In case I utter God's words to you, whether in the language of men, or the speech of a messenger of God, and I have not demonstrated by actions that I really love you, and am burning with a desire for you to prosper an excel in God's Kingdom, then I turn myself into an empty loudmouth, shouting about judgments I have never experienced. And even if I prophesy to you, have awareness and perception into the secrets and mysteries of all religious rites and ceremonies, and if I have complete understanding and demonstrated miraculous faith which has removed a mountain of difficulties from your life, and a not held and possessed by God's kind of love for you, I am nobody you need pay attention to. Even if I feed the poor with all my substance and offer to give my body as a burnt sacrifice, if I have not experienced God's love and longing for you to be right with Him, it will not buy me favor with God.
God's love is enduring and gracious. It doesn't disappear when the first difficulty arises in our relationship. God's kind of love is not possessive and envious of your relationships to others. God's love doesn't allow me to exalt myself over you, to make you my slave and totally dependent on me for your spiritual food. God's love in me will not allow me to mistreat you, without my having to confess to you and ask forgiveness. God's love gives me the patience to overlook faults that He is not dealing with at the time. It keeps me from assuming the worst about you or anyone else the Lord is drawing to Himself. Even when the hidden darkness is uncovered, I cannot rejoice at the discovery, but am grieved in spirit and body at that which grieves the Lord. Only if the uncleanness is confessed and forsaken, and truth and forgiveness established in its place, can God's love rejoice and celebrate.
God's love enables me to endure and patiently forgive all kinds of accusations and attacks on my credibility until He comes to deal with the offender. His love keeps me resting entirely on His wisdom, grace and provision for the situation in which I find myself because I spoke the words He told me to speak. God's love gives me what I need to love you in spite of the rebellion against God's authority, and His word to you. I expect fervently that you will come through this darkness, into His marvelous light.
God's love will never allow me to be driven off the course He set for me. Prophecies can be made of none effect by the failure of the one spoken to, to act on them. Words can be stopped when the hearer refuses to listen and accept these as coming from God. All knowledge that the person thinks he has about God will become useless to him, when he rejects the message and messenger God has sent to set him on the right course. All knowledge is partial. All prophecies are but a segment of God's great plan. When we come into a full grown son relationship with the Heavenly Father, through obedience to the Son Jesus, we will see that our obedience to the part revealed, has led us beyond it, to a more complete and full understanding of, and wholehearted cooperation with the Lord.
Just as a child perceives his relationship to his parents one way when he is growing up, and another way entirely when he is full grown, so the religious exercises and attitudes toward who God is and who we are, will have to change with Spiritual growth. By clinging to the old vision, given as a spiritual babe, we are like the child who keeps looking at his own image in a mirror, instead of seeing the Father, who is waiting to show him all about His House and His kingdom.
Through God's love we are enabled to take our eyes off our selves long enough to see Him in His body (those He has called and chosen). We will never see Him face to face, or person to person, until we acknowledge Him in one another, and love one another with His kind of love. All the things we think we know about God from our religious training and practices will pass away, as we go on with Him. Only three things we will bring us out of our religious experiences. They are; the faith and trust in Jesus as my Savior and Lord, the hope and expectations that He is making a fit vessel of my life to dwell with Him, and the Love of God shed abroad in your heart, by the Holy Ghost. The greatest and most important of these is God's love manifest through us to others. This is the more excellent way to find God's will for your life.
