Tag Archives: agape love

February 20, 2009 · 12:52 am

Forgiveness–How to Love Your Wife As Christ Loved the Church

As men, we are admonished to “love our wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for it.”  We are to love our wives in the same manner that Christ loves all of His followers.  How does He love us all?  He forgives.  No matter the faults that we have done–He  has a forgiving heart toward us.

We are also admonished “to be not bitter” against our wives.  Men become bitter toward their wives when they do not forgive them.

But some man will ask, Forgive them of what?  Forgive them for just being human.  Forgive them for not being perfect perfect.  But we men have a problem doing this.  We hold on to small grudges and little snide attitudes.  We puff up and become indignant towards them.  We expect them to make the first move toward reconciliation.

But the biblical love is a forgiving love and is unconditional.  We should not love our wives because they love us first.  That is not loving our wives the way Christ loved all of us.  He loved us when we were unlovable.

This kind of love is, of course, not the “love” born from our original carnal nature.  This love is the “love from above”–the agape love, and women are wired by their Creator to respond to it.  In fact, this is the only kind of love that will reach them.

The Divine Relationship in Husband and Wife

There is a divine ratio and proportion going on here.                                               Husbands :  Wives ::  Christ : the body of Christ (His church, us)          Husbands are to love their wives the way Christ loves us.

And so we must look to why we, the body of Christ (the church), love God.  “We love God because He first loved us.”  We didn’t wake up one morning and decide that we were going to love God.  No.  He loved us first and gave Himself for us.  Christ laid down His mortal life, thereby expressing the greatest love a man can show another.  It was only then that we could be changed from a selfish, non-loving individual into one who loves another.

In like manner, God demands that we love our wives unconditionally.  We love them first by forgiving them of any perceived shortcomings or wrongs towards us.  We forgive their imperfections, both outward and inward.

We are asked by God to love them as He loves us by using great patience in waiting and hoping for the harvest of reciprocal love, joy and peace.

Yes, this is difficult to do on our own strength.  It takes faith in God’s power, for we do not have it within ourselves to love our wives the way Christ loves us all.  Again, that love is from above and not from the earthly nature we are born with.

We can only get it from God.  This kind of forgiveness and love cannot be obtained through the usual means available to man.  It must be asked for from Him who is LOVE.  For “God is love.”  He, therefore, is the only One who has what He is asking us to dispense to another.

Man’s Problem in Forgiving and Loving

It takes humility to approach the altar of Divine Love and ask God to channel His Essence through us to our wives.  To say to Him, Please help me love her with the forgiveness that yields sweet acceptance–the way You have accepted us into Your Presence.  I cannot do this on my own; my heart is too small.  I know this now.  Help me.  Flow Love through me to her.  Thank You.      KWH

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January 25, 2009 · 4:55 pm

Add to Your Faith–How to Make Your Calling and Election Sure

After obtaining “like precious faith” with the apostles of Christ, we must make several additions to that faith in order to be fruitful in God’s plan.  These additions are spiritual additions and can only be added by His in-dwelling Spirit within you.

It is by adding these certain spiritual traits to our faith that we can make “our calling and election sure.”

God has promised us that we can be “partakers of His divine nature.”  To secure these promises we must add these spiritual attributes.  If we don’t add them, then “we will be barren and unfruitful.”  We will not show that heavenly power and light through our vessels if we don’t.

What are these additions? They are found in II Peter 1: 5-7.  To faith, add virtue; to virtue add knowledge; to knowledge add temperance; to temperance add patience; to temperance add godliness; to godliness add brotherly kindness; to brotherly kindness, add charity, which is agape love from above.

Those that lack these spiritual additions to their faith in Christ are blind and have “forgotten that they were purged from their old sins” (v. 9).  In other words, the guilt of sin and ungodliness will haunt them.  His salvation lies dormant in them, and they are subject to negative thoughts hurled through their minds by our enemy Satan, the ruler of the air waves.

But if we make these additions to our faith, we find an “entrance…into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ (Yahshua) {v. 11).

To comprehend virtue, the first addition, we must study it out, and then apply it, calling upon Him for His strength, for it is only by His Spirit that we can accomplish anything.          Kenneth Wayne Hancock

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