only one that controls it. Why? Because marriage is the sanctity of God, not you. So when you control, try to control the marriage and the outcomes of a marriage, when you, you’re moving it out of the heavenly realm into the physical realm, and now you have to deal with it. Okay, let’s go on. So the second thing I want to, I want to say about this, this characteristic of your life is first is the depth of your love as indicated by how much you forgive. And secondly, the depth of your love is indicated by how much you know you’ve been forgiven.

I want you to get that you to forgive as God has forgiven you. So if you don’t know the degree by which God is forgiven to you, you would never understand the degree by which he’s telling you to forget. First of all, you can talk a person’s love. You can tell a person’s love by how much they will forgive somebody else. And you can also tell how much they know they have been forgiven. Now, this family is a very interesting place. When we get together now, I. I read. I read a lot. I listen to you guys.

I. I get texts from you guys. I get telegrams from you guys. I get all kinds of stuff for you guys. So. And I read a lot on the outside. And Billy Rich just brought up the condition of the tribe that killed the missionary. And the wife forgave the chief. The chief was the leader of his nation, changed the whole nation. And the. And that chief came back to see the wife. But I’m gonna, I’m gonna give you another story here. I was reading something online today as I was writing, and this is a story about a lady who was in jail.

She committed a criminal. She’s been a criminal. She was sent to jail. Now, I don’t know all of the details about, by people that are in here, and I don’t. I don’t really get involved with that unless somebody wants to talk about it. But I’m quite sure over the period of. Of our lives, for whatever reason, we’ve. We’ve done things that would put us in a. Not a great light in people’s minds, let’s just say that. So I’m quite sure we have a lot of the people that have done something like this in their lives as well.

And. But I do know that we have fornicators and adulterers and adulteresses and thieves and liars and. And a whole bunch of backgrounds here. Okay? We got a lot of people like that in our. In our group, in the other condition of our. Our togetherness. There’s a whole lot of that in that group. All right? When you deal with due diligence on somebody, you. You get more information than really what you tend to want sometimes. So. But I’m. I say all this to say I’ve never ceased to be amazed that it is inevitable that these people who have the greatest sense of forgiveness in their lives, who grant to others the greatest forgiveness, are typically the ones that have done the most harm.

Their pattern, their pattern of life is totally different. Yeah. Don Paul. And that’s the reason I was, when I was studying this, I, I ran across this and I said, I’ll read it. And it was, I wanted to just bring it up because it doesn’t matter about your background, it doesn’t matter about what you’ve done. Christ has already forgiven your sin. The problem about it is that you have it now. It’s always the smug self righteous religious people who can’t forgive somebody for something in their past. Oh my gosh, I, this is what drove me bats in church.

In corporate church you get the older generation who basically looks down over their glasses to everybody that did anything wrong and they don’t even, they don’t even recall that they did it themselves. And even when you approach them and talk to them and says, well you did this, I know this about you. Oh, that’s different. Okay. It’s just, you know, no. Okay. So we really can’t seem to let them off the hook. You get a person in say a church, for example, who’s a former drunk or an alcoholic or a prostitute or criminal in some nature and they come to know Jesus Christ.

Then a little later on somebody else comes along with a terrible, deep sinful problem. That kind of person will say, why, you know, I’ll forgive them. After all, look what the Lord did to me. And on the other hand, you get somebody that’s come to church all of their life that’s been in a religious setting majority of their life, they can’t seem to get over themselves to forgive that person. Why do you want to look down on anybody at all? I want to go back to the law of attraction. That which you attract to you is mirror image of you.

So Luke 7 we see a beautiful picture of the lord in verse 37. Let’s start with verse 36, 37. It sets it up. One of the Pharisees by the name of Simon, not Peter, but the other one, Remember Simon the magician desired Jesus to eat with him. And when he went to the Pharisees house he sat down to eat. Now watch what happens. And behold a woman in the city who was a sinner. Now here’s a woman who’s evil, she’s vile by scripture, no doubt a prostitute, just really a rotten wretched woman. When she knew Jesus was eating in the Pharisees house, she brought an alabaster box of ointment.

