Chapter 1

The Overriding Principle – Love.

Most of us, as Christians, believe and accept that God is One in Three, and Three in One but struggle to understand ‘How’ and ‘Why’.  I hope to explain better in a later chapter this Three Stranded Cord principle of the Holy Trinity, but before we go into specific aspects of Three Stranded Cord Theology we need to see the three stranded cord itself come under one overarching principle, that principle is the one that harmonizes the whole book of God and is the principle of love.

The church today in the 21^st century can be said to have divided into two halves, whatever denomination or stream you may examine, for example the Catholic Church at one end of the spectrum to the Pentecostal at the other end, and these positions or entrenchments can be defined as, ‘The Faith Movement’ and ‘The Word Movement’. 

But there is a third movement, one we take for granted as read, but during the last hundred years at least, very little practiced in its pure state and that third part or movement is the grand movement of Love.

If we today could combine the word, the faith and the love movements together with the right balance we could have an unbreakable cord, an unstoppable church.

But the truth is we don’t.  It must be the pre-eminence of the word or faith but definitely not the dangerous doctrine of love, which cannot be controlled by man or church, and yet the word and faith’s main focus is love, in fact the whole Bible’s focus is love, love based on relationship with God first, neighbor second and each other third; from Genesis to Revelation the whole Bible is based on love.

God created us out of love, He loved Adam and Eve, He loved Abraham, Isaac and Israel, He was with Joseph in prison and loved Moses, in fact at the heart of the Law given by and to Moses is the royal law of love.

In Exodus 20 when God gives Moses the Ten Commandments God says in verses 3-6 …

3          " You shall have no other gods before Me.

4          " You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;

5          you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me,

6          but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

And in Deuteronomy 6 verses 4-7 Moses focuses on the Great commandment when he writes…

            4          " Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!

5          "You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.

6          " And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart.

7          "You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up.

Many Christians do not see the harmonization between the Old and New Testaments.

In the Old Testament, God is perceived as a God of vengeance and anger but God is not a schizophrenic who suddenly changes personality from one of judgement to one of love and freedom.

Love combines and provides a bridge over both Old and New Testaments because our God is the same ‘yesterday, today and forever’ and does not change He is, as He created us multi-faceted, and so can be a God of Holiness as well as a God of love without these facts being paradoxical, contrary or confusing.  It is only because we want to create God in our own image and to put Him into a box of limitations.

But God has no limits, even if we try to set Him them, and for Him there is no conflict between judgement or love.  There are so many examples of God’s love for His people in the Old Testament that it is hard to choose an example, but one of my favourites is the story of Elijah in 1 Kings 19 in which Elijah after defeating the false prophets of Baal runs away from King Ahab’s wife Jezebel after she threatens to kill him.

God not only sends an angel to encourage and support him as he flees to Horeb, the mountain of God, but speaks to him with the ‘still small voice’ directly instructing and comforting him in his need; this truly illustrates the love and care that God has for those He has created.  And we may say ourselves today, ‘Yes, but I am no Elijah.’ But this again calls into question the love of God that He has for all His creatures, without favor or partiality.  Elijah was a man called by God who was marked by his availability not his ability and we are all called to be so ourselves today.

God looks at our heart attitudes to see if what we do is out of love and not out of ambition, fear or compunction or duty

Isaiah the poetic prophet writes about people honoring God with their lips, but their hearts being far from Him and this neatly segues us into the New Testament and the gospels and Jesus the Son of God’s teaching on love.

Jesus quoted Isaiah 29 verse 13 in Matthew 15 verses 7-9 calling the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites for teaching the same thing, the letter of the Law and not the heart of it.

The heart of the Law is love and this can be seen through God’s and Christ’s mercy, grace, forgiveness and sacrifice, we can see this in the story of the woman caught in the act of adultery or the penitent thief on the cross.

In fact the Three Stranded Cord of New Testament doctrine can be summed up in Jesus teaching and practice of love, not eros, physical love based on affection, feeling or emotion but agape love, unconditional love based not on but in God who is love (1 John 4 verse 8).  The cross of Christ and Calvary being the ultimate expression of this love.

Jesus’ teaching on love is itself three stranded; simply put Jesus taught, love God first, love your neighbor second and this included our enemies and strangers; and to love one another third, the common denominator being – love.

We see this illustrated in the gospels in two passages; the first is Matthew 22 verses 34-40…

34        But when the Pharisees heard that He had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.

35        Then one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him, and saying,

36        "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?"

37        Jesus said to him, " 'You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.'

38        "This is the first and great commandment.

39        "And the second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'

40        "On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."

In John’s gospel Jesus added a third commandment to this.  In John 13 verses 34-35 He says…

34        "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

35        "By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another."

