Continuing in Love. Julie Guggenbiller Market Street Fellowship

Transcription

1 Julie Guggenbiller Market Street Fellowship Continuing in Love I want to share a little today about the importance of continuing on in this journey of knowing the Lord, but I want to focus more on the fact that if we want to go where this goes, we don t get to modify things to suit ourselves along the way. You see, God already has a specific destination and expectation in mind for us, and He already has decided on a way to bring us there...and that way is through love. Now right off the bat I want to say that I feel like this is going to be hard for me to communicate to you... I suppose that s no different for any of us, though, when we stand up here... It s just that I tried so hard to think of bible stories to use, and how best to say it, and I was reading and reading, and stressing and stressing, but everything I tried to say was so scattered that I pretty much couldn t even remember what it was I was trying to spit out! So yesterday morning I decided to throw out the whole thing and just begin to write about what the Lord has been dealing with my heart on... I hope that s ok. And hopefully what I say will have a familiar ring to it, because what I m trying to say is basically an echo of the same thing others in the body have been saying for a while now. To get us started, I want to read from 2 John... 2 John is kind of an obscure little book for me... In my mind it always takes a back seat to its neighbor 1 John. That s why I decided to read it...i felt sorry for it! Now I don t know about you, but when I think of John s epistles, I think of two words: love and Gnosticism... Love because the way he writes to the churches is so gooey and gentle, and he talks constantly about love... and Gnosticism because I ve heard it taught that one of the main reasons John wrote his epistles to the church was to refute Gnosticism, a popular wrong teaching that was cropping up in various places. I m not sure I can explain Gnosticism for you because I don t know that I completely understand it, except to say that I think it has something to do with thinking you can live for God in your spirit through the knowledge of the truth, and yet still live according to the flesh in your daily life. I guess I d say Gnosticism seems to come out from an incorrect comprehension that allows us to think we have two lives, a natural one and a spiritual one. I m sure there s more to it than that, but what little I know about it reminds me of that Horse Pulling a Cart analogy Jessie mentioned in her most recent message... Eventually it becomes impossible for a horse and a cart to remain together if the cart keeps fighting where the horse is trying to take it. In the same way, the Lord has an expectation for us, a destination; a goal planned for His body, and He is taking us there... and as His body, we need to go with Him where He goes, along the way He chooses, instead of pulling against

2 Him... The journey of knowing Christ that we re on isn t open to personal interpretation at any point along the way. Ok back to 2 John... I m going to read the whole thing. It s short. 1 The Elder, To the elect lady and her children, whom I love in truth, and not only I, but also all those who have known the truth, 2 because of the truth which abides in us and will be with us forever: 3 Grace, mercy, and peace will be with you from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love. 4 I rejoiced greatly that I have found some of your children walking in truth, as we received commandment from the Father. 5 And now I plead with you, lady, not as though I wrote a new commandment to you, but that which we have had from the beginning: that we love one another. 6 This is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, that as you have heard from the beginning, you should walk in it. 7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world who do not confess Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is a deceiver and an antichrist. 8 Look to yourselves, that we do not lose those things we worked for, but that we may receive a full reward. 9 Whoever transgresses and does not abide in the doctrine of Christ does not have God. He who abides in the doctrine of Christ has both the Father and the Son. 10 If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into your house nor greet him; 11 for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds. 12 Having many things to write to you, I did not wish to do so with paper and ink; but I hope to come to you and speak face to face, that our joy may be full. 13 The children of your elect sister greet you. Amen. Now if your mind is anything like my mind, it instantly defines key words like truth love commandment teaching antichrist reward using some strange default understanding I ve learned somewhere along the way. But let s try to lay our default definitions aside so the Lord can show us His meaning of those words... And because I just read how John commands the church to walk in it, I want to focus on the word love today. It s important we not let our ideas about love define the love John mentions here... It would be so sad to miss what he is saying because we think we already understand it, you know? If love IS God s commandment for the church, it becomes awfully important that not interject our ideas about it and let Him give us His understanding of it. So laying our default definitions aside, this passage tells us that John is so happy because he s heard that some of them are walking in the truth. And not just any truth, but the same one that the Father gave in the beginning! And he tells them that he s going to give them a new commandment, but then he says that it s not really a new one, because it s the same thing they already heard in the beginning-- that they should love one another.

3 And then he says a tongue-twister-ish type of thing... He says Here s a new, yet not new, commandment for you... Love one another... and this is love, that we walk according to His commandments...and this is the commandment, that as you heard in the beginning, you should walk in it. It s like his understanding of love is a circle... the commandment comes out from love and love comes out from the commandment... Like he almost can t tell which came first, walking according to the commandment or love that causes them to walk according to the commandment... Maybe that s because though they sound like two different things to me, to John, love and the commandment they received in the beginning are the same thing?? John s commandment to them is that they should continue loving one another, just like they did in the beginning. It was as if he could have said, Hey guys... I know you ve been doing this for years... You ve heard a lot of truth, and have seen a lot of the Lord... But now more than ever it s important that I remind you that the way to continue on in Christ is exactly the same way you started... And it has to do with walking in love...this isn t the time to take it from here and stray from what you ve been hearing all along... Love has to become more than a word, a feeling, to us... Love, like all words, has to become defined in and as Christ... Love, to us, is the giving of Christ, the receiving of Christ, and everything having to do with our experience of Him. We like the idea of being loved by God when we get to define what that means... But the bible is clear... God so loved the world that He gave His Son... and that Son revealed His love to humanity through the judgment of the Cross; through putting death to death, and opening a door out of Adam and into Life in Christ. And judgment will always show us the same thing: That there is a clear division between heaven and earth... Between Adam and Christ, first and second, old and new... And the work of the Cross is to continually reveal and apply that division in the believer s heart, to transition us out of one man (Adam) and into another Man, Christ... Judgment happened once on the cross, but the effect of judgment is ongoing in the life of a believer, as over and over and over again, the cross works a deeper realization that it s not I but Christ. That is what continuing on in love means. So when I read those verses last week, I started to understand more why John love is so important in the body of Christ, and why he kept commanding them to walk according to the commandment of love. Because without judgment at work in us, making room in our hearts to fill with Christ who is the Love of God, all we will ever experience is ourselves. What I mean is that without love working in us, there can be no experience of Christ, only Adam... Without Love ruling in our soul, we re each left to operate out of our own sense of identity. Without love bringing judgment and dividing between what is and isn t Christ, there is no place in our hearts for God to fill with the nature and mind of Christ. So without love, there is nothing filling us except us. Do you see what I mean?

