Personal and Impersonal Love
Transcript of FLOT Line Episode 542 aired on January 10, 2016
Good morning and welcome back to the FLOT Line. I’m your host Rick Hughes and for the next
few minutes I’m going to ask you to stay with me. It will be a time of motivation, inspiration,
education, just like every week, no manipulation. No games, no gimmicks, no appeals for money,
no solicitation, not trying to get you to join up, fess up, give it up, nothing like that. This show is
simply about giving you some accurate information, not human speculation, but accurate
information developed from the Bible, the canon of Scripture, the Word of God. That’s right, it’s
a show about the Bible but don’t turn the dial yet. No ranting and no raving, no carrying on, no
foolishness, just trying to lay out simple concepts from the Bible so that you can verify and
identify what might be God’s plan for your life and if I can do this, you have the freedom and the
privacy always to orient and adjust to the plan. That’s up to you, but our show is always about
accurate content, not about being a great communicator but about giving accurate content, giving
you accurate information, no manipulation. And we have been talking about the 10 unique
problem-solving devices that make up the forward line of troops in your soul. That’s why we call
it the FLOT Line, forward line of troops, 10 unique Biblical problem-solving devices. This is not
something that we’ve conjured up, this is not something new. These are age-old Biblical
doctrines that have always been here and sometimes we just have to put them into a system so
that we know what they are and how to use them. So we’re talking about these problem-solving
devices and we’re reviewing what we’ve taught before. If you’ve never heard this, let me suggest
that you contact us through our website, rickhughesministries.org and I’ll send you the book,
Christian Problem Solving
. There will be no charge and there will be no follow-up information
from us, but if you’d like to get a list of these 10 problem-solving devices, let us know. We’ll ship
it out to you ASAP at no charge. So I want you to understand that one of the greatest problem-
solving devices we have is personal love for God and we’ve been talking about this last week
and this week. This is problem-solving device number seven on the FLOT line of your soul,
personal love for God. That’s going to lead us to impersonal love for others which we will talk
about a little bit later on and then eventually into sharing the happiness of God and eventually
into being occupied with Jesus Christ. We’re looking at these last four problem-solving devices
and they are found in the Word of God, this is not something that we’re making up. So, I want to
show you today motivational virtue, that’s your personal love for God, 1 John 5:3,
“If you love
Me, you will obey Me.”
There are two words linked up there, obedience and love. All
obedience is coming from the motivation of personal love for God. If you’re going to live
the Christian life and if you’re going to glorify God to the maximum, you will do it because
you love Him.
You haven’t seen Him, you haven’t touched Him, but you know He’s real, you
know His Word is real. You’ve come to know Him through your soul, the invisible part of you,
and you love Him. You love Him because He provided salvation for you through His Son the
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Lord Jesus Christ. You love Him because He gave you His Word. You love Him because He
provided the Holy Spirit to guide you and lead you in your life. You love Him because He
sustains you daily with all of your logistical grace needs. I mean why would you not love Him?
Everything you need, everything you want, everything your life is about has all been provided by
the grace of God. However, on occasion we tend to mess things up. One of the ways that we
mess things up is when we allow sin to gouge into our life, when we allow sin to gouge in and
scar us up. Have you ever had your car keyed? I have not yet, I hope I don’t, but I’ve seen people
who come out of a movie theater, come out of the grocery store, and some one had taken a key
and gouged their car all the way down the door, just scraped it. Sometimes our souls get gouged
just like this. This is what sin does to us. Sin will create scar tissue in our soul. The Bible says in
Ephesians 4:17,
“This I say
[this is Paul writing to the church at Ephesus]
and I testify in the
Lord that you should not walk as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their minds.”
So he is
warning this church not to live like the unbelievers live in the empty mind, nothing in their
thoughts. Futility in the Greek New Testament is the word for the emptiness of mind, the
mataiotes
of the mind.
“They are darkened in their understanding,”
the Bible says in Ephesians
4:18. Why are they darkened? They are darkened in their understanding, they are alienated from
the life of God because here is why,
“Because of the ignorance that is in them due to the
hardness of their heart,”
hardness of the heart. The word hardness is porosis P.O.R.O.S.I.S., and
it’s a word for scar tissue. The heart can get hard, the heart can get scarred up. Listen to verse 19,
“Thus, they became calloused and have given themselves over to sensuality, greedy to practice
every kind of impurity but it is not what you have learned from Jesus Christ.”
