The Things that God Hates 3: A Lying Tongue

Proverbs 6:16-17; Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 32:3-4; Psalm 109:1-4; Revelation 21:8; 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12; Ephesians 6:13-14. 

This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on August 22, 2021.

Today, we will continue our look at the seven things that God hates.  Proverbs 6 lists a lying tongue as the second thing that God hates. 

Let’s get into our passages.

God hates a lying tongue

The word translated as “lying” in Proverbs 6 can be translated as: an untruth, a lie, a sham, falsehood, fraud, and deceit.  The phrase is literally “a tongue of falsehood,” or “a tongue of lies.”    It is like the tongue is the offspring of lies and belongs to them.  Of course, the tongue is not the real problem.  Even if God had not given us a tongue, we would still be capable of misleading and lying to one another.  The tongue is just a powerful tool for those whose hearts are inclined to mislead others.

At its core, a lie is a refusal to face the truth, to face reality.  This is precisely why we see much of what we see in these last days.  Mankind is in league with fallen spiritual beings, and are rebelling against truth and reality itself.  Of course, to rebel against reality is to rebel against the One who created it.

Many people object to a God.  They may never say it this way, but they feel that reality is a straitjacket that restricts them.  Only a liar would call reality a straitjacket because it is their own perversity that restricts them.  It is their own life of pursuing pleasure that leaves them shackled and bound to sin.  This is what we all would be, if it weren’t for the love of God calling us back from the precipice, saying, “I love you.  Why will you die?  Choose life!” 

The ninth commandment in Exodus 20:16 tells us not to bear false witness against your neighbor.  Of course, it is wrong to bear false witness against anyone, but the neighbor part is added to intensify the command.  It is not setting the limits of the command, but rather intensifying it.  How could you do such a thing to your neighbor, or even your brother?  If neighbors do not live truthfully with one another, if we lie against those we depend upon for mutual protection, then no society can last long in such circumstances.

There are different reasons why people lie.  Some people really will say anything in order to protect or promote themselves.  Others lie because they believe the ends justifies the means.  Lies are told to conceal activity from others, and in some cases, lies are told to protect others from harm.

Regardless of the reasons why we may lie, such reasons are only the superficial motivation.  There are deeper reasons that go to the core of our human nature, which brings us to the rub.

In Deuteronomy 32:3-4, Moses declares the nature of God.  He is something that is like a large Rock.  It cannot be moved and can be trusted.  You can build your life upon Him and it will hold up, as opposed to sand, which looks solid at first.  I mean, isn’t it just broken up rock?  However, sand is not dependable between sinkholes and liquefaction.  God doesn’t change, yesterday, today, or forever.  The words Justice, Truth, Righteous, and Upright are woven together to highlight God’s nature.  God by His nature is truth, but we are not.  Even when we speak of justice, truth, and righteousness, we are not generally being completely honest.  We just want the justice that is in our favor, and not that which hurts us.  Moses reminds Israel, and us, of just who God is, so that they will do the hard work of fighting against their own sinful nature.

Lies come too easy for us, and only a person who keeps their eyes upon God and has a healthy fear of Him, can be transformed into His image.  The choice is always to conform to the perversity of this world, or be transformed into the truth of who God is.  Titus 1:2 tells us that God cannot lie.  Why?  He cannot lie because He is Truth.  It is His nature.  Whereas, lies are contrary to the nature of God and the reality He created.

In Psalm 109:1-4, David was able to take his prayers, his cries to God, and put them in poetic form.  Always remember that songs which move us deeply are crafted from the difficult things and the anguish that they have gone through. 

David speaks of how the wicked have lied against him, that is within society.  Saul is a good example of what David is talking about.  Saul continually defamed David as a rebel insurrectionist, a usurper, but the truth is that Saul was the true rebel.  He was in rebellion against the path of God, and though he was not usurping the throne, he was usurping God’s place of leadership within Israel.  Still, Saul deflects the truth and paints David as the bad guy.  David also mentions that the wicked do this without cause.  Even their feigned reason for coming after him is a lie.  He has done nothing to them, but good!

