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The Facet of the Capacity to Love, No. 1
BD14-01© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)
We have been considering the matter of
being a spiritually mature Christian. We’ve indicated
that we’re thinking about this in terms of a five-sided
edification structure in our souls—a pentagon of defense. We
have thus far studied three facets of this pentagon. We
began with grace orientation, and explored the fact that God’s way of
dealing with us in this age is on the basis of what He can do for us,
and not on the basis of what we can do for ourselves or for Him. We studied the facet of the mastery of the
details of life in which we learned that the number one thing in every
Christian’s life must always be doctrine so that it is
“the Word, and the Word, and the Word.” Everything else, details
which, essential or non-essential as they may be, are nevertheless
details in respect to the supreme calling of the study of the Word of God.
And then we have been pursuing in some detail the facet of a
relaxed mental attitude—a mind free of bitterness and all
other mental attitude sins. A mind which expresses itself toward God by the practice of the faith rest technique—the
fact that we walk not by sight but by faith on the basis of what God has promised us, on
the basis of what God had explained to us in doctrine, His ways of
operating, on the basis on what God has told us is coming ahead in history in the
prophetic word. Now this whole building is structure upon the foundation of doctrine in the human spirit.
This morning we take another step and
we are now going to look at another facet which we’ll call the capacity to love. We’ll
be looking at this in some detail. This capacity will be explored in three
ways: love toward God, love toward the
opposite sex, and love toward friends. No
Christian can view himself as a spiritually
mature believer until he
has grown to where there is within his being a capacity to love God, to
love your own particular man or woman, and to love your friends. This
is not a natural quality or inclination
within us. This is something which has to be developed.
If you will notice the fourth verse of
the hymn we sang this
morning went, “Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were
a present far too small. Love so amazing, so divine,
demands my soul, my life, my all.” Now
that’s pretty well put. Love so amazing,
as God has exercised toward us, does demand in response the total love
of our soul. And there lies the rub because it
is not within the normal natural capacities of people to love God with
all their heart, with all their mind, and with all their soul.
So, we have a very very important
subject to be looking at,
in the matter of what is love all about. It’s
a very confused issue. There’s
a lot of (nonsense) that is put out
even by Christians on the
subject of love. There’s
a lot of ridiculous kind of practices that are carried on among Christians under
the name of love.
It would be well therefore to begin
with the meaning of the word “love.” We
use it of course in a
very casual way, very carelessly in a variety of applications. Someone
may come up to you this morning and
say, “I love your dress.” “I
love that song we sang.” “I love
this item of food.” “I love
this fun.” “I love
that book.” We sing hymns
with expressions of love in them. We mistakenly
equate with sex. The dictionary
defines it as “a
strong feeling of affection,” but biblically it is much more
than any of these.
Let’s review for a minute what
we have already looked at in
the way of the word “love” in its New Testament use. The
nature of love is to be determined by the
meaning of these words. When God speaks
of love, He uses a word to describe it that explains it to us. Archbishop
Trent was a very great linguist. He
in his studies of languages discovered a
relationship on the part of the Latin church fathers, particularly a
man named Jerome who lived at the end of the fourth century and who translated
the Bible from Greek into Latin—the Latin Vulgate version which is the
basic translation of the Roman Catholic church. He noticed
in the study of the Latin writers that there was a relationship between
certain Latin words whose meaning was clear, and certain Greek words which were
used to equate with those Latin words.
He noticed that there was the Latin
word “diligo.” And
he noticed that “diligo” in Latin was the
word for love which was based upon the mental esteem of the object. It
was a word which was a mental expression
and a non-emotional expression. It had
no emotional qualities implied. It
simply meant: When a person came up to you
and said, “I love you,” and he said,
“diligo,” it meant, “I esteem you as a
being with my mentality. And I bear you
no ill will. I bear toward you a spirit
of good will and of blessing that I would impose upon you and wish upon
you.”
Then there was another word for love,
“amo.” This word had a
distinctive meaning, and this
was the meaning of a word that was (in contrast to
“diligo”
which was mental), this was emotional. “Amo”
was an emotional expression. One line quoted
from Cicero, one of the Latin writers, very clearly distinguishes the
use of these two words. He was talking to
one friend about another friend. Cicero
says, “I do not esteem,” and he used the word
“diligo.” “I do
not merely esteem the man, but I love
(“amo”) him.” That
is, there is something of a passionate warmth of affection and a feeling with which
I regard him. Cicero said of his friend, “I
not only value this man in my mind and esteem as a friend, but I have a
certain emotional affection and attachment toward him.”
