Mark 12:30-31
30 “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”” NET Bible
According to Strong’s Concordance, one of the Greek words for love is agàpe and it is defined is as such: love, benevolence, good will, esteem, love-feasts. Properly, a love which centers on moral preference. Typically refers to divine love or the love of God for man and man for God.
The Greek word for lust is epithumia and it means: desire, passionate longing, lust, eagerness for, inordinate desire. Epi means “focused on” and thymòs, “passionate desire”—properly, passion built on strong desires (urges). These can be positive or negative whether the desire is inspired by faith (God’s inbirthed persuasion).
We can see by these definitions that the two words may imply similar things, but the end result is different. Love focuses on serving and benefiting others while lust focuses on serving and benefiting self. From this difference, we can see God’s nature and the devil’s nature because they both seek to hone his respective nature in our hearts. Our job is to make a choice of which nature we will allow to grow and be rooted in our hearts. Depending on our choice, we will have either life in abundance or destruction.
God made us in His image and likeness. Many things can be said about this statement, but I am going to focus on the fact that He created us to love Him and worship Him. He also created us to love the creation He loves. But the serpent (Satan) came with his contamination of selfishness in the Garden of Eden to turn our love into lust. He did that through Adam and Eve. Before the appearance of the serpent, Adam loved God and His creation all around him and was able to be used of Him in a powerful way to co-labor with Him on behalf of what he was given authority and influence over.
What enabled Adam to do that were God and His loving nature which helped him desire the best for what he was entrusted with. The wholesome relationship he had with His God provoked him to take care His creation and make sure it was well preserved and growing healthy. For this, Adam had everything needed to do that because his trust and reliance on God were strong and the glory of God’s Kingdom was within his reach.
Then Eve came and became his help meet and the two were able to do even more together in unity. They gave to one another of that love that God had poured in them not only for Him, but for each other and His creation. Much more could be accomplished between them as they joined their gifts and talents together to fulfill the mandate God had given them to be fruitful, multiply, subdue, replenish the earth and take dominion over what they had been blessed (empowered) to care for (See Genesis 1:17-18).
But then came the serpent with its cunning craftiness to deceive Eve and make her question God’s mandate for them of not eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They ate of the fruit and their disobedience worked a transformation in them that turned them into people that focused more on themselves than on the things they once loved. They still did their work in the Garden, but now their own agendas were more important.
At this point they could see things in a different way and no longer could they reason things from God’s loving nature. No longer could they give themselves wholeheartedly to care for what they were entrusted with without expecting something in return. No longer could they relate to God in the same way they did before. In addition, their senses were no longer used to help in co-creating and co-laboring with God. Now their focus was to satisfy their own desires and go after what looked, sounded, and felt good to them.
In addition, they could not inquire of the Lord for His input whenever they seemed challenged with their mandate to make what was given to them to be conformed to the ways of the Kingdom of God. This happened because instead of a faith that works through love, the fear that perverts had set in. They had become sensual beings (focused on their senses where the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life were more important to them) and this became the compass for their decision-making.
Galatians 5:6 says, “For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision carries any weight—the only thing that matters is faith working through love.” NKJV
1 John 2:16 also states, “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.” NKJV
The more they did this, the more they turned from the One who loved walking with them and hearing their great ideas to name the things given to them to steward. Their contamination was too strong and caused them to concern themselves with their own ambitions at the expense of the things God had put under their care. This happened until they could no longer dwell in the Garden. By this time they and God had incompatible differences.
This self-centeredness caused them to reach the point of no return. So they had to be expelled from the Garden and this way, God made sure they could not return by placing a Cherub angel with a swinging flaming sword outside of the garden. This happened because once God exposed their condition, they did not repent. Instead, they tried to hide themselves and continued with the wrong thinking and behavior and what’s more, their reverence towards God was also gone.
Adam and Eve had exchanged the truth for a lie. Darkness had also become more comfortable for them than being in the light of God’s presence. But God, in His love for them, could not tolerate their selfish involvement with His creation around them, and sent them to the wilderness of testing to sweat and see how they had given up His glory for a lie that brought death to their dreams. He did this to help them return to the rock from which they had fallen to hopefully cause them to desire the genuine kind of love again instead of the lust of their senses (See Genesis 2-3).
Many in the body of Christ go through the motions of this state of being and still do it in the name of God. But in this hour, God is demonstrating His love for them and how, due to this kind of love, He will not leave them in their mess. For this reason, many will be sent to the wilderness of testing where they can know to reverence Him and learn to love Him, love themselves, so they can in turn love others and serve them and turn their attention from self to loving and serving others more than themselves.
This is not something to fear because the furnace of affliction is designed to turn us into pure and refined gold. Without this, we cannot love and serve God in the way He originally intended for us. The contamination of the enemy in us will be burned so that what is left is Christ in us, the hope of glory. Here we can run to Him instead of away from Him and make Him our first priority instead of a second or third option as before. No other God loves us enough to not leave us in our filthiness and comes down to pick us up to cleanse us with the water of His word and makes sure that the fire that is sent to refine us, does a thorough job.
Only He knows what the designed product should look like after it has gone through the process of removal of everything that was not originally intended for it. Therefore, the things that nurtured and sustained the wrong thinking like crutches, will be removed so we can depend on our God and Creator more purposely and learn to stand on His promises while we get to know Him in new ways.
So, in these times, when fear or uncertainty want to come, know that there is One who is focused on us and not on Himself. He is ready to give us the proper cleansing and purifying so we can be reduced to love and look more like Him. To Him alone be all the glory.▪
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