Like the cry of Israel rising up from the mud pits of Egypt to God, the cry of the righteous reaches God’s ears.  Even people who lie against others often complain about those who lie against them.  However, notice what David’s answer is to all this frustration. “…but I give myself to prayer.”  David appeals to The Power that is higher than King Saul, or anyone else on this planet, or in this cosmos, for that matter.

If you are not convinced that God will deal with all liars, then read Revelation 21:8.  There, we are told that “all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone…”  It may not look like it in this world, but God is committed to destroying those who give themselves to lies, and to lying.  This passage uses inheritance language.  They will have their part, their portion, their lot, in the Lake of Fire.  It becomes their inheritance.  They will not be allowed to enter into the new heavens and the new earth.

Any time a person complains that a good God should not allow so much evil on earth, remind them that they should be more careful.  God has set a day of recompense, but will you survive?  Will I survive and come through the coming Great Filter of God?

Let us not fool ourselves.  God hates lies and false causes.  He will bring to destruction everyone who embraces them, and He will separate them from His creation.

God loves truth

The flip-side of hating lies is that God loves truth.  I could have said that He loves a truth-telling tongue, but there is a deeper issue here. 

In 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12, Paul reminds us that part of what God is trying to do is to give us a love of the truth.  Think about that.  What is God doing right now?  He is working to help us learn to love truth.  To love truth is to love God because He is truth by nature.  You can’t separate these two.  This includes our wrestling with our sinful nature, and learning to cooperate with the lessons of truth that God is trying to teach us.

Paul pictures the end times as a time in which God quits trying to convince the world to love truth, and He hands them over to a strong delusion, a great lie that the whole world will believe hook, line, and sinker.

In fact, we should recognize that salvation itself, the Gospel, is all about asking people to embrace truth.  I am a sinner, that is the truth.  God’s judgment hangs over my head, that is the truth.  Yet, God doesn’t want me to be destroyed, that is the truth.  If I will throw myself upon His mercy, die to self, and put my trust in the person and the way of Jesus, then I will be spared.  Truth!  If you don’t love that truth, then something is very wrong with your heart.  Something is wrong with all of our hearts, but God can help us if we will trust Him.  Many today keep pushing away the love of God that continues to reach out to them. However, one day it will come to an end because God loves others too much to give you eternity of choosing lies over truth.

In Ephesians6:13-14, Paul reminds us that Truth is part of the armor of God.  Like Saul with David, this world offers us all kind of armor that it says will protect.  Lies and deception are the protection of the wicked.  David knew that he would not survive using this world’s armor.  His trust was in God and the truth.  The truth is that God has either sent Goliath and the Philistines to chastise Israel, or that God is looking for someone with enough guts to trust that He would be with them.  David was that man.

Of course, Jesus also trusted in truth, and it got him killed.  At least, that is what the world, and your flesh, wants you to think.  The truth did not get Jesus killed.  They were actually killing truth when they killed him.  He willingly laid down his life for us, that is the truth!  To overcome the attacks of this world upon our faith, we must love truth more than life itself.  This is the real battle.

As we close, I bring to our remembrance the warning of Jesus himself.  Perhaps Matthew 24 and the Olivet Discourse is what Paul had in mind when he wrote 2 Thessalonians 2.  There, Jesus gave his disciples a look at what lay ahead of them from the first century to the end of the age and his Second Coming.

Jesus emphasized and warned against deception, false prophets, false christs, and lying signs and wonders that are coming to convince the world of The Big Lie.  It will be convincing to those who have not clung to the truth of God and loved it.  Many who claim to be believers in Jesus will become believers in the anti-Jesus because they let themselves use lies as a defense instead of repenting before Christ.

