1. 1 LOVE As soon as you see this word relative to your Christian life, what do you think first? “I know that I do not love enough.” And then what do you do in every day life? As you endeavor to raise your love level, you work hard on not being so critical if you catch yourself starting to say things that aren’t loving, or we increase our good deeds and self-denial right? But that isn’t really love is it? Just because we reduce the rate at which we tear people down, or even if we slightly diminish the rate at which we indulge ourselves, it doesn’t mean that we are loving.

2. 2 LOVE Let me make this easy for you. Love isn’t something that you choose to do, unless we are talking about choosing to love yourself (which is something the flesh is very good at doing). Loving isn’t something that you choose to do, it is something that you choose to allow God to do in you – because He alone IS love. God doesn’t assist in loving self, and He doesn’t need to. We are proficient in it all by ourselves.

3. 3 LOVE There is probably more confusion regarding love than any other thing that Christians talk or think about and there is good reason for it. It is IMPOSSIBLE to love the way the Bible describes in our own strength – so to try to fulfill a command to love is to energize fallen and inept flesh to do what only God can do.

4. 4 LOVE The discussion of love is first and foremost about your interaction between you and God, NOT about you and your relationship with others – which is the first mistake we make. That is to say that you cannot possibly rightly love others if your relationship with God is not healthy first! Your ability to love anyone properly is the evidence of a healthy relationship with God NOT the means to have a healthy relationship to God. I’m saying that because when we read 1John 4:7ff or come home from a revival or a marriage conference, the first thing most of us try to do is to love harder or more frequently – and we end up in failure because we don’t understand this critical point. Let me prove it to you.

5. 5 "“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And He said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ “This is the great and foremost commandment. “The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.”" Matthew 22:36-40 Why is the FIRST commandment to love the Lord with all of your heart, soul and mind? Why is it second to love your neighbor as yourself? It is critical to the Christian life to understand that “loving others” is the RESULT of loving God, NOT the means to loving God! In other words, your ability to do ANYTHING good in the Christian life comes OUT of your intimate love with God as a result. Your obedience in your Christian life does not cause you to love God.

6. 6 It is critical that you understand the concept of the first cause in this or you will end up trying to emulate God’s life in you in the power of your flesh. "We love, because He first loved us." 1John 4:19 That is, the only reason, or cause for you to be able to love is that He loved you first, and everything you want to do that is good and holy in relationships comes out of His love in you, in marriage, parenting and all relationships. God loving in you is the first and only cause of anything good or holy that you do. All else is just flesh trying to be like the Most High.

7. 7 Wives, what is the most offensive verse in the Bible to you? Eph 5:22 “Wives, be subject to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” ( ὑ ποτάσσω) Husbands? Eph 5:25 "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her," It is an utterly impossible task for both of you isn’t it! Do you know why? It isn’t because you married a shmuck for a mate – it is because you are attempting to do something in Kingdom life by the power of self- discipline rather than allowing the love and the life of the Lord flow out of you in the form of love.

8. 8 Here are some axioms to help us get a handle on living as Christians before we move on. 1.All life and power to do anything come out of our intimacy with our love with God. 2.Love for God (and obedience) comes very naturally out of our completion in Christ. 3.Loving God with all our heart is commanded because of our needs, not His need to be loved. 4.It is loving God that satisfies the heart of man, NOT obedience or service to God. Our love for God comes out of our need for God, so if we are not convinced of our astronomical need for God, we CANNOT possibly love God the way we need to love Him. That independence becomes the plague that kills us and everything around us and it will overtake us if we are not first convinced of our need. Most of what we do in the course of our lives, and what we actually call “love” is actually self- love. That is why there is so little satisfaction in what we call “love”.

9. 9 Here are some axioms to help us get a handle on living as Christians before we move on. Love intimately and satisfyingly connects us to God and His wisdom and power to live. That is why the first and greatest commandment is to love God. You can’t do ANYTHING properly in the Christian life or the Kingdom of God without that first step. Our first and constant thought should always be, “Lord, teach me how to love and engage You.” But that is not how most of us live. I am personally convinced that before we can move into what God has given to us, we must first be bitterly and savagely confronted with how huge our self-love truly is. Let’s study how we hold faulty views of what love is and how it works – which is why it doesn’t work.

10. 10 What would you think is the most common use of the word “love” in a sentence today? Most of us would say the phrase “I love you” is the most common use of the word.

11. 11 But when there is a conflict or some sort of an argument, then how would you say the word is most commonly used? “YOU DON’T LOVE ME!” “HOW CAN YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME?”

12. 12 When would you say the most emotional force is tapped, when you love someone, or when you are in conflict with someone for not loving you? The reason I am making this point, of course, is because I believe when we use the phrase “I love you”, I believe what we are most commonly saying is, “I really want you to love me” and our polarity in the issue is a real problem for us. That being said, let’s see if we can learn some pivotal things regarding “love” so that we can learn to stop abusing its name, purpose and most importantly, it’s FUNCTION. It is perhaps an unknown fact to most of us that agape LOVE, the same love that is at the base of what drives God Himself, has the critical function of being the exclusive driving force behind every single thing that we think, do and say. "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.” 1Corinthians 13:1-3 Do you see it? Who would think someone who knew all mysteries and had all knowledge and the faith to move mountains was nothing or capable of nothing if he did not have love? Someone like that would be hailed as indispensible and would be on TV and radio and would have a massive following. If someone with that much blessing is nothing without love, how important is love to us? It is our design to be directed exclusively by love in everything that we do and think and remember, love is God’s character, as we will see.