Of Time and a Season Part 15

[HKHaugan]

Of Time and a Season Part 15

 “…a time to love and a time to hate…”

 This takes time, prayer and the Holy Spirit. What does it really mean? Please read with a spiritually open mind and heart. It may be Solomon’s most important time and season statement in that it sets the stage for its fulfillment in the Messiah to come. In fact, if you read Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, their contents are so personal and relational that only Jesus could bring fulfillment to them. Consider that and read on spiritually.

 Love, ah, the most bandied about word in our language and others I’m sure. You use it and there is a shift in mind, heart and spirit and the perception of those around you. Show me a person and I will show you a singular definition. No one has a corner on the market of definition outside of Scripture. The intellect can’t define it. The emotionality and attitudinal heart have a field day in wordy nonsense and our spirit is driven by whatever the culture accepts. Without God it is emulsified into a recipe with directions to bake at whatever temperature the moment calls for. I think you get the drift. It is curried in appeals for justification. It is rejected by cultural therapists as a negotiable reality. It is contraband for egotists and predators, the excuse for rationalization and window dressing for political diatribe. Even poets and other ethereal prognosticators use it as an escape hatch for unfulfilled fantasies and indulgent wordplay. Love is prayed for, played for, trusted for, lusted for, inebriated for, abbreviated for, respected for, rejected for, believed for, received for, sung for and hung for, and so on.

 Isn’t it great that the Bible clears aside the snowplowed slush of steamy literature and terminal emotionalism? Yes Virginia, there is a real love. It is not a dream, a hope, wishful thinking, or religious sentimentality. It is spiritual, personal and relational. God is love (1John 4:8). Simple, direct and definitive, isn’t it? That clears away all the intellectual pondering, romantic idolizing and self-devising behaviors to conjure up what the secular world neither knows nor accepts. The spiritual, personal and relational nature of God is love. To believe in God with the mind, to trust God in the heart and our spirit motivated to act the way He does is to love Him and to love others. As the exact image of God, Jesus lays love out there like this, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments (Jn.14:15).” So, obedience rooted in personal faith takes us into the experience of God’s love.

 If you know what Jesus thinks and put it into practice you will experience God’s love and be able to give love and be loved. You will experience the first step in love and that is faith in Jesus who pictures how God’s love works. When we get out of ourselves; thinking we can feel it, get it and use it, and get into Jesus, what we discover is that He loves through us and we experience His loving us in the process. Jesus shows us the Father’s love for us is to believe in Him, Jesus teaching us to love by trusting Him and the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit being His love working through us. The Bible is His love documents, letters and guide to build the image of Him we are into a spiritual childhood growing in loving integrity. That’s why Jesus told us in His Word, “I am the way, the truth and the life (Jn.14:6).”

 The Cross was His way of showing that getting out of self and into the Father’s will allows us to experience Him, His faith, His truth, His love and His grace that brings us back to Him. You’ve got to put yourself at the foot of the Cross and let go.

 God’s love is not something you get and hold on to. God’s love is always moving us forward in every next moment to experience Him wherever we are and with whomever we meet. Love is why He created the universe and us. It’s why Jesus called us to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind'; and, 'Love your neighbor as yourself (Lk.10:27)." Anything less than being motivated by the love of God is hate.

 Ok, Ok, I know that sounds extreme, but it’s true. It seems hate is the opposite of love as Solomon listed it. Let’s think about it and as the Lord says through Isaiah, “Come now. Let us reason together (i:18).”

 The fact is that the love of God is loving one’s self which enables us to love others. When you realize how much God loves us it’s hard not to love others. Not to love God is to hate Him and likewise to hate self and others. While hate is a word that sounds so active it is actually very subtle in practice. It’s first self-deceptive. It’s hard to believe that I could think and behave in a way that is lying to myself. But if I am the sole judge of right and wrong, that in itself is hating the image of the Creator in me. Adam is a prime example. When he was looking for an excuse to give God, he blamed God and Eve (the woman you gave me) and ended up guilty (he hated himself). Eve blamed the serpent and endcd up in the same condition. Her guilt ended up in separation and guilt.

 The Cross then was God’s plan to right the situation. Jesus substituted Himself for us, taking on our sin, repenting for us, so we could regain our relational place with God. That’s what sacrifice is all about. It’s backing up and realizing but for the Cross of Christ we would be in a state of self-hate forever. Could there be anything worse?

 Self-hate is going to result in using social strategies to gain acceptance which doesn’t work because everyone knows inside they don’t work. That’s why they feel so alone in the midst of being culturally successful. Superficiality and pretending, manipulation greed, status seeking and being somebody we’re not only encourages hate in others. Actually it is hating others because phoniness is easy to detect and isolates them by inadvertently encouraging them to do the same thing. God’s love counters all that stuff. Relational dishonesty, relational self-indulgence, relational self-protection is the result of sin and sin is the spirit behind self-hate. Guess who’s behind that spirit?

 So, how do we deal with hate? We turn it on the one who is its source, the devil. We hate what he likes. We hate what he inspires. We hate his sin and the evil it encourages. We turn the tables on the devil when we feel the temptation to do what he likes. We turn it back on him by resisting him and getting him to face himself (James 4:7). We put him in his place. He hates that. He sees himself as he really is. He has exposed himself to us at the point of temptation.

 Do we always do a good job at that? It’s a battle. Resistance is a strategy we have to learn. Some people learn it early, others late. That’s why we are in the Body of Christ. No one is alike. We learn to love each other through our growth together. We are at different stages of growth. No one is the same. But it’s at the point of choice the Holy Spirit reminds us He is our Counselor. He will show us our weaknesses and that is when we hate the weakness and the Holy Spirit can move us away from it. It takes time and practice, but it will happen. Think of how Jesus faced the issue when He spent His forty days without any sustenance in the wilderness but the Holy Spirit. The devil tempted Him, “Jesus answered him, ‘It is written, ‘You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve (Lk.4:8).”

 Bottom line? Love the Lord and others, hate sin and evil, worship the Lord and serve Him.