Churches That Give Life

The Invisible Enemy of Our Spiritual Life

I want us to consider an invisible enemy that hinders us from living as God desires us to live in our corporate life as a church. We know about the science fiction films where an alien makes itself look like a friendly human then when it has been accepted it turns on those it has befriended with a view to taking over the human race. This is what this enemy does to us. It is so good at it that we rarely see it until it has got us into a very disappointing situation in our relationships either with an individual or in a corporate church setting. Its name keeps it hidden until the damage is done because Its name is love or to be more exact, natural human love which leads to human goodness and human enthusiasm, which will eventually let us down because it is tainted with self-interest.

Natural Love

Because all people have been created in the image of a God who is pure love, man was made a being with the capacity to love. When sin came in, although it enabled us to do bad things, it did not totally obliterate our ability to continue to love and care for each other. Natural love, which is the driving force behind the good things we do and the passion that we put into doing them, can be very powerful and achieve great results. Paul comments in Rom 5:7For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. that some are willing to die for others. In the history of the human race, although we can see much evil, there have been many non-Christians who have done great heroic deeds for the welfare of others. Some even lose their lives in the process. Even today strangers will give one of their organs to save the life of someone in need of a transplant. Human love with its resulting commitment and goodness is a very valuable asset to the human race and has powerfully curbed the rule of evil in this world. If we look at the fruit of the Spirit we can see quite easily how natural love becomes invisible because it can produce fruit which looks very similar Gal 5:22-23But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law.. People who are atheists do manifest this type of fruit in their lives from time to time. They even use it as an excuse to say they do not need a Saviour, it’s that convincing. Because the Bible mainly contrasts the bad side of our nature with the new life in Jesus we are easily fooled into not seeing the bad side of our good side. We have to look at things from a spiritual perspective not to be caught out by our invisible enemy. So what is the problem?

The Flaws of Human Love

As good as our natural love is with its resulting goodness and commitment it is flawed because it contains two serious weaknesses. It is tainted with self-interest and as a result it has limits. It will go so far but no further and because of this it is capable of being turned into hate. Many evil deeds have been done in the name of ‘love’.

1 self interest

Jesus commented on the self interest of natural love when contrasting it with how God loves. Luke 6:32-36 where He shows us how much higher God’s love is to man’s love. We all find it easy to do good to those who do good to us but when they don’t appreciate what we do then that’s a different matter. Self-interest is much broader than our understanding of just being selfish. Being selfish is usually obvious, self-interest is much more subtle. Self-interest causes us to commit ourselves to God more for our reasons than His, we respond like Isaiah in Isaiah 6 ‘here am I Lord send me’ then we add ‘to do what I want you to want me to do’. In the kingdom of God He is the instigator of what we do and He directs how we do it. Jesus said of Himself that of Himself He could do nothing John 5:30. It was God who called Saul into His service and God who told him what he would do Acts 9 v 15But the Lord said, “Go, for Saul is my chosen instrument to take my message to the Gentiles and to kings, as well as to the people of Israel.. All Saul’s subsequent actions were in line with that initial call. It was God who chose the time and place to launch Paul on his first missionary journey Acts 13:2As they ministered to the Lord and fasted, the Holy Spirit said, “Now separate to Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”. The Lord’s prayer says in Luke 11 v 2 your will be done on earth as it is in heaven not my will be done in heaven as it is on earth.

When God created Adam and Eve He made them for the purpose of bringing about His will on earth as it is in heaven. We have no other reason for our existence on earth. We were given absolute authority in the earth which we were supposed to use to make it happen. Instead we chose the path of self interest and instead of bringing life we brought death. We had this choice before sin entered in and we still have this choice today. We are to use our freedom of choice to do what Adam and Eve should have done. The self-interest of natural love will hijack our commitment to God and although it appears to produce a good result it will in the end bring death and the curse of sin. The words of Jesus in Mat 7:21 – 23 really challenges the motive for our Christian service because not all those who use the name of Jesus for their service are accepted. The work that will suffer most loss described in 1 Cor 3:12 – 15Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire. will not be those things done full of mistakes and failures but those things done full of self interest.

2 its endurance is limited

Human love will go a long way but eventually it will run out because it needs a return on its investment and if that return does not materialise by an expected time it will quit. Human love is very dependent on visible demonstrations of appreciation and doesn’t suffer long when there is a lack of those demonstrations. That is why some people in close relationships who appear to love each other very passionately at the beginning can get to a place where they say ‘I don’t love you anymore’. They start well but run out of steam when there is insufficient return on their investment. This usually happens when their perception of the balance of the relationship becomes so one-sided, as they perceive it, that they consider that all they get is disappointment and pain so they say they can’t love anymore. They quit the relationship to find someone else who they think will alleviate their pain and give them back some of what they feel they have lost and they will feel very righteous and justified in doing it.

