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| Daniel J. Musokwa |
Here is yet another installment in this series on BEING GOD: The LOVE Aspect by Daniel J. Musokwa, my dear brother, friend and fellow worker in the Lord. You can always check out all the other installments here: Part1, Part2, Part3, Part4 and Part5
Let us now delve right into the very essence and nature of God - Love.
Jesus spent three and a half
years teaching His disciples how to minister (Mark 9:29), how to be compassionate (Mat 9:36; 14:14; 15:32; 20:34), how not to judge (Mat 7:1), how to love one another (John 13:34), how to love sinners (John 8:10-11; Mat 9:10-13). In
essence, He spent three and a half years teaching them about nothing but LOVE!
Think about that friend! He didn’t even dare fill them with the Holy Spirit a
minute before they had downed the basics of love! Even God the Father had to
wait 30 years until Jesus had grown, “in wisdom and stature pleasing God and
men”, before He could allow the Holy Spirit to come upon Him at the river
Jordan. Friends; being filled with the Holy Spirit of God is NOT an issue to be
taken lightly at all. Please think about this. This means God Almighty, the
maker of heaven and Earth actually coming down to inhabit the physicality of
the human body.
Remember God is love; how can you be possessed by love and it
not show? A person who is possessed by a demon of insanity goes around, well,
being insane. Same thing happens to those possessed by the Spirit of Love or
Spirit of Grace. BUT you will receive power when the Holy Ghost
shall come upon you… power to be witnesses of God’s love!
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| Source: Google Images |
But what do we do today? We get people saved, we
pray for the infilling of the Holy Ghost without any kind of ministerial
training or instruction in the prerequisite course of loving people
unconditionally and then we dunk them in water in baptism and voila!
We have a full-fledged Christian! Then we spend months after months counseling
them and years wondering what went wrong… and even more years doing
deliverances on them.
Remember Jesus TAUGHT His disciples for THREE AND
A HALF years before releasing the very HOLY Spirit to them. The Father waited
THIRTY years before releasing the Holy Ghost upon Jesus! Now you do the math.
We have gifted ministers today who don’t have a clue what it means to be a
Christian. We have pew-warmers whose sole responsibility is to sing, tithe and
give an offering; no clue whatsoever what the Christ-life is all about. This is
just sad.
We spend so much time trying to dowse down gossip,
ill-feelings, self-seeking attitudes, hatred and the like because Christians
haven’t really been taught about love... sacrificial love. The kind of love
that has its defences completely lowered... love that gives others the freedom
to hurt you if they so desire. We need to reclaim the lost Christian art of
VULNERABILITY. The church is filled with people who have built the Great Wall
of China around them... this makes fellowship and, subsequently, worship very
superficial and hypocritical. “I only need God” we say... “I don’t need
anybody”. Why? Because we’ve been hurt by so many people so many times. So what
do we do? We abandon love and vulnerability... and along with it, our divinity.
The Scriptures are clear about the New Testament
model; first came an intensive teaching of the gospel TO THE BELIEVERS (this is
not evangelism) and then the infilling of the Holy Spirit came second.
Sometimes during an intensive teaching (as the water of the Word was being
applied) the people received the Holy Spirit directly. Why? Because the Word
prepared them for works and faith! Why? Because faith cometh by hearing and
hearing by the Word of God (Rom 10:17).
Why does faith come AFTER being taught the Word of Christ? Because faith is one
of the nine gifts of the Holy Ghost, it comes with Him because His duty is to
REMIND you everything that you have heard from Christ through the Word (John 14:26). So the Holy Spirit cannot
truly function in you if there’s nothing in you for Him to remind
you of.
THE TEACHING ABOUT CHRIST AND HIS LOVE HAS TO
ALWAYS COME FIRST BEFORE THE INFILLING OF THE HOLY SPIRIT AND THE GIFTS!
Otherwise young Christians tend to think they’ve
accomplished much because they can now ‘speak in tongues’, have been baptized
and are now leading the worship team. It gives them a false sense of
accomplishment and therefore they do not “press on towards the mark of
the high-calling in Christ Jesus.”
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| Source: Google Images |
Christians, we need to learn that
there is a process of maturity, and it does not begin with the GIFTS
of God but with the CHARACTER of God. LOVE always comes
first, and then SPIRITUALITY (including the gifts)! Until we learn this godly
principle, it is going to take us a long while to be the ekklesia that
Christ called out.
TO BE CONTINUED>>>
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