Today, let us not only hate those lies that are told against us, but to hate the deceptive cause that is dripping with a false coat of righteousness and appeals to our sinful nature.  May God enable us to love truth because He is truth, and without Him, we will not survive what lies ahead of us.

A Lying Tongue audio

The Things That God Hates 1: Introduction

Proverbs 6:16; 1 John 4:7-8.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on August 8, 2021.

We are starting a series on the things that God hates using the seven things listed in Proverbs 6.  In order to do justice to the gravity of the subject, we will take a week on each item, with this week introducing the concept of God hating something. 

Some use this idea of God hating to charge the Bible with inconsistency, and error.  In short, they use it to defame the character of God.  However, if we think more deeply on these things, we will find that this is not so.

Let’s look at our first passage. 

How can God hate?

Proverbs 6:16 clearly states that there are things that God hates.  The knee-jerk reaction of some is to ask, “How can God hate?”  Now the word that is translated “hate” here is the same word we have talked about in prior sermons.  This Hebrew word has a much larger range of meaning than our English word “hate.”  You have to look at the context in order to determine whether it speaks of something that is merely loved less than another thing. 

We saw this in Genesis 29:31. Many translations will say that God saw Leah was unloved, but it is actually the Hebrew word that in some cases can mean a disdainful hatred towards someone.  It is clear from that passage that Jacob does not “hate” Leah in the English sense.  Rather, when it comes to choosing between Leah and Rachel, he would reject her and choose Rachel.  Rachel was loved by Jacob, but Leah was not.

In Proverbs 6:16, the verse has another word that is clearly meant to be synonymous, or parallel with the earlier word “hate,” and it is the word “abomination.”  In Hebrew, this word has an extremely thin range of meaning.  It pretty much means something that is loathed and detested.  Although it can be used of humans, it is mostly used of God.  Some of these abominations that God hates are perversions of the Mosaic sacrificial system, but most of them are immoral activities that God has gone on record as stating that he detests them.

So, we can be assured that contextually the word “hate” here is on the other end of the spectrum from Genesis 29:31.  It means to hate, as we English speakers would think.  These are things that God has a strong aversion to, and detests.

Now, let’s look at the passage in 1 John.  This passage categorically defines love as an essential part of God.  “God is love.”  In other words, God can’t quit being love any more than we can quit being human.  Yet, we should note that, even though the Bible speaks of God hating things, it never states that God is hate.

It is here that we should understand that, for us, hating something is generally rooted in something that is wrong in my heart.  With God this is different.  Just as we find it impossible to be angry and righteous at the same time, so we find it impossible to hate and be loving at the same time.  In the Bible, we see that because God loves His creation so much, especially humans whom He made in His image, that He hates anything that threatens to destroy it, us.  He can do this perfect, not in spite of His love, but directly flowing out of His love.  If God is perfect love, then he must hate that which threatens to destroy the object of His love.  Like I said, it is impossible for humans to do this perfectly, which is why Scripture tells us, “The wrath of man does not produce the righteousness of God.”  James 1:20.

This brings us to two important understandings.  One, sin, as defined by God, is that which destroys us, others, and the world around us.  Second, God’s wrath, His active hatred for sinful things that destroy what He loves, is for the purpose of setting things right, producing righteousness.

There is a common statement that has surfaced over the years.  “God hates the sin, but loves the sinner.”  Is this true though?  My answer would be, yes, and no.  If this statement is used to remind people that God always desires the salvation of the sinner, even in the midst of their judgment, then it is true.  God is not willing that anyone should go into eternity lost.  However, He will not force anyone to put their faith and love in Him.

How is this statement wrong?  If we use this statement to justify not repenting of our sin, not repenting of destroying ourselves and others around us, if we use it to coddle and excuse rebellion, then we are treading on thin ice.  The sinner who refuses to hear God’s call for them to turn from sin, and to embrace His righteousness, will find out that God’s love for them will not cancel out their choice.