This is not the sort of love and commitment that is able to cope with being a Christian but many are misled into using it to live their Christian life only to eventually become disappointed and give up. We particularly fail to recognise this trend or accept its validity in the life of the church. We have all sorts of people who show great promise and commitment to the work of God only to lose it a few years later when that work doesn’t give them the fulfilment they we hoping for. We betray the presence of self-interest and the enthusiasm of natural love by the manifestation of anger with its accompanying bitterness and resentment when what we do is not appreciated. Lack of appreciation is the number one cause of taking offence. When we seek to inspire people to be committed to the work of God we need to avoid ‘Palm Sunday commitment’ like the plague John 12:12 – 13The next day a great multitude that had come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees and went out to meet Him, and cried out: “Hosanna! ‘Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!’ The King of Israel!”. This is the natural phenomenon of natural enthusiasm produced by natural love. In the natural world of humans it is a common experience of people who commit themselves to an interest to be very enthusiastic at the beginning only for it to decline over time. People do lose interest in something they were wholly committed to and wander off to become involved in something else with equal passion. Backsliding is often the product of the disappointments produced by natural love. According to 1 Cor 13 ‘love never fails’ but this is divine love and only this kind of love will see us through.

Natural Love Needs Visible Support

Our belief in the fact that we are loved is based on the how much we can see that we are loved. We do not believe in other people’s love for us if they don’t treat us in the way we have decided we need to be treated. If you treat me the way I believe you should then I will believe that you love me but if you don’t then I won’t. We impose this concept of love on God and we colour all the passages of God loving us as if His love is only a bit better than ours. This is why people have so much trouble believing God loves them, especially in difficult times. Natural thinking finds it impossible to believe in God’s love when there is not only a serious lack of visible evidence, the evidence points in the opposite direction. A classic example of this is trying to tell someone God loves them in times of personal tragedy, like the death of a loved one because the reasoning of our understanding of love is that it does its best to prevent bad things happening. If God loved me why did He let this happen? Is the cry of the self centred human being. Jesus never doubted His father loved Him no matter what he went through. Isa 53:7-10 describes some of the experiences that Jesus had to endure to be our saviour. The most notable is the phrase it pleased God to bruise Him. How do we understand this aspect of God’s love? It certainly doesn’t mean that God is pleased to bring tragedy into our lives either as a punishment for sin or to teach us a lesson because this suffering of Jesus has delivered us from such things. The man Christ Jesus has been the only man in human history that God has been pleased to bruise and it happened because of the love that the Father had for the Son and the Son for the father coupled together as an expression of their love for us. No matter how badly Jesus was treated especially during His trial and crucifixion He never doubted His Fathers love even though from a human perspective there was not only no evidence of it the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Even when Jesus cried out on the cross ‘My God My God why have you forsaken me’ He never doubted that His Father loved Him. It takes divine love to act this way. The problem of our church life is not direct wilful sin it is living together with too much natural love. When it fails, usually through a lack of appreciation, the fruit of the flesh follows from the ensuing bitterness and resentment. If we related to each other with divine love we would not sin against each other. Natural love turns to hate when it is offended. Broken relationships are an evidence of a lack of divine love.

Preaching The Gospel

Because of the deceitfulness of natural love and enthusiasm we need to make sure we preach the true Gospel. In the beginning God was God and the Lord of man so man lived under this beneficent reign through his obedience. Sin came in by an act of disobedience so man took himself out from under the lordship of God and made himself his own lord. God’s salvation was given so that this situation could be reversed. The Gospel message is not just about our sins being forgiven it is about who is lord of our life. Our sins being forgiven enables us to be able to move back under the Lordship of God again so we can be enabled to live a life not tainted by sin, our new life. The essence of repentance is to change your mind about God’s position in your life and the rest flows from that. Salvation is not designed to make our natural love capable of being adequate for our Christian life it is to replace it with a love that does not have the flaws of natural love. 1 Cor 13:4 – 8 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

The natural goodness and commitment that natural love produces which we so often use to serve God with sincerity of heart puts us in a prison of condemnation because when it fails it gives us a bad conscience. We know that according to the Bible ‘love never fails’ and we just did so we pronounce judgment on ourselves. This leads our conscience to produce a ‘must do better’ attitude which only makes us worse because our efforts will eventually fail again. We become locked up in the prison of our own self-condemnation. Because the lie of the adequacy of natural love is the reason for our prison life it keeps us failure conscious. Natural love in the Divine love for you will not be enough to get you out of prison. It has to be divine love in you and through you that will break the prison that your dependence of the ways of natural love and its resulting goodness and commitment has put you in. Paul at Philippi is an example of the power of divine love when at midnight he and Barnabas had a praise party instead of a pity party and it brought the house down Acts 16:19 – 26. For Paul to be able to respond to his experiences at the hands of the people in Philippi in the way he did could only happen through the divine love in him not even the divine love for him. Divine love is not just a wonderful teaching about God’s love for us in providing for our salvation, making us clean to go to heaven when we die; it is the very person of God causing us to get the victory over everything that comes against us and to see everything through to the end. The motivation of our life is divine love not natural love in divine love for us.