Jerome followed the use in the Latin
Vulgate because he understood the meaning of Greek words. Whenever
he came to a certain Greek word for “love,” he knew which of
these Latin words to express it because he know which Latin word
expressed what the Greek word meant. Which is the clue
which is so strategic to us today to interpreting what the Bible means
when it talks about love.
What he discovered was this: Whenever the
Bible speaks of “agapao”
love, it was comparable to the
Latin “diligo.” So
that “agapao” is a
mental attitude. “Agapao”
has no emotional implications. You can be in a
position of mentality toward an individual where you bear him
absolutely no ill will, where you bid him nothing but the best. You
wish him nothing but the greatest. And
yet you have no emotional attachment toward him. You
wouldn’t want to go out to dinner
with him. You wouldn’t want to go off on
a camping trip. You wouldn’t want to
become comraderies and buddies in some social way. But
you don’t dislike him. You
don’t hate him. You
don’t have any bitterness toward
him. You don’t have any antagonism. You’re
not competitive with him. You have no
mental attitude sins toward
him. You just plain “agapao” him.
Now it was also discovered that when
it came to using the other
Greek word “phileo” in the Greek language that this
was comparable to “amo” in
the Latin, because “phileo” conveys the idea of
emotion. This has an emotional quality within love in
contrast to the mental quality of the other. So
mental love is “agape.” This
word connotes a relaxed mental attitude free of any ill will in the
form of any jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, hatred, unforgiving spirit, a
guilt complex, or competition. It connotes
love which is founded on an admiration, a veneration, or an esteem,
rather than an emotion. It means a mind
which is kindly disposed toward someone. And you
are concerned for his welfare.
For this reason, Christians are told
to “agape” their enemies. In Matthew 5:44,
when the Lord says, “Love your enemies,” this is the word that is
used. And you can immediately see why God could not
tell us to “phileo” our enemies because you cannot
command your emotions. You cannot go to
a person, “I want to direct
your emotions to have a certain feeling.” But
you can tell a Christian, “You should have
a certain attitude of mind which is free of ill will.” In
John 21 you have an interesting relationship of these two words. John
21, beginning at verse 15. The incident
where the Lord is asking Peter as to whether he loves Him. John 21,
beginning at verse 15, “So, when they had dined, Jesus said to
Simon Peter, ‘Simon son of Jonah, lovest thou me more than
these?’” Now here the word
that Jesus used is the word for mental esteem, “agapao.” “Do
you love me with a mental attitude free of any bitterness and ill will,
Peter, more than these others?”
And Peter says unto Him, “Yea
Lord thou knowest I love thee.” Ahh, but Pete
pulls a switch. Pete doesn’t use
“agapao.” He says,
“Lord, you know I ‘phileo’ you. You
know I’ve got a real affection of
emotional warmth toward you.” Now
apparently, following that disastrous denial on the part of confident
Peter, where he simply turned against the Lord right in the face of their
enemies, it was hard for Peter to say, “I’ve got this supreme
quality of mental good will toward you Jesus.” Because there was
something else about “agapao” love, and that is it
is not a human production. It is something
that only God can produce in us by means of the filling of the Holy Spirit. It’s
part of the fruit of the spirit. This is the word that is used when it says
that, “… the fruit of the spirit is love, joy,
peace,” and so on.
So, it seems that Peter just could not
rise, after such a devastating defeat, to say, “Lord, I love you with that kind
of love.” So, Jesus comes to him a second time, and he
says, “Simon, Son of Jonah, lovest thou me?” And
Jesus says, “… though
‘agapao’ thou me?” And
Peter again says, “Yes, Lord, I ‘phileo’
you.” The third time, in verse 17, Jesus comes down
and talks to Peter on his level, because here in the Greek, Jesus says,
“Simon, Son of Jonah, do you ‘phileo’ me?” And
Peter says, “Yes, I ‘phileo’
you.” And that was the extent to which Peter could rise on this occasion to
declare his love for the Lord.