Now we don’t have time to go into all of this. We’ve already, we’ve already done this. As a matter of fact, we wrote about it in, in the in some of the teachings as well, it was purchased by her with her money that she gained from her trade, which would be prostitution. So it’s kind of a strange situation that is laid out in scripture for us. But so she comes into the house where the Pharisees or entertaining Jesus, and she stood at his feet behind him, that is Jesus, she was sweeping a broken and contrite spirit mourning over her sin.

And she began to wash his feet with tears. And she did wipe them with her hair of her head. And she kissed his feet and she anointed them with ointment. Now this is absolutely a shocking scene. If she’d have done that to the Pharisee, he’d have turned around and slapped her across the mouth. It have had his servants pick her up and throw her in the street. How dare you touch a clean person, you vile, filthy woman. That’s probably what he would have said. And yet in verse 39, it indicates this. When the Pharisee who had bidding him saw it, he spoke within himself, okay? He spoke inside.

In other words, he was talking to himself in the inside. This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that touches him. For she’s a sinner. Oh, the self righteous is incredible. He didn’t have any forgiveness in his heart. And you really know why? He didn’t think he needed to be forgiven for anything. And you will forgive in measure as you comprehend your own forgiveness. That’s what he says. He says, forgive those as Christ has forgiven you. So you need to understand your own forgiveness measure that Christ gave to you so that you can forgive.

That same way you will love as you comprehend that love of God toward you. And the deeper your sin, the greater your sense of forgiveness and the more magnanimous your love and forgiveness is to someone else. Well, he didn’t have any sense of sin, so he didn’t have any sense of forgiveness. Now I like this. He was saying it in himself, not out loud. And then Jesus answered him, okay, isn’t that great? A few of those deals and you’d be shaken. He can. He can read your mind, guys. He knows what you’re saying. And Jesus answered and said unto him, simon, have I somewhat to say to you? And he got his pious voice and he said, master, say on.

There was a certain creditor. Jesus was a master of illustrations. You got to remember that because there’s a lot of illustrations throughout the Bible that he used to explain the actual condition of his teaching. There was a certain creditor and he had two debtors. One owed him 500 denary Daenery is about a week’s a day’s work at that time, and the other about 50. And when they had done nothing to pay, he frankly forgave them both. Nice guy, right? Well, we went on to the story, we talked about that a couple weeks ago, where one of the ones he forgave went out and caused one of a person who owed him to be thrown in jail.

And then the master comes back and finds out and basically takes everything that the guy had and so forth and so on. So this story that Christ is now going to reveal to Simon goes like this. Thou hast rightly judged. And he got the point, okay? And he turned to the woman and said unto Simon, simon, you see this woman? I entered into your house. You gave me no water for my feet. But she’s washed my feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. You gave me no kiss. But this woman, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss my feet, my head with oil.

You did not anoint, but this woman hath anointed my feet with ointment. Wherefore I say unto thee, her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little. Oh, what a terrible indictment Christ just did to this guy. The reason she loves me so, the reason she’s doing this to me, the reason she’s responding like this to me, you see, is because she loves much. And the reason she loves much is because she has a deep sense of sin and seeks a deep forgiveness. And Jesus turned to her and he says in verse 48, thy sins are forgiven.

He forgave much, and she loved much. You see, the ability to love depends upon how deeply you sense the love of God. The ability to forgive somebody else is dependent upon how much you know you have been forgiven. Here’s was a, a smug, self righteous Pharisee who thought he was so righteous and so good and so wonderful that he didn’t even need forgiveness. He didn’t even talk to Jesus like that woman did. He wasn’t interested in washing Jesus’s feet. He wasn’t interested in serving Jesus in the way she did. All he wanted was a theological discussion to find out if this guy, who was, who he was cracked up to be.

In other words, is this Jesus Christ really who he is? And from the very beginning he didn’t believe it anyway because he said, ah, if he was a prophet, he wouldn’t mess with this woman. His own self righteousness damned him. I want you to think about what we’re talking about. His own self righteous damned him. He never needed Jesus to begin with. He had no ability to forgive a harlot because he had no sense of forgiveness in his own life, because he had no need. He had no sense of sin. At the point of this people, that man should have realized that if those two sinners were matched side by side, he was the greater one.

