Law of Love

Welcome to Fear No Fear, a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear and champion faith in God. The law of God is still valuable, but we are under the law of Christ. Jesus wants us to love God and love others. The Holy Spirit guides us in living with love and avoiding selfishness. God changes us from the inside out through renewal. Get the word in your heart, listen to teachings, praise God, and let His love transform you. In Him, fear has no place. Let God do His work and be renewed in Him. Welcome to Fear No Fear. Grace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit embrace you today. This is a series of devotions and meditations on scripture. We reject fear in any and all forms. Fear is a spiritual force, the currency of darkness and ignorance. It's what we inherited when Adam gave up his faith and Satan uses it to keep people down. His only weapon is words. If he can get you believing or looking at words of fear, he's got you. Instead, we champion faith as an allegiance to God, as a belief and trust and loyalty to the Lord God Almighty. We accept the evidence of his word as unvarnished truth, as is, just as it's written. We get close to his perfect love through the word, and perfect love casts out fear. 1 John 4.18 All scripture is taken from the World English Bible, which is in the public domain. Visit eBible.org Joshua 1.8-9 This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, that you may observe to do according to all that is written in it. For then you shall make your way prosperous, and then you shall have good success. Haven't I commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Don't be afraid. Don't be dismayed. For Yahweh your God is with you wherever you go. Joshua 1.5-9 First, this section is from Joshua 1.5-9, and it is a map of success. It delineates exactly what you need to do to have success in life. Be strong, have courage, lead others with wisdom, be obedient to God, and love Him with your whole heart, turning neither to the left nor to the right, but standing your ground and staying your course. If you do it, you'll be righteous in His eyes. Deuteronomy 30.19-30 That's the whole point behind choosing life. Deuteronomy 30.6 But there's some question as to whether you can actually keep the law and follow God with your whole heart all the time. Ecclesiastes 7.20 Essentially, we might be able to keep the law on the outside, but we can't do it on the inside, which was one of Jesus' major messages, that if you do it in your heart, it's just the same as if you've done it. The second thing is that you might point out that we are not under the old covenant law, and that is true. But if we look at the verse today, and we combine it with what Paul pointed out in 1 Corinthians 9.21, we find that we're not outside the law of God, but we are under the law of Christ, of Jesus. And Jesus said in Matthew 5.17, Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill. The law has value. The rightness of the ordinances has not changed. The righteousness at the core of the law has not changed. What was wrong under the law is still wrong today. But we have a different covenant to deal with it. The covenant of grace, where we are given the righteousness of Jesus by grace through faith, which is the only way to fulfill the law's right ordinances. Jesus is the only one who did it. In Him, we can too, because He's already made the path. We simply walk it in Him, because we're spiritually circumcised into Jesus and have His spirit. Deuteronomy 30, verse 6. So now, we are able to keep the law in our heart, in our mouth, to meditate it, to observe, to do it, and get all of the prosperousness and success from our spirits in our lives. We can do it all because the Word is the core and the function of what we do. The law has value, and it is right. But what exactly is that law that we need to have on our mind and in our hearts and to meditate on it all the time so that we can follow it and then be prosperous and successful? What exactly is it? Do we meditate on the burning incense part or the don't murder part? Well, in Matthew 22, 37 to 40, Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. The second, likewise, is this. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. The whole law and the prophets depend on these two commandments. So we have commandments from Jesus. He wants us to love as He loves, as we love ourselves, the idea being we don't hate or harm ourselves. And boy, has the enemy worked hard to corrupt that idea. But if we do this, we will follow all the commandments in the Word because everything we are to do or not do is based on and around love. You aren't going to covet your neighbor's wife if you love them as Jesus loves them. You won't steal or murder. You'll respect your parents. You'll focus on the Word and spending time with the Lord. Yahweh wants to bless us and keep us from harm. He wants us to bless others and keep them from harm. Telling someone that God says something is wrong is love. Berating someone and making them feel like trash is not love. There is a huge difference. It is possible to present the truth without hate or judgment when the Holy Spirit leads us and our method of delivery lines up with Him. It will never be wrong. So how do you know if you're doing it with love? Living with love? Walking in love? Well, the Holy Spirit will tell you. Don't know what His voice is like? Read the Word. Think on it. Wrestle with it. Get it inside yourself to where that still, small voice speaks and then bang! You'll start to hear from God and know what the Spirit is saying about what you're doing. Remember, the Holy Spirit does not convict us of wrongdoing only of our trust or lack of trust in Jesus. This isn't about guilt or, oh boy, you're going to get it. But the Holy Spirit does correct us. All the time. He tells us when