Now it’s very revealing in
Scripture when you know the
difference in the meaning of these words. It
shows something very dramatic about Peter and
about his condition
right at this time following his great defeat. This
man was gun shy. In John 11,
if you’ll turn there for a moment, you have both of these
words used. This is the incident describing the
death of Lazarus. John 11:3 says,
“Therefore, his sisters (the sisters of Lazarus, Mary and Martha) sent unto Him saying,
‘Lord, behold, he whom thou lovest is sick.” The
word “love” here is “phileo.” “He for
whom you have an emotional friendship, your friend Lazarus, is sick.”
Verse 5 says, “Now Jesus loved
Martha and her sister and Lazarus.” Here it uses the
word “agapao.” The mental
attitude good will toward the members of this family, toward Lazarus and toward his two sisters. This
explains (in verse 5) the delay before
verses 6 and 7, that Jesus heard that His friend was sick, but he
waited two days in the same place, and then after that He said to His disciples,
“Let’s go to Judea again,” where Lazarus was. He
delayed. Now the delay would seem a
little heartless and unkind on the part of the Lord, but verse 5 makes
it clear that Jesus didn’t have any mental ill will against this
family. There was a reason for his delay, and the
reason was in verse 4. “This
sickness,” Jesus said, “is not unto death, but for the glory of God,
that the Son of God might be glorified by it.” The
sickness had to go to death so that Jesus could demonstrate the power of God
that resided in Him, to the glory of God, by raising Lazarus from the dead.
So, the Scriptures use the words necessary to make clear that
Jesus had an emotional attachment for his friend Lazarus, but he bore
no mental ill will toward the family as might be interpreted because of his delay. But
it was the result of His waiting so that
God could be glorified. Verse 35 says that “Jesus wept.” And
verse 36, in viewing this again, says, “Behold how He loved
him,” and here they used the emotional word “phileo.”
Now this is the basic meaning of these
words, and you should have the two clearly in mind. Jesus
said, “I give you a new commandment, to love one
another.” He is calling upon you to do something you
can do. He is not telling you to have an
emotional attachment to members of the congregation.
There might me some people in this
splendid Berean congregation that you don’t give particular care to be
comradery with. You don’t strike it off particularly. You
don’t have anything against them, but your
temperaments are not such, and your interests are not such, or your
state of life is not such that you might find occasion to be thrown together. It
doesn’t mean you don’t like
them, but God says, “You’d better love them. You
better see to it that you have a mental quality that is free of any ill
will.” So, don’t go around
trying to do in one of your brethren. Don’t
go around trying to undermine somebody. Don’t
go around trying to do anything that reflects a bitterness on your part
because that is a failure for which you can be held accountable.
Callouses
Now it’s going to be necessary
for us, in pursuing this subject of love, to review something else. If
you’ll turn to Ephesians chapter 4. We’re
going to have to have an examination this morning of the soul in
order for us to understand how the quality of love operates. In
Ephesians chapter 4 beginning at verse 17, you have the Scripture which explains to us how callouses
(insensitivity) can develop in your soul.
Soul
Now let’s take a look here. Here
is the soul. The soul has a mind. It has emotions. And
it has will. The mind has an expression in the way of
self-awareness. The mind also has an expression in the form of conscience in which we have our values and
our standards. Now this is the soul. This is the real
you. This is what leaves you when you die. This
is the person that all of us really know in its particular expression.
Now I want you to notice what can
happen within your soul and to your soul. What can happen
within your soul that destroys your capacity to love? The
facet we’re studying is how to be able to
love: God, the opposite sex, and your friends. Now I’m
going to show you how to destroy the capacity to love any of those. Verse 17
says, “This I say therefore and testify in the Lord, that ye
henceforth walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their mind.”
First we begin with vanity. The word
“vanity” means “emptiness.” It
is the Greek word “mataiotes.” This
means and emptiness. Now
this is the key word to describe the first step in developing spiritual
insensitivity in the soul to God or any expression toward God in love. The
unsaved have an emptiness in the mind of
the soul. They have no divine truth
there. A Christian can come to the same
state of soul emptiness. How does he do
it? He does it when he sits and listens
to the Word of God being explained, and he goes negative. Any
reservations in your mind toward
something that you are taught from the Word of God, if what you are
taught is indeed the truth of God, if you have the slightest bit of reservation
or neutrality, you have gone negative. And
when you go negative, there arises (God says) in your mind a certain
emptiness. There is a low pressure system
that develops in the mentality of your soul.