You think you’re self righteous. You think you’re all goody goody. You think you can’t forgive anybody. You won’t forgive anybody. Well, I want to put that person and you together. And scripture says you’re the worst because it is the ultimate sin to say I don’t need God. It’s the ultimate sin. And so to say to you that dependent upon the depth of your own sense of forgiveness will be your ability to forgive somebody else. Did you get that? Let me read that again. And so I say to you that dependent upon the depth of your own sense of forgiveness, that’s what the depth of understanding, how much Christ has forgiven you.

You know your life, you know what you’ve done. Look at the depth that Christ has forgiven you. So the depth of your own sense of forgiveness will be your ability to forgive somebody else. And you love little because you sense God’s love little. You love much because you sense much love in your forgiveness. Now here’s a broken sinner who knew she desperately needed forgiveness and she would need much forgiveness. And on the basis of much forgiveness, there was much love. Sometimes I think those are the kind of people that ought to populate the church more than others.

By the way, we don’t need people who think they don’t need anything. We don’t need people who already think they’re okay. Now I remember a story about Robert Falcone. The Falconer told and he was setting in a group of poor destitute people, including people of the street prostitutes and evil people. And he was telling them this story and he was trying to show them that Jesus would forgive them. And he was reading it to them. And his biographer says that someone sobbed out loud. And he looked, and it was a young slender girl with a face disfigured by smallpox.

And except for a tearful look, it wore. It was poor and expressionless. Now Falconer said something gentle to her and then she said, will he ever come again? Who said Falconer. Oh, him. Jesus Christ. Hang on, guys. I clicked the wrong screen. So hang on a second. Okay, so. So she asked, f corner, will he come again? Now, story says that she was sobbing and Falconer asked, who? And she says, oh, him, Jesus Christ, the one who forgave the woman. Give me your phone. And I have to. I’ve heard. I’ve heard tell. I think that he will come again.

What? Why do you ask? Ask Falconer. And because she said with a fresh burst of tears, which rendered the rest of her words unintelligible. And then she recovered herself in a few moments, and as if finishing her sentence, she put her head up to her poor, thin, colorless hair and said, sir, can he wait a little while? My hair is not long enough to wipe his feet. She loved so much because she loved much. And so what is going on here in Ephesians is our Lord is saying this. God loved us, he forgave us, and that’s the way we are to be with each other.

No bitterness, no anger, no wrath, nothing. And in great measure, your ability to forgive is absolutely dependent on your ability to love. You will love and forgive little if you see yourself forgiven little. If you see yourself as a vile, broken sinner, poor and destitute and desperate, forgiven much, then you will forgive much. That’s how it works. You need to measure your love. B. Because you’ve been forgiven much, you will love, and that causes you to forgive others much. So we are, in this sense, to be like God, and the Spirit is the only one that can do that.

Now, you might say, like Sopher said, oh, to be like God, can’t thou by searching, find out God his way was was our past finding out? How can we be like God? It’s impossible. If we take our world’s definition and we think God is a benign Santa Claus, maybe we have a shot at it. But if we take the Bible definition, we must say, like Peter said, depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man. We must say, with John, I see him in Revelation, chapter one. He has a vision of Christ. And he says, when I saw him, I fell at his feet as a dead man.

To be like God is incredible. Now we ask, how could such a thing be? Well, if we look at Luke 6:36, it says, as your Father in heaven is merciful, you be merciful. First Peter 1, as he is holy, you be holy. Matthew 5:48, as he is perfect, you be perfect. First John 4:11, as he is loving, you’ll be loving. What you’re to be is, be like Christ. And you might say, is it really possible? Sure it is. Sure it is. Number one, it’s possible by regeneration, right? You got. You’re a new creature. You’ve taken off the old, you put on the new.

Second Peter 1:4 says that when you were regenerated, you became a partaker. Of what? The divine nature. When he gave you you new body, you became him. That’s incredible, guys. You can be like God because God lives in you. You’re a partaker of the divine nature. By regeneration. Number two, by sanctification. As the spirit of God works in the life of you to conform him or you to the image of God. Paul is saying, you know, if you’re going to call yourself a child of God, act like it. Love is to qualify everything in our lives.