In John 3:17-19, we are told that the condemnation of God, His hatred for sin, is even now looming over the sinner.  That person is a destroyer of God’s good things, both within himself, and others around him.  Yet, God’s love constrains Him to make a way for that sinner to be saved from his fate.

With the cross, God wants us to see at least two things.  First, it shows how greatly He hates sin, and how serious He is about destroying it completely.  Second, it shows how greatly He loves us and is willing to move heaven and earth in order to save us from this fate.  He takes our sin upon Himself in order to make room for repentance, but the room is finite.  Yes, He loves you and has made a way for you to see the error of your way and believe on Him, but He can’t wait forever for your decision because He loves everyone else too.

Do not be deceived.  The person who goes into eternity refusing to repent of their sinful destruction of God’s things will not find the love of God.  Why?  They will not find it because they have rejected it at every turn, over and over again on earth.  To repent is to embrace the love of God.  That person will find God’s love on the other side of mortal death.

Thus, we see the picture at the end of Revelation 21.  The creation is melted down, and recreated as a new heaven and new earth.  An eternal city, built by God, comes down out of the heavens.  It is symbolic of the righteous, but it is also real.  We hear these words about it.

Its gates shall not be shut at all by day (there shall be no night there).  And, they shall bring the glory and the honor of the nations into it.  But, there shall by no means enter it anything that defiles, or causes an abomination or a lie, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.

At the cross, Jesus dealt with my sin, your sin, and took the judgment of our wickedness, our sinful destructions, upon himself.  However, I must choose to turn from my sin, quit loving wickedness, and start loving Jesus, the One who died for me.  The day will come when there will be no more room to choose for me, and for you, for your neighbor, your friend, even your enemy.  The day will come when there will be no more choice for this world because God’s plan is to bring us to a place where there will be no more wickedness forever, amen!

It is not His plan to bring us to a place where there is only wickedness.  However, for those who reject His plan, and embrace wickedness, He allows them to enter into the fruit of their choice, a place of only wickedness, and none of the goodness of God.  This is a repulsive thought, but it is even more so to the God who loves us and does not want this for us.  Why will you choose death?  Choose life and live!

Things God Hates 1 audio

Father, Turn Our Hearts

Luke 1:11-17.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on June 20, 2021, Father’s Day.

We are celebrating Father’s Day.  It is easy in life to let your heart turn towards the things that it wants to turn towards.  It doesn’t help when you have a society that elevates following the heart over doing what is right and pleasing God.

Don’t get me wrong.  Sometimes, God puts things in our hearts, but the follower of Jesus will wrestle with those things, seeking to be intellectually honest before God.  They desire more to follow him than to follow their own heart.

Today, we will look at a man who was grieved by the fact that he and his wife couldn’t have any children, and through his interaction with an angel, we are reminded of God the Father’s heart for us.

Let’s look at our passage.

The Father’s impact

In this passage, we are not told whether Zacharias was praying for a child that day in the temple.  He was a priest who had been picked by lot to offer the incense in the Holy Place before the veil, and the Presence of God.  We are told that he and his wife were “well advanced in years.”  This probably means that his years of praying for a child had long since ceased, and his hopes for such had long since died.

God the Father chose a particular day, when it looked like there was no hope, and in fact he wasn’t even looking to see if there was hope anymore.  It was at that moment that He sent an angel to give Zacharias the good news.  God had a present for him, a large measure of grace; he was going to have a son!  As exciting as this news was to Zacharias, notice that this grace is not all about him and his wife.  It is also about the nation of Israel and its need to turn back to God.  We must always remember that the grace of God in our life is a present from a loving Father, but it is also intended to bless more than just me.  It is our natural tendency to be short-sided in regard to the grace of God in our life.

This is probably the first time that Zacharias has seen an angel.  Though we are not given a description in Luke, the angel explains that he is Gabriel who stands in the presence of God.  This angel called Gabriel also interacted with Daniel in Daniel chapters 8 and 9.  There he is described as looking like a man (no wings).   So, it is most likely not what Gabriel looks like that startles Zacharias, but the fact that no one is supposed to be in the Holy Place at that time, but him.