Now your understanding of this is
going to be difficult because I don’t know the condition of all of your minds this
morning. It may be that there are some
people here whose minds have become so hardened with layer upon layer upon layer of
callous already developed that you’re going to have a hard time even
paying attention to get hold of this that will explain what’s taking place
inside of you. You’re going to be wondering
around in your mentality all over the place even though your eyes may be glued up here
to the front. And we’re going to show you
in a little bit why, having come to the point of developing callouses on
your soul has set you upon a very very difficult uphill fight from which you may
never recover. So, if you haven’t gone too
far, listen carefully because there is a point where it is almost impossible
to return from a hardened status of soul.
Alright, here’s vanity. Because of
negative volition there’s an emptiness in the mind. A vacuum is
created at the emotions and at the will. What happens? Well
a low pressure area always wants to
equalize itself and it sucks something else in in order to stabilize. And
when you are not drawing in doctrine
because you have gone negative and you are not exposing yourself to
doctrine on a daily basis, either through attending church services, listening to
tapes on the Word, studying books on the Word, and reading the Word if you have
enough background to study it on your own, if you’re not daily
taking in the Word because you have gone negative, you’re going to take in something else.
You’re going to take in
falsehood from the world. You’re
going to suck in here human viewpoint. You’re
going to suck in slavery to the details of life. You’re
going to suck in mental attitude sins of one kind or another. You’re
going to suck in social concepts. A
lot of the things that are destroying the
nation today as being the things that we should do socially and that
are the rights of people that we should pursue that come from disorientation of
mind. You are going to be having guilt
complexes. You’re going to have
negative dispositions. And in general
all the way down through your being, your mind, your emotions, and your will, you
will have set up a vacuum and you’re going to be drawing in what is the
mind of guess who? Satan.
Satan is interested in giving you his
thinking. Now just get that straight. This is a subject
we have to go into in more
detail, but Satan is constantly preoccupied in giving you his thinking. He
will never disturb you as long as you are
psyched into him. As long as you
are phased in to his thinking, he will not bother you. He
never bothers a church where people are
phased into him. And he will take
your closest Christian friends and he will become the agent through them as
you see what happens here in the story, you can see why your Christian friends,
and why those good Christian workers that you’ve known for so long
can come to a position where Satan is using them to bring discouragement to your own
service and to your own life.
Do you remember when Peter came up to
the Lord and rebuked
Him, and Jesus was telling was telling him about what was ahead for Him
in dying on the cross? And the Lord
turns to this godly man Peter, and says, “Get thee behind me
Satan.” You obviously can understand that Satan is not going to
come to you through someone who is a distant unrelated personality.
Do you know how Satan is going to
discourage you? He’s going to get
somebody who’s an old
comrade of arms to go over to the traitor’s camp, to be a
deserted, to be a disappointment to you. That’s
the person. Someone that’s close enough
to you that you want to throw your hands up and say, “Oh,
boy.” And if you are disoriented in your soul, you
will say, “Oh, boy.” But if you are not
disoriented, you will pity the person who has gone to the rebel camp,
and you will understand that the person has become wormy in his soul, as hard
as that may be for you to say. It’s
pretty hard for the Lord to turn to Peter that he esteems so highly, and say,
“Peter, you are wormy in your soul. Get thee behind
me.” Satan is functioning through you.
Now Satan wants to bring his thinking
into your being. He wants to bring
his emotions into your soul. He wants to bring
his will into your soul. And the minute
you go negative toward the Word of God, you have set up the condition and
he’s got you. You will set up
the condition for a low pressure system. That’s
what it means here. “Do not walk as the other
Gentiles in the emptiness of their minds.” Why? Because,
verse 18, “… having the
understanding darkened.” You go from
vanity to a condition of darkness, and the word is
“skotizo.” This means an intensive blackout of your soul
from the stuff that has been sucked into it when you went negative
toward the Word of God.
