The Almighty God demonstrated His love towards us in Christ Jesus. Christ is the expression of God’s love to all the peoples of the earth.
The Israelites are God’s special people, that was chosen out of all the peoples of the earth to worship Him. But Christians are His Holy people. We as Christians have been set apart for the Lord, for the purpose of manifesting His love to the world, that has no knowledge of Him.
That’s why we had been created in God’s image, for the whole world to know Him through His love working in us. God’s love is the only answer to the problems of the earth, and all Christians have been called to manifest it to a world that does not know Him.
God cannot do anything on the earth without the Christians. He can’t transform the world without our ability to use our faith in Him with His love.
That’s why the Apostle John wrote:
“Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore, the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.”
I John 3:1 NKJV
God is love. His love towards us is unfathomable and its depth can never be measured. You were created for this very purpose – to love the unsaved world with the love of God:
“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
John 3:16 NKJV
God’s love in the life of a Christian will always yield to His Spirit. His love produces the very best in us. Our willingness to yield in obedience to His word and His Spirit, causes us to produce after the fruit of His love.
The height of our Christian life is measured by how we are walking by faith and love towards one another as Christians. There is no depth, height, length or width with God, which the seed of His love can’t bring us into.
And He has showered His love upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who now lives in us. Every child of God has been created in the image of His love. The ability to love the unlovable is in every Christian on the earth today.
There is no Christian who cannot love. And everything that God creates through us has the seed of His love in it, for the purpose of increasing and multiplying His Kingdom on the earth.
We can know if a new Christian will become hot, cold or lukewarm in response to the gospel of Jesus Christ, based on what is being done with the seed of God’s love in that newly saved life.
We grow in the love of the Lord as we release our faith to walk on the authority of His word. There is no Christian life experience without the walk of faith in His love. If we are not living by faith, we will never be able to have any hope, for the future about eternity in Christ Jesus.
God’s word reveals His love.
God’s word is the spiritual food that a Christian needs for spiritual growth. The spiritual life of a Christian is dependent on the pure milk of God’s word. We grow daily by feeding on it. Our faith grows as we become dedicated to feeding on God’s word and acting on what it says every day.
That’s why the Bible says in challenging those who are not growing in love:
“For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the first principles of the oracles of God; and you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a babe. But solid food belongs to those who are of full age, that is, those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”
Hebrews 5:12-14 NKJV
Those who are acting on what God’s word says as they are reading and meditating on it daily, have trained their senses to discern good and evil. They are growing in spiritual discernment for walking in the perfect will of God.
After a while they will start desiring the solid food of God’s word. They will begin to seek solid food of God’s word for their spiritual growth.
That’s one of the reasons why certain Christians often change churches. When they are in need of the solid food of God’s word and have spiritually outgrown the desire for the pure milk of the word within a congregation; they will go somewhere else within the Body of Christ to get it.
The desire in a Christian for the solid food of God’s word emanates from the longing of his heart to grow in love. Solid food belongs to those who have come to full age. They are the ones who have learnt to grow in love by faith in God’s word.
They are the ones who have learnt to grow up with the application of God’s word, so as to transform their world for Jesus with the love of God. They are the ones who have trained their spiritual senses to recognize good and evil, by personally and practically applying God’s word to their own lives.
You can walk in the love of God.
We grow in love as we are growing by faith. The Apostle Paul said to the Thessalonians:
“We are bound to thank God always for you, brethren, as it is fitting, because your faith grows exceedingly, and the love of every one of you all abounds toward each other,”
II Thessalonians 1:3 NKJV
As we are growing up spiritually, our faith is growing exceedingly as well. Our love as Christians towards one another then begins to abound or multiply. We then begin to spread the aroma of God’s love everywhere that we are going in this way.
If God’s love is not abounding in your Christian life, it’s a sign that you probably are not spending enough time in His word.
God’s word reveals His love to us. And as our faith is growing exceedingly, we are empowered to spread the aroma of His love to a lost world.
The Christian church in Thessaloniki was growing in faith as their love towards each other was also growing. Exercising our faith with the seed of God’s love causes us to grow in faith and love. If the early Church could grow in faith and love, the modern-day Church can do much more.
Every believer in Christ Jesus has the faith of God. But it’s important to be using our faith to make the world a better place with God’s love. That’s why we are on the earth – to transform it with God’s love.
To be able to grow in faith and love, we need to be feeding our spirit man with God’s word. A Christian who is not feeding on the word of God can’t grow in the love of God. And if you are not growing in love, you are not growing in faith even though the seed of faith is in your life.
That’s why we can’t be feeding our natural bodies with natural food at all times, while forgetting to feed the spirit man also. There are those who do think that the word of God that, they are getting during the Sunday Church services is all that is needed for their spiritual growth.
That’s basically not true. God’s word that brings spiritual growth into our lives, comes out of the deposits that we are making daily on your own. You are responsible for your personal spiritual growth, through prayer and by abiding in God’s word.
Pastors can only point God’s word to you, but they can’t make you a doer of what it says. There has to be a passionate desire in your life to do what God’s word says. It’s your personal responsibility as a Christian to act and do what God’s word says.
There are Christians who don’t even read the Bible at home. They don’t study God’s word in private devotions. But they do have all the time to study and follow every television show, and other things on the internet and the social media. And these are the very Christians who are wondering, why they are not growing in the things of God.
A Christian who wants to grow exceedingly in faith, needs to be seeing God’s word as the only source for spiritual food and growth. The social life of that Christian without any involvement and engagement in the word of God, will drain the life of Christ out of such a Christian.
