Good morning Divine Perspective Readers, I trust you had a great week. Like I wrote at the nascent stages of this blog about the Simplicity Of God, it’s imperative we know that God is soooo simple, that we actually need someone’s unfortunate help to miss Him and misunderstand His ways. He knows the most important thing in life is Character, like I wrote in the last post, (if you’re yet to read that post please do), and rather than give you 100 keys to developing your character, He tells you only one thing is needful. Sometimes I really wonder why that concept of keys only makes sense in the church, because quite frankly, it doesn’t make sense outside the church, there are never many different keys to one door… That’s a joke though, and of course there’s nothing wrong in simply using keys in terms of principles in order to drive home a good teaching. Like I was saying, God doesn’t give us 100 keys to developing our character, or 67 steps to reaching the mature man. This however is what He says, that if you grab my essence, which is LOVE, you won’t have to bother about the keys and steps. He locks up the whole essence of Character in Himself and gives it to us to glean from.
Let me also say this, that what holds the world together is not sheer power, it is INTEGRITY. Yeah I know Hebrews 1:3 says He upholds all things by the Word of His power, but may I also say that if that Word with which He upholds the world is subject to change and fallibility, then there would be nothing it’s holding together. God is God primarily because of His Character. The Power of the Word is in its Integrity, its Immutability, its CHARACTER. Characters even on a theoretical note do not change. 4 is 4 in Nigeria, America and every other part of the globe, it never changes. The moment the identity of 4 can be subject to climatic conditions, time or perhaps location, then the entire body of knowledge called Science would lose its essence. The angels don’t shout Powerful Powerful Powerful in heaven, but they do shout Holy Holy Holy. This is not an attempt to put Power and Character into a battle for superiority contest, but to make us realise that our lives will actually be more powerful if lived according to the virtues of God, which has now become our inherent nature.
Romans 1:4(kjv) And declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead
It took the Spirit of Holiness, which is the Holy Spirit for Him to be declared the Son of God with Power. You don’t know what true power really means until you meet a man of Character. Character broke the power of apartheid in South Africa, ammunition and nuclear weapon didn’t, but Character did. God sought a man who would break the hold of sin on humanity, it took a sinless man to do that. Now we must realise at this point, that God isn’t seeking a perfect man, thank God we already have that in Christ, but He seeks men who would represent the Perfect God to the imperfect world, and the only vehicle through which we can do that is LOVE. It’s funny how unadvised Christians see Grace as the opposite of Holiness, they see Holiness as an old testament teaching, what a shame! The reason for Grace is ultimately Holiness. Holiness will never be subsidized for the sake of the new covenant. If anything, Grace raises the stakes and standards of Holiness even higher. Grace teaches us to live holy lives and not otherwise. Someone might be wondering… “So what part does he get to talk about It’s All In Love”? Don’t mind me, I like to flow as the Spirit leads, so I believe some folks needed to read that. Like my pastor would say, I said all that so I could say this… All of God’s Character is loaded into one chief courier; LOVE.
Check out 1 Cor 13, and put it side by side Gal 5:22, where the fruit of the Spirit is listed, you’d find a striking semblance in the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5 and the attributes of Love in 1 Corinthians 13. God is LOVE. That’s all we need to really realise. That whenever we show love to anyone around us, we are not just trying to be nice, we are actually dispensing the fragrance of His majestic presence. God can’t come any closer to man than He already has. His Voice and Signs were predominant in the old covenant, His Person was manifest in flesh as Jesus before the ascension and now post resurrection, His life is expressed through all His Sons and daughters. This life has no other expression apart from LOVE.
Romans 5:5b …because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.
If you’re born again, guess what? You have all the content of the fruit of the Spirit, including gentleness, endurance, long suffering, faith, temperance, etc… All of them. When we do not love, we are not giving the Holy Spirit full expression on the earth. I mentioned in a post sometime ago that we have more authority on earth than God does, primarily because of our earth suit i.e our body… So whoever we give the permission to use our members (our body and emotions) to, is the one who is in authority and would do as his nature permits. If you put out love in an environment, and inject envy, strife and hate, then what you get will be a direct product of the devil’s nature.
James 3:16 For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.
… Like I’d always say, if you flip that verse around, you’d get something like this… For where Love and Peace is, there is clarity and every purposeful good work. Yield your members as instruments of God unto righteousness and not otherwise, and there’s no other way to do that, than to be completely overwhelmed by God’s Love. Watch out for our next post, which will be “Let It Sink”. Enjoy your weekend.
Much love