And what is it that is darkened? “Having
the understanding,” which
is the word “dianoia.” This
“noia” is from the word
for mind—“noos,” the thinking part of our
mentality. “Dia”
is a preposition meaning
“through.” So, what this word
means is that the thinking part of the mind is darkened. You
come to the point where you cannot think through
straight. You can’t think straight. You
can’t think straight about God. You
can’t feel straight in your emotions
toward God. You can’t choose
straight in your emotions toward God because all areas of your soul are hit. And
you cannot express yourself through any
facet of a capacity of your soul toward God because there is now upon
your soul a darkness. You are literally blacked out.
Now you’re insensitive to
anything that God has to say to you. For this reason,
you can’t love God. When you have the
blackout, you can’t love God. You
can’t love your particular man or particular woman. You
can’t love your friends. You
simply cannot have the capacity for love when this condition exists in your
soul. So, what do you do? You make a substitute (pseudo) love. And
our churches are full of Christians who
are going around with their mouthful-of-teeth smile, and it’s
loathsome in every direction. Sweetness and light. Smiles and words.
And pretense of one fake personality with the
other fake personality. Because they’re incapable of loving.
If your soul is calloused, you will
not love and you will
not have happiness. I don’t
care how much you stand up and sing, “Oh, how I live Jesus.” It’ll
destroy all of the other
capacities of the facets of your soul, of your spiritual maturity structure. You
will not be able to master the details of
your life. Nor will you be
able to have a relaxed mental attitude, and you will not be oriented to grace. Why? Because
you’re calloused in your soul, and you’re sitting in a room of
pitch black darkness. What direction do you have? How do you know
where to move? You’re stumbling around like
some blind idiot. So, you make moves that you
think are in the right direction, and you think you’re
perfectly in command.
Ahh, but you see, Satan always comes
looking like you. That’s his disguise. Therefore, it
doesn’t bother you when you look
in the mirror and see yourself, and there’s the devil telling
you to do something. It’s OK with you. You like yourself
and you think it’s your idea. Or else he comes
through some close Christian and gets to you that way.
Now the result of all this: Vanity is a low
pressure area. It darkens the thinking through part of our mind being alienated from the
light of God. Now we are alienated. And the Greek
word is “apallotrioo.” It’s
in the perfect tense which means “estrangement.” It
means that the estrangement (because it’s perfect tense) happened in the
past at the point when you went negative toward doctrine and now it (the condition)
continues. It is something that is just passive. It will happen to
you if you go negative. You don’t have to do
anything more about it. It’s a thing that you
will experience.
So, here you are. You are estranged from God your heavenly father. And
that’s horrifying to contemplate. You
started with vanity in your mind that developed
a darkness over your thinking, over your understanding. That
resulted in an alienation from God your father, and the life which it
says is the life of God, which is our walk by means of filling with the Holy
Spirit.
And the next thing is that the reason
for this is why you’re in this condition. Why are you
alienated from God? Because of the
ignorance that has now developed in you. The
“agnoia.” This is the
ignorance, the incapacity to learn. As a matter of
fact, this is a preposition that is used in such a way with the
accusative that it means “through.” Through
the ignorance that is in you. Now how did
this ignorance come there? Well the only
real protection you and I have is Bible doctrine in our soul which we
get from positive volition. It’s
the only protection for a young person. It’s
the only protection for that young kid you send off to college in reference
to sex and everything else. And if he is
ignorant in doctrine, he’s in a bad way because
here’s what we’re leading up to.
The final stage is … the
blindness of their heart. Now the word
“blindness” is not really
blindness. It should say “hardening.” And
“heart” is the
soul. Because of the hardening. The Greek says
“porosis.” The hardening of
your heart. The hardening of
the soul. Spiritual ignorance. Why are you
spiritually ignorant? Because you are
in darkness. Why are you in
darkness stumbling around in
your soul incapable of having capacity to love? Because
there is a hardening that entered your soul. And
when did the hardening come in? At the point that
you were resistant to the Word of God.
So, here is your soul. Here is your mind. There
develops upon it a callous. Here is your
emotion and there develops a callous. Here’s
your will and there develops a callous that grows and grows and grows
and grows. And gradually you are less
sensitive and less sensitive and less sensitive in all phases of your
soul when it comes to expressing yourself. On
the one hand toward, and on the other hand toward man because you express
yourself in your soul toward God and toward man.