Listen, a believer
can scar his soul. Can you remove it? Yes, listen to 1 Peter 1:22, I want you to think about this. It
could be in relationship to your own life in your past and things that have scarred your soul in the
past. It can be in relationship to your children or your grandchildren who have been into things
they do not need to get into, things that have left a scar in their soul, a scar, a guilt, a memory, a
hurt conscience. Here it is,
“Now that you have purified your souls
[1 Peter 1:22]
Now that you
have purified your souls by your obedience to truth so that you have genuine love one for
another deeply, from your heart.”
How do you purify your soul? By obedience to the truth. Let’s
go back to these two words.
“If you love Me you will obey Me and My mandates are not
grievous,”
1 John 5:3. Some of the mandates, well,
“Study to show thyself approved unto God.”
“Grow in the grace and the knowledge of your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” “Take My yoke
upon you and learn of Me,”
study, learn, grow. Let’s go back to the verse, these are three
mandates. Now that you purified your soul by obeying these mandates, what is it that removes
the scar tissue? It is the washing of God’s Word in your soul.
When your soul, and this is your
mind, this is part of your soul, it’s your mentality, your volition, your conscience, your self-
consciousness. When your mind get scarred up with memories, things that haunt you, scars and
things that you remember and things that have happened and things that cause you to feel guilty
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or things that cause you to feel hostility and bitterness and anger, you can remove these things. I
don’t care what they are, you can remove them by watering your soul with the Word of God.
Listen to 1 Peter 1:22,
“Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the Truth,”
that means you’ve been studying, you’ve rebounded, you stay filled with the Holy Spirit, you are
taking in God’s Word consistently with the result that, or so that, Peter says,
“So that you have
genuine love one for another, deeply from the heart.”
To be purified is the verb
hagnizo
in the
Greek New Testament.
Hagnizo
means to be pure from fault, to make pure, to cleanse
ceremonially and morally.
There are two ways that any believer purifies himself. The first
way is when we rebound, when we use problem-solving device number one. We confess our
known sin to God. The second way is through the Biblical inculcation and the scar tissue in
the soul is removed.
I have seen Christians that got out of fellowship with God and stayed out of
fellowship over a long period of time who do not have the ability to concentrate. This is what sin
will do to you. This is what drugs will do to you. This is what abusing sex will do to you. You
lose the ability to concentrate and this is why you cannot grow spiritually because you can’t
listen, you can’t pay attention, your mind wanders, and your mind drifts. These sort of people
once they rebound, once they are back under the filling of the Holy Spirit, they need to begin to
study a little bit at a time. You can’t drop an hour worth of Bible class on them, they are not just
going to be there the whole time. But as you begin to feed them and as they begin to grow, then
they begin to regain their ability to concentrate. Their mind is no longer cluttered with the sin
and with the scars and they began to focus on divine viewpoint. They begin to let go of the
bitterness and the guilt and the shame, it is an amazing thing. It’s so easy to blame our miserable
life on miserable circumstances that occurred to us and yet that’s not why we are who we are. We
are who we are because we choose to be this. You don’t have to choose to be a loser. You can
choose to take God’s Word, learn it, and use it and glorify God to the max in spite of any
circumstances that might have happened to you. You are not a victim of your circumstances. You
are a victim of your decisions and bad decisions limit future options.
Sin can scar the soul, sin
can pollute the conscience.
Listen to Titus 1:15,
“To the pure all things are pure, but to the ones
who have been defiled and the unbelieving ones, nothing is pure but their mind and their
conscience has been defiled,”
the mind and the conscience are defiled. The conscience is where
all the norms and standards are stored. The mind is where you assimilate information and act
upon the information. So let’s look at this. When we scar up our souls the first thing we do is we
shut down the ability to take in information. Now I didn’t make this up, I read it to you from the
Bible. You want to hear it again? This is Ephesians 4:18, it says,
“They are darkened in their
understanding
[that’s their mind]
alienated from the life of God
[or the plan of God, and why?]
because of the ignorance that is in them
[ignorance, no knowledge]. Why do they not have any
knowledge? Due to the hardness of their heart, the scar tissue corroded and scarred and hardened
the heart so that even the believer now cannot concentrate. His mind cannot function correctly
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and he needs to begin to wash all that out with the Word of God. The washing of the Word of
God will purify his thinking so that his conscience can get fired back up and his norms and
standards can set back in motion to what should be. Norms, things that you live by. Standards,
the Word of God. You must understand this in order to be a well-adjusted person. You must have
norms and standards. You must have in your norms hygiene, privacy, freedom, property, etc. And
in your standards, what are your standards for right and wrong? Hopefully it’s the Word of God.