Jesus repeats this commandment in John 15 verse 12.  But back in John 14 Jesus says in verses 21-24…

21        "He who has My commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him."

22        Judas (not Iscariot) said to Him, "Lord, how is it that You will manifest Yourself to us, and not to the world?"

23        Jesus answered and said to him, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him.

24        "He who does not love Me does not keep My words; and the word which you hear is not Mine but the Father's who sent Me.

To unpack this a bit, and it can only be a bit because it would take a very large book to expound the doctrine of biblical agape love; is to basically state that in my view, and I hope you will assent, that love is the key, the Master’s key, the skeleton key which opens every door in the kingdom of God.

Jesus was saying here that agape love is unselfish, selfless and unconditional; it doesn’t count the cost and is sacrificial by its very nature, this is borne out by Jesus’ ultimate expression of love, His death on the cross.  But more than that, He taught that love, true love could be acid tested by obedience to God and to His commandments and love for God is a commandment not a choice that we make, withholding or bestowing it as, where and when we will.

Agape love, which can only be found in Jesus’ teaching was a radical concept, a revolutionary teaching which has just as much force today in the 21^st century as it did in His day.  Who else would say ‘love your enemy’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ and illustrate it through the Parable of the Good Samaritan?

Today we rationalize and excuse and justify why we don’t as Christians literally apply His commandments, if we love those who persecute us or mistreat us or abuse us we are afraid of being ‘doormats’, we interpret the scriptures to suit ourselves.  ‘Washing the disciples feet’ for example today is not practiced literally but is used as a figurative metaphor for service as a whole, humility in the church is seen as a control mechanism used to manipulate the membership, but seldom practiced by the church leadership.

And then we dare to say, ‘Where is the power, the gifts, the miracles, the signs and wonders?’  The answer is found in love and the practice of it, this is why the early church was so different, its distinctive mark was love, love freely shared, freely given, freely practiced, frightening to us Christians today!

The apostle Paul carried on the teachings of Jesus on love in his letters to the churches.  He wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy 1 verse 5 that…

5          Now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart, from a good conscience, and from sincere faith,

What Paul was saying to Timothy and to us today was that the true intention of God’s Law is to cultivate love from the heart, true obedience to God’s Law comes from an attitude of love and that is why Paul writes in the book of Romans 13 verse 10…

10        Love does no harm to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the law.

Here Paul was saying that love didn’t replace the Law, but fulfilled the Law in that you wouldn’t commit adultery if you loved somebody, because love wouldn’t defile others or steal purity, only lust or selfishness would do that, love would not kill or steal or covet if you really had agape love in you.

But this agape love itself was and is not something that could or can be self generated, it, itself is a gift from God and only comes through the power and anointing of the Holy Spirit, in fact Paul wrote in Galatians 5 that the first fruit of the Holy Spirit is love.

But probably Paul’s greatest dissertations on love is found in his letter to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 13 where he details the distinctions and details of love.

In this chapter we see principles of the three stranded cord emerge in a powerful way, Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 13 verse 13…

13        And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

In verse 8 he writes…

8          Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

And in verses 1-3 Paul says that to have ‘all faith’ to sacrifice ‘all things’ to move in the gifts of the Spirit but not to have agape love is pointless, useless and fruitless.  Love encompasses faith, because at the heart of faith is trust and we never truly trust unless we love.

In the same way, love covers hope, again because we have and hold hope in God’s promises believing in them because of His love for us and the proof of this love shown in the life and death of His only Son Jesus Christ.

And so we come full circle.  The apostle John in 1 John 4 verses 7-12 enlarges on this teaching…

7          Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

8          He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

9          In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him.

10        In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

11        Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

12        No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides in us, and His love has been perfected in us.

Love does not request but requires and in some ways demands intimacy and fervency.  The secret of true love is not to love, but to be in love with, God wants us most of all to be His lover for a lover in the first flush of love, loves unconditionally the object of his affections.

In this the time of the lukewarm Laodecean church, God holds this against us that we have left our ‘first love’ (Revelation 2 verse 4) and do not seek first the kingdom and its King but love things instead of the Lord of all things, a differentiation we sometimes struggle to discern!  The first epistle of Peter chapter 1 verse 22 says…

22        Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart,

Fervent, agape love is the preeminent need of the 21^st century church, if you; and each of us can only individually know this that this love is missing from our lives, then we have to go and seek it humbly from the hands of Him who can fully and freely supply this need.  Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  For without the experience and practice of this doctrine our lives and the rest of the pages of this book are empty and pointless.

Pray if this is so that the Holy Spirit will shed abroad in your heart, your fellowship and the body of Christ the agape love of Jesus Christ.

Things will never be the same again!!