Now how are you going to express
anything toward God when you’re insensitive? How are you
going to express anything toward man when you’re insensitive? Our
subject is love. What the world needs is love, sweet
love. And it’s the thing it knows
least about because it all starts here in the soul. And
if you don’t understand this, you
don’t understand anything about
how you work. And until you get
hold of this and until you can read Ephesians 4:17-18 and follow through and
understand step-by-step what’s happening, you’ll never grasp
how you’re structured.
Now we’re not going to go into
the verses which follow which
tell how we express this insensitivity … , giving ourselves
over to lasciviousness to work all uncleanness with greediness and so on. That’s
something more. The soul begins with negative volition for
doctrine that you hear and your mind rejects. Negative
volition creates an emptiness in your soul
which acts as a vacuum. This vacuum sucks
in false doctrine and human viewpoint into the facets of your soul. These
false concepts cause a blackout upon
your soul so that you become spiritually ignorant and thus you become
alienated from the life which God has for you and you cannot express spiritual
life. And all this spiritual ignorance is
caused because you let callouses develop in the first place.
Now we’re interested in talking
about the capacity to love. On the basis of
this background let’s take a look at our friends the Jews once more of the
Exodus generation. The spiritual condition of
these Jews, as you will recall, is that they had spent one year coming
out of Egypt and they are wondering in the wilderness. During
that year they had received training from God
to prepare them to faith rest to go into the land and take it. Now
apparently they had been taught doctrine during
this year by Moses and taught promises and taught prophecy. And
they had the experience of great needs and
crises such as the need for water and passing through the Red Sea and so on, that God provided
for them so they had before their physical eyes the same evidence that doctrine,
promises, and prophecies were confirming for the eyes of their soul. Later
the performance of these people
revealed that most of the congregation had gone negative toward the
Word of God and had gone negative toward what they had seen, and so they had
developed this condition that we have here of callouses on the facets of their soul.
This was the picture of Israel after a
year of training. They were insensitive to God
because the only way your soul can function with God is that you let it
breathe. From God, through the means
that He has put up, inhale doctrine. And
then you let it on the other side exhale doctrine. Now
that’s a useful way of thinking about it. This
exhale will be toward God and it will be
toward man. But you inhale the Word of God.
I’ve been very interested to
observe how much resistance there is at the point of how we inhale the Word of God. I
talked to a lady this week again. She’s
kind of one of those forceful Christian
personalities. In the course of
our conversation I had indicated that part of the problems of the very
thing we were talking about in that conversation were due to the fact that
people were not being taught the Word of God, and that the breakdown is within the
churches themselves. People are substituting all
kinds of psychological devices in order to try to get their lives
straightened out.
And she said, “Oh, do you mean
that I have to learn from a
pastor-teacher if I’m going to learn anything about the Word
of God?” I said that’s the basic
procedure until you come to the point where you have enough doctrinal background that you
can go it alone, and you won’t go too far alone even then. God’s
order is to have a pastor-teacher under
whose instructions you sit and learn. “Oh,”
she said, “you’re
limiting the Word of God.”
And I thought now that is about the most stupid asinine
statement anybody could make. But
because I’m a gentleman, I didn’t tell it to her. I
just thought it. Here is the very thing I’m talking
about. It is to enter into the Word of
God which is forceful and powerful and quick and living. And
this inane woman is saying, “You’re
limiting the Word of God,” because I was telling her that she
can’t sit around with her … other ladies, and sit around and chit-chat with
each other about their miserable no-good bum husbands that they have at home so that
they can pray for each other. And have their
little Bible studies with women teaching women, and all the other trite
that goes with it. And she could see
immediately that if she had to be responsive to the direction of an
authority within a church that it was really closing in on her little playhouse life. And
so she was coming up with some sweet
little cliché like “limiting the power of
God,” and she didn’t know the first
thing about how the power of God was to be released. The
only way the power of God can work through the Word of God is to know the Word. And
that’s something more than reading on the page.
She says, “Well, do you mean that somebody can read the
gospel and not be saved?” I said, “Oh,
yeah, people can read the gospel out of the Bible and they can be
saved, but,” I said, “I notice that isn’t always the
case.” The Ethiopian eunuch, when Phillip asked him,
“Do you understand the gospel that you just read?” He
said, “How can I unless somebody explains it to me?” I
could see that she hadn’t thought of that. So
you need people explain the gospel to you
too.