Let’s say the Ten Commandments, there’s a standard. So if you live by the Ten Commandments,
that’s your standard. Now the Christian life is much more than the Ten Commandments, there are
well over 400 commandments in the Old Testament in what is called Codex 1, Codex 2, and
Codex 3. But the freedom code or the Ten Commandments is a great standard for every
individual within the nation. So when you have standards that are Biblically based and when you
have norms that allow you to function in society without being offensive and weird and criminal,
then you can function but your mind must be able to concentrate. And that’s what scar tissue
does, alienates you from God’s plan because you are ignorant, you don’t know it. How can you
know it if your heart is hard? How can you learn it? Remember this, the Holy Spirit is the one
that’s suppose to guide us and teach us the truth but if we have quenched the Holy Spirit and
grieved the Holy Spirit as believers, how could He possibly do this? He can’t until you rebound
and confess your sin and allow the Holy Spirit to fill you once again. So when this verse says in
Titus 1:15,
“To the pure all things are pure, but to the ones that have been defiled and
unbelievers
[unbelieving ones]
nothing is pure but their mind and their conscience has been
defiled.”
The word defiled is an interesting word, it is the word
miaino.
You say, “What does that
mean?” Well the best way I can tell you is there was no indoor plumbing in those days. They
didn’t have commodes in the house and so they had chamber pots and whenever the chamber pot
had to be emptied,
mianino
was yelled.
Miaino
is what was in the chamber pot. Keep this in
mind, here’s what can get inside of you, what’s in the chamber pot can pollute your thinking, it
can pollute your soul so that you are not able to live the Christian life. So how do you remove the
pollution from your soul? When you take in the Word of God consistently under the filling of the
Holy Spirit you will learn and apply and cleanse your soul. Pure, clean, Bible doctrine is like a
well of pure water in your soul, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. Psalm 69:1,
“Deliver me O
God, for the water has reached my neck,”
that’s right. How do we purify our soul? By obeying
the truth. Now this is not a system of salvation. This is positional sanctification not permanent
sanctification. Permanent sanctification is when you get saved. This is you getting in fellowship
with God experientially and living your daily life as glorifying to Him. Think about this, listen to
1 Corinthians 3, sometimes people miss this one and I want to give this to you. This is why you
can’t walk around polluted as a believer in Jesus Christ, why you can’t walk around with this
scar tissue in your life. 1 Corinthians 3:16-17,
“Don’t you know that you are the temple of God
[Paul wrote this to the church at Corinth]
and the Spirit of God dwells in you?
[this is the
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indwelling of God the Holy Spirit]
If any man defile the temple
[that’s pollute the temple]
him
will God destroy. For the temple of God is holy which temple you are.”
God can put you under
the sin unto death, you as a believer can go out under the sin unto death. There are three stages of
discipline: warning discipline, intense discipline, and yes even dying discipline. You can read
about it yourself. You can read about it in 1 Corinthians 5 and read what happens under the sin
unto death to the believer in this passage. You see, when we scar up our soul we have no love for
God. We can’t have love for God. It is impossible because we can not learn and know His Word.
The Bible says,
“If you love Me, you will obey Me,”
and how can we obey Him if we’re not
learning what He says? It’s impossible. There are several words in the Bible that are important
for the temple in the New Testament. The shrine or the sanctuary used among the heathen to
denote a shrine concerning idols, this was one of them. And then there’s a sacred place and it’s
never really used figuratively but it’s the real place. It’s the place where God the Holy Spirit lives
inside of you, yes He does, He lives in you. So what Peter is saying is when you obey God by
means of the Holy Spirit now that you purified your soul by your obedience to truth, you will
have genuine love one for another resulting in un-hypocritical brotherly love.