That’s why certain Christians are not different today from the people of the world, in the way they are living their Christian lives. They can’t transform their world with the seed of God’s love in their lives, because they are not acting on God’s word for the unsaved world to see.
They are more involved with the worldly things to the extent that, they don’t even have the time to be reading God’s word and to pray. All of their various engagements with the world are devoid of God’s word and their personal testimonies of Jesus.
God’s love can change your world.
The life of God in us is in the very center of our hearts. Nothing can ever change that. The seed of God’s love is in you, even though you may be doing nothing productive with it to change the world at the moment. You were born again to change the world, and not to be like the world.
Start being a doer of God’s word with His love to change your world. Everything begins with you and your faith in God with His love. The sooner you realize this the better things will become for you in your Christian life.
We were born again to spread the aroma of Christ everywhere we go on the earth.
I remember once meeting an agnostic atheist a few years after getting saved. He had told me while I was witnessing about God’s love to him, that he actually believed that when Christians are talking about the heart of a man, that we are actually referring to the heart which pumps blood through the body.
There are many people in the world who do think like this. But I will never forget that encounter with this agnostic atheist. It opened my spiritual eyes as a very young Christian at the time, to see how the devil was using the ignorance of some people to deny them of salvation.
There is no way that the natural heart can function like the center of the spiritual heart in man. These are two different things. I had to spend some time explaining the differences in the usage of that word and their meanings to him.
I eventually was able to get the man saved by directing him to the words of one of his famous philosophers concerning it. There was no point in trying to point him to the scriptures, because he was not going to accept it.
I had to come down to his level of reasoning and get him to the place, where he could begin to understand the thoughts of God towards him.
And the moment when he realized that God is love, he became open to accepting the scriptures as God’s word. It takes a lot of patience and faith with love to witness Christ to such people. You will have to understand their way of reasoning, so as to be able to help them to see Jesus.
This was exactly what Paul did when he first preached to the Athenians. He told them:
“For as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: “God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’”
Acts 17:23-28 NKJV
Paul used the very words of their own philosophers in Athens to open up their hearts, to see God in action around them even though they never knew Him.
A man who does not know that he has a heart to surrender to the Lord, can never experience the love of God. God’s love is not sensual. It’s spiritual and of the spiritual heart.
This agnostic atheist’s understanding of love was limited to the understanding of the unsaved world. But he finally received Christ and experienced the in filling of the Holy Spirit.
It’s always beautiful to see people without any religious background receiving Jesus. The hunger in them for the knowledge of the Lord can’t be quenched. They grow faster than certain people with religious backgrounds.
More than very often people with religious backgrounds had been religiously brainwashed, and not biblically taught. The religiously brainwashed people can’t be taught to believe contrary to many things that, they had been brainwashed into by their denominations. Religiously brainwashed Christians can’t grow as fast as those, who are being biblically taught and discipled.
And that’s why they can’t love the Christians outside of their own denominations. They can only love those in their sheepfold. But God’s love transcends denominational barriers. If a Christian wants to grow in love, then that Christian needs to be seeing the end of the earth in the spirit.
The Body of Christ is bigger than any Church or denomination. It’s the love of God in the lives of Christians that causes us to abound as we are growing exceedingly.
The best thing to do for those who are brainwashed, is to keep on loving them. Love works by faith in helping them to overcome the hindrances to their spiritual growth.
Spread His love to the world.
That’s why taking the gospel to the unreached people of the world is so important. The unreached people of the world need to hear the gospel preached to them, at least for the first time.
That’s the commitment of Bible Vision International Ministries. We are committed to taking the gospel to people who are not yet churched. The world is full of many people in Churches who are doing nothing with the seed of love in their lives. Many of them are not growing in love and in faith, because they have not been taught to act on the word of God.
I remember a time that I was in a Siberian village for rural evangelism. It was the very first time that this young lady in the village heard about God’s love for her. She wept as she demanded to know why I did not come a week before the time. Her mother had died a week before I got there. She had died without anyone coming to the village, to tell the whole village that God loves them.
The inhabitants of the village had never heard Christ preached before. The closest Russian Orthodox Church to the village was about seventy miles away. There was no church in this village at the time. Nobody ever went there to tell them about the love of God until our team got there. And there are many communities in different nations of the world like this.
A church was started in that village at this young lady’s house; that is reaching out to other villages in the region to spread the love of God.
God’s love is abounding today among those Siberian Christians. Their faith is growing exceedingly. And it all started with a seed of faith and love towards them, that was sowed in one life.
You can imagine how many people are dying daily, who had never heard about Jesus. There are many unreached people groups that have not yet heard about God’s love for them. They need to hear about Jesus from you. It’s only by using your faith to step out of your comfort zone that this is possible. Are you going to step out into the end of the earth?
Denominationalism cannot save the world. Jesus is the only answer to the world’s problems. There are many peoples of the unsaved and unreached world who are waiting for you. They want to hear about what God’s love has done for you.
There are many people who had heard about God’s love and not responded to it in many cities around you. Time is running out. You don’t have the time to be wasting with them, with their unresponsive attitude towards the gospel of Jesus Christ. Jesus is coming back to take the Church with Him very soon.
That was why He told us:
“But whatever city you enter, and they do not receive you, go out into its streets and say, ‘The very dust of your city which clings to us we wipe off against you. Nevertheless, know this, that the kingdom of God has come near you.’”
Luke 10:10-11 NKJV
What are you going to do with God’s love seed in your life? There is a world out there waiting to hear your personal testimony of salvation. Are you ready to go?