Get yourself straight on how
you’re going to get doctrine. If
you’re not able to sit
and church where the Word of God is being taught—and
it’s pretty hard to find a
place where that’s being done. And
I mean being done on a doctrinal explanatory basis. There
are plenty of places … that have good
doctrinal statements and that are preaching the Word, but
they’re not blowing
the smokescreen of your personality away from you so that you can see
your true character. If you’re not able to sit
there then you’d better get yourself on tapes. And
if you’re a college student then you’d better wake up, that you
can’t go week by week and have the areas of your soul open to
drawing in all kinds of chaff and sustain yourself as a Christian, you’re
going to be the biggest dummy and dope when it comes to what your university and
college campuses have to shell out of anybody imaginable. You
will have no point of orientation and of
being able to evaluate and operate on divine viewpoint.
Well, the people of Israel were just
in this very condition. Doctrine in our
souls is the only thing that God uses through which we can understand and love Him. There
were a few like Caleb and Joshua who
did go positive and these were able to love God. Their
souls were sensitive. They kept inhaling and exhaling the Word of
God and so they could respond. But the
typical Christian of today who talks about loving God has very little
doctrine flowing through his being and he doesn’t love God at all. He
has to substitute some fake experience and
expression and he calls that loving God because Satan creates strong
resistance toward any means that may come for you to secure a flow of doctrine
through your being.
This is the picture here of the
typical Christian. He is heavy with
callouses on his soul. He’s
out of touch with God and he doesn’t
have any capacity to love God or people. And
if we don’t inhale doctrine, we’ll
inhale religion. (Christianity is
a relationship.) We’ll
inhale legalism, our doing instead of
God’s doing. We’ll
be slaves to details, our human viewpoint culture, and the whole bit.
Now the ten spies came back, you will
remember, and they were negative. Obviously this
was their soul right here, loaded with callouses. And
so they saw the giants, and because they were
dark in their souls, how did they respond? Caleb and Joshua
saw the giants and they said, “Oh, boy, the bigger they are
the harder the fall.” Caleb and Joshua
saw the fortified cities and said, “Boy, that’s going to be
a ball charging into there. Aren’t
they going to be surprised when we come running around a right-end play right smack into the city
on them.” Everything that Caleb and Joshua
saw, they said, “Boy, this is really going to be an exciting
campaign. This is unbelievable.
But the other dopes, because they were
calloused, and wondering around in the darkness of their soul that their callousness
had created saw the giants and they started crying. They
said, “We can’t take it.” Just
to give you a little clue as to how serious
callousness toward spiritual things is, Numbers 14:37 tells us that even those men who did
bring up the evil report upon the land died by the plague before the Lord. These
ten men dropped dead right there in front of the congregation. And
we’ll see a little later what effect this had on the congregation. It
really wowed them because you remember
that these were all number one boys. God
had told Moses to pick the chief, the number one, the prime area leader
from each tribe. Pick the guys with smarts. Don’t
give me any of your second-rate mediocre men. So, they were
all people who were of capacity personalities. And
there they dropped dead because of the callouses.
Judas was an unbeliever and he went
negative to the gospel. He built
callouses toward God. And that day when
Jesus Christ finally handed the sop to him and identified and Jesus reached out and
took that sop. At that moment,
what little light was still filtering in his soul closed off. And
Judas was dark. He went out and
betrayed Jesus Christ. He then repented
of what he did. He in effect confessed it. He took the money
and made restitution. And here’s where we’re going to
take the story up next week. The callouses
were still there.
For you as a Christian, I want to tell
you right now, that when you make your confession of sin, it doesn’t make any
change to what has developed here. Now there is a
way to make a change, and we’re going to tell you about that next
week, but Judas could make no change, so he went out and he committed suicide. In
that moment, John 13:30 says when he took that sop, in that moment, Satan moved in. He
had the man under full control. Then it was the sin unto death. There was nothing
further that could be done for him.
Once you permit a buildup of callouses
on your soul to take place, it is very difficult, and it takes a lot of time, to remove the
damage. We’re going to tell you next
week how to remove the damage.
Dr. John E. Danish, 1971
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