Philadelphia,
brotherly love, love for the band of brothers, love for one another. It was an amazing thing in
World War II, the Japanese never quite figured out. They would die for the Emperor. They would
fly kamikaze airplanes and crash them for Hirohito but Americans died for one another. Men
gave their lives for each other. The combat veteran’s love for the man who served in combat
beside him is an incredible, incredible, courageous love. It’s very close to the believer’s love one
for another that we should have. This is why believers should be able to see each other and
embrace each other and be warm encountering each other. Combat veteran are like this, any
combat veteran that served in combat has great appreciation one for another, different
personalities, great appreciation. This is what made America what it is, men and women who
would die for one another. This is a love that is totally relaxed.
This love for God is a mental
attitude love based on the filling of the Holy Spirit, based on the Word of God in your soul,
based on your appreciation and respect for Who and what God is. It motivates your
response to obey Him.
Personal love for God is an amazing thing. Impersonal love for one
another is even more amazing. You see personal love for God is what motivates you to obey Him
and how should I obey Him? I’m told I have got to love other people, impersonal love. I’m
suppose to love weirdos and I’m suppose to love jerks and I’m suppose to love members of my
extended family that I do not even like being around on holidays.
Impersonal love is a
problem-solving device. It’s an unconditional love toward all mankind. The emphasis is
always on the virtue of the one doing the loving not the one receiving the love.
The emphasis
is on the virtue of the subject not the object. You see under impersonal love you can love
someone based on who you are not based on who they are. It’s the ultimate expression of virtue
in your life as well as humility in your life. It’s an amazing thing. There’s an example of it in
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Philemon with Onesimus the runaway slave who faced the death penalty. Paul wrote about it in
Philemon 1.
“Consider him no longer a slave
[Paul said]
but a beloved brother.”
There is
impersonal love, to forgive him, the one who stole and ran away.
“He’s a beloved brother
especially to me, but now much more to you both in flesh and in the Lord. So if you count me as a
partner, receive him as you would receive me.”
Amazing how impersonal love will allow you to
forgive someone that even stole from you, that even lied about. You see, under these
circumstances you can react with hatred or you can respond with forgiveness.
Personal love for
people is not commanded in the Bible.
I am not commanded to personally love everybody.
I
am commanded to personally love God and impersonal love is required by God as a part of
His operational plan.
For example,
“Husbands love your wives.”
I am mandated in this passage
to love my wife. “
Wives obey your husbands,”
whoops, I shouldn’t have said this one should I?
Yep, it’s a mandate. Same thing here in Titus 2:4,
“Older women should teach the younger
women to love their husbands and to love their children.”
In Hebrews 13:1,
“Let brotherly love
[impersonal love]
continue.”
These are imperative mood verbs, they are not requests. They are
mandates. Impersonal love, listen, if you and your spouse get in an argument, the worst thing you
could ever say is, “I don’t love you.” God would never say this to anybody. The Bible says,
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”
You may have to switch loves if
they frustrate you, if they anger you. You just switch over to impersonal love and then you love
them based on who you are, maybe not based on who they are. Impersonal love does not work
until it is first motivated by your personal love for God. You can not love someone you do not
like until first of all you love God who you don’t know very much yet. The more you know God,
the more you’ll love people you don’t like. It’s an amazing thing and without impersonal love you
are never going to have any good human relationships. You’re always going to be nitpicking.
You’re always going to be moody. You’re always going to be jumping from one friend to
another, one partner to another, one spouse to another because you don’t have any basis to hold
this relationship together. Without impersonal love as a wonderful problem-solving device, the
Christian cannot hold friendship relationships together.
Emotions are designed by God to
appreciate a relationship but never to establish the relationship.
Virtue love in the Christian
life doesn’t have emotion, it doesn’t work on emotion. It works on the content of God’s Word in
your soul because emotions don’t think. You can think, you can solve your problems if you
purify your soul with the Word of God. Arrogant people are the ones that are always seeking
unconditional love from other people but they don’t have anything to offer in return. Their love
is always conditional. They love you based on what you do for them, or if you follow their rules
or their regulations. So the greater the arrogance, the greater the conditions of the love, that’s not
the Christian life. This is not what God says. Impersonal love is wonderful. How did God love
you? With impersonal love, He loved you when you were still a sinner. He loved you even
though you were not His child yet and He sent His Son to die for you. Personal love without
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impersonal love as a virtue, this is when you are very weak, very unstable. John 15:12,
“This is
My mandate, that you love one another as I have said I love you.”
1 John 4:20,
“If someone
says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.”
Think about this, consider it, pray about it.
Until next week this is your host Rick Hughes saying thank you for listening to the FLOT Line.