This has always been God’s standard. You say this is a New Testament thing. No, it’s not. It’s always been God’s standard. The heart of everything is love. From the very first time God ever laid out a standard, it was love. You say, well, wait a minute. The Ten Commandments. Boy, that doesn’t have anything about love. That’s just crushing law, legalism. No, was love. It was love. Do you know that the Ten Commandments are nothing but ten aspects of love verbalized. That’s all they are. Ten aspects of love verbalized. If you go to Exodus 20 very briefly, maybe something you never thought of before will be verbalized to you.

10 Aspects of Love verbalized. It’s a fabulous thing. First of all, toward God and secondly toward others. Look toward God in the first four commands. Love toward others is in the last six. First, love is loyal. Love is loyal is what he is saying, Verse 2. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. That’s the way love is. Love is loyal. Not fickle, but loyal. God is just saying, would you love me enough not to leave me for some other God? Your wife or your husband might say, would you love me enough not to leave me for another? You see, your friend says, would you love me enough not to go and find somebody else? That’s love.

Loyal is love. That’s all he’s saying. This isn’t anything different. Love is loyal. It doesn’t make other guides. It isn’t fickle, doesn’t turn its back on others. Second, love is faithful. Faithfulness is loyalty extended. Love is faithful. Don’t make any graven image, carved image of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath, or in the water underneath. Under the earth. We’re gonna. Guys, this is important because this gets back into creation. We have never understood water in this commandment before, but you will now, with this new subject in substack. Don’t bow down to them to serve them.

For I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and showing mercy on thousands of them that what that love me. In other words, love is loyal and love is faithful. And God’s saying, if you love me, you’re not going to be fickle. If you love me, that’s the negative. You’re not going to leave me, but you’re going to stick to me and you’re going to be faithful. And third, love is reverent. Verse 7, Exodus 27. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes his name in vain.

Now, I’ve heard people say, you can’t talk about my wife like that. Okay? You can’t slander my friend. Well, do you feel that way about God? Love is reverent. If you love God, you’re not going to use his name in vain. You’re not going to drag his reputation through the gutter. Love is reverent. Fourth, I love this because love is intimate. It’s beautiful. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days thou shalt labor and do all thy work. But on the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God. And if and in it thou shalt do no work, nor thy son, thy daughter, the.

The. The man servant, maid servant, cattle, stranger in the gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and. And so forth. The Lord blessed the Sabbath and hallowed it. Love is intimate. Do you know what love does? It draws outside for intimacy. What God is saying here is, you know, if you love me, you don’t just go live your life. You come apart to me. You want to be with me. You want to fellowship with me. You want to drop the cattle, the activities, the land, the busyness, and you just want to be with me.

And that’s the way love is. Love is loyal. Love is faithful and reverent and intimate. That’s all he’s talking about, is loving him. That. That’s all he wants. In the first four of the ten Commandments, why, when it was all summed up, when the whole deal was summed up, Jesus said, the whole thing can be summed up in these words. This is Jesus talking. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. That’s it so? The first 14 commandments was to do nothing but do that. Now the second part are towards people’s relationship, men versus men, toward men and what he’s saying there toward men.

It’s love. Again, look at verse 12 of Exodus 20. First of all, love is respectful. Love is honor thy father and thy mother, for the days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee. Love is not lawless. It’s not rebellious. It’s respectful. It gives honor to people. One of the great characteristics of love is love always seeks to say the best about everyone. Put that on your self assessment list. Love always seeks to aid and help, assist and honor. Love is respectful. Secondly, love is harmless. Where there is true love, there would be no injury.

And so he says in verse 13, Thou shalt not murder. Love wouldn’t murder. Love is harm. Harmless. It hurts no one. It helps next one. Love is pure. Oh, we’re to be pure, right? Purity is our number one conduct trait. Love always seeks the purity of another. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Adultery defiles, but love seeks only purity and then another. Love is unselfish. He says, love is unselfish. Thou shalt not steal. Love doesn’t steal love. What it gives, it gives. It doesn’t take, it gives. And then number nine in verse 16, love is truthful. Thou shalt not bear fault, witness against thy neighbor.