There are things that can make men afraid.  Zacharias is a righteous man who has been serving God “blamelessly.”  It would be easy to say that a righteous man shouldn’t fear anything, even that we shouldn’t fear God; He is on our side!  However, God still does things, or allows things, in our life that we can’t control, and that we weren’t expecting.  Fear is a natural response in these times.

Many fathers try to look like they aren’t afraid, but if we don’t keep our heart and eyes turned towards God, we can become entangled in a web of fears.  You can spend your life trying to become greater than your fears, or you can turn to the One who is greater than all that you fear.  In fact, when we are not living right before God, we often fear things that we shouldn’t.  Proverbs 28:1 says, “The wicked flee when no man pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.”  We can become trapped by a mixture of real things and figments of our warped imagination.

The real problem in life is not that we fear, but that we are truly bad at fearing the right things.  There are many fathers today who are not afraid to abandon their children, or they are not afraid to help a girl abort their baby.  They aren’t afraid to abuse the woman that they are with.  Really, they don’t fear God who has warned those who do such things of the consequences of the things they are doing.  We are not afraid to play God in our labs, businesses, and government buildings.  We are not afraid of throwing off the time-proven wisdom of the past for the seduction of a future that we think we can control.  Yes, the real problem is that we aren’t afraid of running off the cliff with all the other lemmings.

In the end, God is not a danger to those who serve Him in love.  I should add a caveat to this.  It all comes down to the definition of “danger.”  Jesus served the Father faithfully in love, but he died on a cross.  Yet, God is showing us through the resurrection of Jesus that any danger He purposefully brings before us, or even allows to come before us, has a way through it that brings us to the good things that He intends for us on the other side.

In truth, He is a danger to our flesh, but He is Eternal Life, Peace, and Joy to our soul, and to our future.  He really does love you, and will bless you if you will turn to Him in faithful love.  Like Zacharias, we must be those ones who are rare in a land of men who have turned away from God.  We must pass that reality on to the next generation, both with our natural children and with the spiritual children that God brings into our lives.

The Father’s desire

As the angel describes God’s purpose for the child that Zacharias will have, we see the desire of our heavenly Father’s heart, and the things that were keeping Israel in bondage.

The term “children of Israel” is used in this context as a reference to generation, and not as a reference to age.  It is not talking about everyone under the age of 12, but of the current generation who had been birthed by the generation before.  It pictures each generation as Israel giving birth to the next generation of Israel.  The nation of Israel, both young and old, were the children of Israel, just as we today are the children of the United States of America. 

The problem with any nation is that our hearts get turned away from God the Father.  No matter how good our beginning may have been, all nations run into peril as more and more of their people turn their hearts away from God.  The Father’s desire was that the hearts of that generation be turned back towards Him.

We must not see God as a Father who is hurt and mad that His children don’t love Him.  Instead, we must see the reality of what happens to children who turn away from loving parents, and cast off their godly instruction.  Such children turn towards foolish things, and the path of folly always brings ruin to a person and to a nation.  God’s heart breaks over the folly that is taking over, not just our land, but all of the nations on this earth.  With a Father’s heart, He cries out, “Why will you die?  Choose Life, and turn back to Me!”

He also desires to turn the hearts of the fathers towards their children.  When our hearts are turned towards God, He teaches us to have our hearts turned towards each other in the right way.  There is a plague of fatherless children across our land.  Too many fathers have rejected the heavenly Father and His desire to turn their heart towards their wives and children.  This is not just a problem for fathers.  Mothers and children have the same problems too.

However, men, we must be bold as lions and care for the people that God has put in our lives.  Regardless of how they respond, we must love them and seek God’s best for them, by showing them what a righteous man looks like, and how he lives.  This world successfully seduces our hearts away from what really matters because it first seduced our heart away from God.  This is how Satan plunders us from the goodness and inheritance of God.