4 If we aren t walking in love, I m at the mercy of my fallen nature and you re at the mercy of yours... And we re each at the mercy of one another! But love judges and removes the Adamic man completely out of sight and gives Christ a body to abide in, and gives the body of Christ His life with which to be filled and abide in. Maybe you re better at controlling your flesh than I am, or maybe I m better at imitating Christ than you are, but at the end of the day, all of our best attempts miss the mark. Adam will never produce Christ, which is why we need to continue on in love. And just a word about the deception/antichrist part John wrote about... I could kind of see how refusing to walk in the truth by not letting the cross be the judgment and end of Adam and our entrance into Christ, forces us to have to come up with an alternative solution to our flesh predicament... And humanity s solution is generally to either cast the truth away completely and live apart from it, or adapt it to reflect ourselves... We delude ourselves by using our experiences as The Plumb Line of what it s like to be in Christ, instead of letting Christ, the Truth, God s Plumb Line, change our experience through changing our souls and making us into a reflection of Him. John warns the church not to get spiritual amnesia and forget that the way their journey started is the way it will continue: With a profound realization appearing in their hearts of not I but Christ. And losing sight of that at any point along the way is deadly, because the only answer to the flesh is the judgment administered through the death of the cross. Not I but Christ is something the body of Christ will never out-grow the need to hear because flesh can t be overcome with right beliefs. Only the LIFE AND FAITH of Christ can do that... I m not trying to be depressing. It just makes such sense out of why we re told to love one another. In closing I want to share with you another rather obscure story I happened to read yesterday... And just so you know, I m always a little gun-shy to say what I think I saw in an OT story, because there is always a big picture the details of the story need to fit into... And there are so many people and places and kings and enemies, each with names that mean something that I can t keep straight... And even when I think I know what someone represents, his role can switch from one sentence to another! So I can never get too comfortable thinking I know what it all means... and I just kind of read and try to see what the Lord seems to be showing me, and not worry too much if no one else sees what I saw in it! That s my disclaimer if I botch this type and shadow, ok? I was reading in 2 Samuel 20 about where some guy named Sheba tries to start a rebellion against David... You really should read it for yourself, but here s a summary: All the men of Israel desert David and follow after this guy Sheba who said, We have no inheritance in David! Each man has to look out for himself!... [That sounds just like what my flesh says!] When David hears about it, he tells a guy named Amasa to gather the men of Judah together in three days and then come back together with them and appear before him.

5 And Amasa went to assemble the men of Judah, but he delayed longer than the set time which David had appointed for him... (He had an agenda of his own) So David ended up ordering a guy named Joab to chase Sheba instead... While Joab was on his way to find Sheba, he meets Amasa, the guy who didn t do what he was supposed to do, and leans in to give him a kiss and ends up killing him with his sword... And Amasa died right in the middle of the street, with his guts spilling out all over the place... And then Joab continued down the road chasing Sheba, like nothing ever happned... And this is the part that got me... It says in verse 11, Meanwhile, one of Joab s men stood near Amasa and said, Whoever is for Joab and for David, follow Joab! And when the man saw that all the people stood still, he moved Amasa, the dead man, into a field and threw a garment over him, when he saw that everyone who came up on him halted. And when he moved Amasa s dead body from the road, all the people continued following on after Joab, to pursue the bad guy Sheba. For whatever reason, Amasa modified David s orders to suit himself... Maybe he didn t think what David wanted mattered that much? And that got him in trouble. He was killed by one of David s men with a sword and his dead body was left in plain sight where everyone could see it... And seeing him dead like that caused the rest of the people to not want to follow Joab and David... Like maybe they thought they d end up dead too, if they followed someone so intent on carrying out the King s orders...? But there was another man standing there next to the dead body of Amasa, watching how the sight of death had the power to stop people from following the King... So he moved the dead body out of the highway and put it in a field, and covered it up, so no one could see it... And then the people continued down the highway, following Joab, the man who was carrying out the King s orders... Maybe I m thinking too hard about it, but that looked to me like what happens when we love one another. Yes there is a judgment that brings death to anyone who operates outside of the mind and will of Christ... And when we see that sort of ruthless judgment executed like that, it causes us to not want to go any further in following the Lord where this goes... Maybe the admonishment to love one another has to do with making conditions right for one another so we can finish what was started in us? Maybe what we re supposed to do when we see a dead man in the middle of the road I m speaking of our old nature, here -- whether what I see is my own dead flesh or yours is realize that carrying out the purpose of God is the supreme the only thing that matters, and love one another enough to drag what is already judged and dead out of the way, and cover it up, so no one can see the horrible sight of it. Because seeing the flesh in ourselves and one another can cause us to lose heart and stop somewhere along in the journey into the purpose for which we have been called by God? Just a thought.