Well, if you lie against your neighbor, you’re trying to hurt him. If you love your neighbor, you say the truth. Love is truthful. Finding love is content. It doesn’t want its neighbor’s house. It doesn’t want his neighbor’s wife, nor anything he has. It’s content with what God has given you. And it’s content in this, in this sense. Love says, I’m so glad you have that stuff. My happiness is in your possessing it. Do you see what I’m trying to say? Love toward God. Love is loyal, faithful, reverent, intimate towards man. It’s respectful, harmful, pure, unselfish, truthful and content.

You see, even the ten Commandments say the same thing. Be like God loves and, and. And the first one, the Lord your God with all your heart. Love the Lord you got with all your heart, soul and mind. Strength and. And thy what? Neighbor as thyself. If you love your neighbor, I’ll tell you something. You’ll respect them, you’ll never harm them. You’ll treat them with purity, unselfishness, truth. And you’ll be content not to have what he possesses. That’s all Jesus was saying in Mark 12, he made this, that statement summing up the law. No wonder Paul says the whole law is fulfilled in this Love, love, love, be like God, people love like God loves, and God forgives people who offend him.

So we see the play walk and look, and there’s where I’m going to stop, because we’re running out of time. We’re going to pick up next time where we left off now by talking about the pattern, and we’ll do that next time we’re together. Any comments or questions about tonight? It’s teaching. Yeah. Linda. Jim, this was such a profound message tonight for me. I am working as a ghostwriter, as an art for an autobiography, and I have a man that I’m profiling that was beaten badly as a child by his mother over and over again. And it.

It’s so hard to write and so hard to read and be there, but he’s not moved into any type of forgiveness. And, and he’s 75 years old and he’s trying to tell his story. And I. I so wish I could give him this discussion to, to look at. And I. I’m just thinking to myself, what a difference, because when you do this, you’re able to grow, you’re able to move on. And the one bad thing or the bad things that happened don’t form your character of your life. I mean, they do, but yet you can move on.

And to. To listen to somebody who could not move on, it is really. It’s a really sad thing. And this really resonated with me tonight. So thank you. Oh, you’re welcome. I’m glad the Holy Spirit was able to do that. Anything else, guys? I know by the. Linda, you can download this off of the website, the YouTube rumble. You can download this and email it. You can email them the link. You can do whatever. So there are ways to get it to him. What you might not be able to do is get him to listen to it.

Yes. All right, thank you. Anything else, guys? Another point. Yeah, I believe it. You mentioned something while ago. We are wired for holiness, and we’re wired for perfection at the moment of regeneration. And when we come into this world, we are wired for rebellion and sin, but at the moment of rebirth, where we were, we are rewired. So we. We are wired for holiness and perfection. And then in your lesson, you know, God says, walk in love, walk in light, and walk circumspectly. And that. The word walk right there tells me it’s a journey. Oh, yeah, because.

Because we have to become sanctified in Christ. It is a journey. You have to walk. Not only walk that way, you have to study that way. Yes, yes. And so we’re at that rewiring, and we are fully wired for holiness. And then we, you know, we walk as in that chapter, it says, you start walking, walk the journey. Yeah, just one foot in front of the other. This is not a sprint. Just one foot in front of the other. And even if you look at what the apostles ask Christ about the number of people that were actually going to go to heaven, he says, just continue the journey.

Just, you know, just seek out, you know, and continue the journey. Because the apostles felt that basically they were. They were not being affected because nobody was coming at that particular moment. Nobody was coming to Christ to be saved. And the apostles just asked him, you know, and he says, europe, part of this is just to. Is just to seek the journey, walk the walk. Anything else. All right, guys, let’s pray. Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you again for getting back into your word. Thank you for having Paul as our apostle and being able to write articulate passages that we can actually interpret as truth.

And Father, we ask that you provide all of us clarity of mind and the. And the. Understand the knowledge and then the wisdom along with your revelation. Revelation that applies all of these teachings to our individual lives. Father, may we continue to be. To look to you for. For our overall life structure and the blessings that we have been provided and show us the capability of continuing to be sanctified and living like disciples for you. Father, we ask that basically help us where help is needed, you heal us where healing is required, and you give us peace and joy or anxiety.

It’s. It either exists or it’s on its way. And Father, we just bless you. Thank you for your son. Thank you for his death on the cross. Thank you for the love that you showed to us in providing us a way to. To go home. And we ask all these things in your sons.
[tr:tra].