Ultimately, the Father desires to turn the disobedient towards the wisdom of the righteous.  Israel had become disobedient children.  They were fathers who were disobedient to the heaven Father, and children who were disobedient to earthly fathers.  They refused to hear the words of wisdom spoken through the righteous men of the past, and written down in the Bible.  In short, to turn is to repent.  There is a lot of turning going on in this world.  People turn from one thing to the next seeking their own happiness.  However, it is not good enough to repent of one fleshly pursuit to go after another.  The only repentance that will actually do you any good, and even do good for the people around you, is the repentance that turns all the way around back towards God.  Finally, when we are truly oriented towards Him, He is able to turn us back around to the people and things in our life in wisdom and righteousness, in a way that gives life, and not death.  May God help us to cast aside disobedience, hear the heart of a loving Father, and turn into the path of life!

The Path Ahead of Us

1 Corinthians 13:8-13.  This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on February 21, 2021.

Next week, we will pick back up in Mark 15 and walk with Jesus to the cross and the resurrection. 

Today, I want to talk about the path ahead of us as believers and followers of Jesus in the United States of America.  One of the devil’s tactics in these last days is to tempt believers to quit loving one another.  However, the love we are to have for one another is God’s love, and not love as defined by this world.  It is the same love that Jesus had for us when he chose to go to a cross for our sake, despite the world having rejected him, and believers who were slow to believe what they did not understand about him.

The disciples could not see how Jesus letting himself be arrested and killed would be the loving thing to do.  Peter even rebuked Jesus for even thinking of such a thing.  I am sure that Peter felt that he loved Jesus and loved Israel, but the actions of Jesus did not look right, did not look like love to Peter.  He didn’t exactly say this, but it is the same idea.  “Jesus, that isn’t love.”

In the days and months ahead, we must not be obstinate in fleshly concerns, but neither can we let the world, including worldly Christians, define for us what love is and what it would do.  We must learn to make the tough decisions of love as the Holy Spirit leads us in any particular situation.

We must not stop loving

In this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul is dealing with problems among the Christians in the Greek city of Corinth.  Their great desire for spiritual gifts was overwhelming their duty to love one another.  They were more concerned with the social prestige of exercising a spiritual gift than the people that God wanted them to bless with that spiritual gift.

This is why chapter 13 functions as a sort of parenthesis within a larger teaching on spiritual gifts.  No matter what Christians may think, they need to keep loving one another as a primary focus that is replaced by nothing else.

Our minds have a tendency to focus on the wrong things.  The believers in Corinth were focusing on the spiritual gifts that they had, and how “spiritual” that made them.  It functioned in their minds more like a badge of honor that was a gift to them, instead of being a gift to their church that would operate through them.  The over-emphasis on themselves was perverting the true purpose of the gifts.  They were not helping one another.  Instead, they were stirring one another up in envy, jealousy, and strife.

Spiritual gifts are not the only thing that can sidetrack believers.  There are whole groups within Christianity that do not believe the spiritual gifts are still in operation today.  Essentially, “God doesn’t do that anymore,” is their mantra.  They are more tempted to focus on the appearance of wisdom and knowledge to the expense of loving their fellow believers.  Again, wisdom and knowledge are good things if they are given from God and we are using them to bless others.  However, if they come from man’s attempts to look wise before others then we will be led astray.  Typically, we will only “bless” those who give lip service to our “human wisdom” and speak invectives against those who do not, even though they are believers.

We should always ask ourselves the question, “Will this make me and others more like Jesus?”  Whether I am exercising a spiritual gift in the assembly, or waxing in philosophical wisdom before other believers, I must always begin with the sacrificial love of Jesus.  He is the ultimate example to us of what God has called us to do, and what it means for us to love others by God’s definition. 