we're going wrong and instructs us on how to go correctly. If you receive the rebuke and change your behavior, well, then you're doing it right. Loving someone is about wanting the best for them. Striving for them to succeed. Making choices not based on what is best for us but what is best for them. Affording them the same opportunities that we would want for ourselves. Never thinking of it as an inconvenience. Serving them. This doesn't come naturally. This is why we need the Holy Spirit to constantly tell us what's what. From cradle to salvation, we taught ourselves to put ourselves first in our hearts, if not in all our actions. The world is built around the idea that you have extraordinary value and should be treated as such. That you deserve that holiday. That you deserve that bonus. That you deserve that drink. You deserve to feel put upon. Taken advantage of. Because it's your time. Your stuff. Survival of the fittest. It's hard to put off. It's hard to avoid thinking. It takes Jesus to do it. The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live. Deuteronomy 30 verse 6. God does it. Jesus does it. The Holy Spirit does it. We may be able to keep the law on the outside but on the inside we won't. Until God circumcises our hearts and cuts out that training we gave it. Cuts out that spirit of weakness and susceptibility to sin that is our heritage from the first Adam. Until we are given the righteous spirit of the last Adam we are hopeless cases. But God changes us from the inside out. God enables us to walk the walk by changing our hearts. By giving us a spirit who loves the Lord our God with all its heart and all its soul. No self, all Jesus. The process by which God does this is renewal. He does all the work but we need to give him permission. We need to plug in to get the advantages of all he has to offer us. This is what we are to do. Get the word in our hearts and heads to think on it. It will renew and transform us if we let it become more than words across pages. Ask God to reveal himself before you read. Look at the footnotes of the verses. Read more than one translation and see how they compare. No time for reading? Get the Bible on audiobook and listen while you do chores or commute. Find yourself word based teaching and listen to it. Praise God and spend a lot of time singing to Jesus. Not a singer? Recite the Psalms of praise. Make up your own words to a tune. Tell him how great he is. It isn't groveling or buttering God up because everything you can say is just plain true. Use that word to guide what you do. Ask Jesus what he wants you to do today. Listen to the Spirit guide you, correct you and teach you. Feel the love. Spread the love. When you are doing all that, there isn't room for fear or dismay or terror or anxiety or depression. Perfect love casts out fear. This isn't a simple takes it and throws it away thing. This is a total renewal of the original host to make the environment hostile and incompatible with fear. This is terror forming our spirit, our mind, our emotions and our heart. This is God being our high place, our fortress and shelter from the storms of life. This is roosting under his wings. This is armor of God under his protection stuff. How can fear thrive? How can we be dismayed when we see Jesus looking at us every day in the mirror? This is an atmosphere of victory because we're placing him first in all things. Think about his perfect love and how you can apply it to your words and actions every day. All those negative feelings that come at us are children of fear. Stop raising them. Raise words of praise to God instead. Praise Jesus. Let his love shine. Let him become your thoughts, your heart, your desire. In him we live and move and have our being. Acts 17 28. Let's be renewed into a new thing. A Jesus thing. A holy thing. Let God do his work. Get into the word and let your renewal begin today. Our daily affirmation of God's love is Ephesians 3 16 to 19. God's love is big and deep. And to be honest, you won't understand it on your own. I don't understand it on my own. It is beyond human comprehension. It's coming to us from a being who existed outside everything we can experience and in fact made everything that we can experience. How can we understand that? We can't. But praise God we can be shown. He can unveil it within us as his unlimited riches of glory and favor. If we consistently use our faith in big and small things, the life of Christ will be released inside of us. We will rest in the secret place in his love. That love will become the source and the root of our life. Our minds will be transformed by the word of the Lord. Then and only then we will be in a position to be shown the great magnitude of Jesus' astonishing love in all its dimensions. We need a piece of Jesus inside us fully operating and rested on to understand God's love. But the word says we can achieve it. The word says we can make that journey. And what a journey. What love. As we close, remember that you have earth. You are precious and valuable. Declare this. Today God loves that I, now you, fill in the blank. Was it a meal you made? A smile you gave? Did you get out of bed? Read? Put on socks? There's no wrong answers here. There is no end to God's love. And no end to the things about you that he loves each and every day. Pick one. And remember, the Lord loves you just because you're you. 1 John 4 9-10 tells us, By this, God's love was revealed in us, that God has sent his only-born Son into the world, that we might live through him. And this is love. Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as the atoning sacrifice for our sins. His perfect love turned away God's wrath because of sin. And it casts out our fear too. See verses 18 and 19. We love because he first loved us. He just loves us. Can't get enough of us. And that is wonderful. See you next time.