It is easy to say that loving one another is a primary focus, or purpose.  However, sometimes love has to make tough calls.  It has to run the risk of the other person, or onlookers, accusing us of not loving them.  Ultimately, God is our judge.  We will have to deal with the judgments of others, but they are not our judge.  If we allow the judgment of believers and onlookers to become more important to us than God’s judgment then we are not loving them as Jesus loved us.

Even right actions done for the wrong reasons can fail this question.  If my heart is wrong, or selfish, no amount of “loving actions” can make me like Jesus because the heart of Jesus was not wrong and selfish.  Our culture is lost when it comes to the proper judgment of actions.  We believe that the end justifies the means.  As long as someone is fighting for the right cause, their methods are rarely criticized.  Yet, at the same time, our culture has become extremely judgmental.  “If you do this thing then we know that you are that bad thing.”  Even this is hypocritical because of the first maxim.  If someone is working for the end that is deemed acceptable then they can do something all day long that others will be hyper-criticized for doing.  God help us to flee from such godlessness and receive a love of the Truth that only He can give.

Paul is reminding the Corinthians that a day will come when prophecies, speaking in tongues, and knowledge (i.e., spiritual gifts) will no longer be needed among God’s people.  This is described as when the perfect has come.  This perfect is describing the place that God is bringing us to.  At the resurrection, we will be clothed in glorified bodies that are immortal and untainted by the sin nature.  We will be a finished being who looks like Jesus, and we will be united with him never to be separated again.  It is in this perfect relationship that we will not need the spiritual gifts of this age anymore. 

Keeping that in mind, Paul’s main point is that love, faith, and hope will continue into the perfect age ahead.  The Corinthians were focusing on temporary things to the expense of eternal things.  That is never good.

This brings us to the relationship between love, faith, and hope.  Paul mentions that love is the greatest of these three virtues, but he doesn’t explain why.  From a biblical point of view, we know that love is described as an eternal attribute of God.  “God is love.”  (1 John 4:8,16).  In a way, faith is an internal, rational response to God’s love for us.  We believe because He loved us and loves us now, and we believe because we love Him.  We might call faith an aspect or facet of love itself.  When there is a separation of some sort in the relationship, love demonstrates itself in faith; it still trusts.

Hope is similar.  It is partly a rational and partly an emotional response to God’s love for us in regards to the future.  Because God is love and has promised His love eternally into the future, I need not fear the uncertainties of the future.  When we are united with Christ, it is not that faith and hope cease to exist or are no longer needed, it is just that they are less obvious.  We will dwell with Him ever able to see Him.  Perhaps this is why Paul calls love the greatest of the three.  It is simply the foundation of the other two.

We are in that tension between the now and not yet.  We have God’s presence now, but not as it will be in eternity.  It is God’s love for us that enables us to walk in faith (though we cannot see Him), and to have hope (though we cannot see the end result promised).  In a sense, we see Him with the eyes of faith, and our eternal future with the eyes of hope.  By the Spirit of God and by the Word of God, the love of God fills our hearts.  We need to daily refresh ourselves in the knowledge and experience of God’s love.  Even in times of discipline, we must see it as proof of His love for us.  The enemy does not want you to live out the love of God, to live this life trusting Him, and to joyfully trust your future to Him.  If he can, he will get you to focus on something else by undermining your faith in God’s love.

We have to spiritually mature to the point where we are not driven by our circumstances.  If something difficult happens, or persecution comes our way, we cannot fall into pity, thinking God doesn’t love us.  We must trust His love for us in the now and we must walk in faith.  We must trust Him with our future in such a way that we are filled with the hope and joy that comes when you truly believe that the Creator of all things is working it to your good (Romans 8:28).

With the Apostle John, let us rise up to the challenge of our day.  Faith is the victory that overcomes the world, and all of the enemy’s attempts to pull us off course.  Let us trust God by loving one another, and having our hearts full of the joy of those who belong to Him!

The Path Audio