Spir Dynamics 1476-83 3/16/99; 675-712 10/8/95

DOCTRINE OF LOVE (Part 2)

Q. True Versus Occasional Love.

1. The spiritual life, with its four spiritual mechanics, two power options, three spiritual skills, ten problem solving devices, and three stages is the only way you as a believer will ever enter into the concept of true love.

a. Love is not some overt function, but comes from the soul. If you do not have virtue and values in the soul from the execution of the protocol plan of God, even if you are sincere when you say, “I love you,” it is meaningless.

b. We are not born with the capability of loving anyone. We are born spiritually dead and with built in arrogance. With are born with built in self-deception. If we lie to ourselves, we are lying to others when we tell them we love them.

c. God has never set up any system of the spiritual life whereby there is conflict between His love for you and His righteousness and justice.

d. If you say to someone, “I love you,” and this is sex outside of marriage, you have lied to yourself and to the person to whom you have said these things. The supreme court of heaven severely disciplines any person who lies in this way.

e. The only way you will ever have a consistent spiritual life is true love or spirituality versus pseudo love or arrogance.

(1) Rapport with God is a harmonious relationship with God. It begins at the moment of faith in Christ. This rapport is initiated by God at salvation and is fulfilled in the unique spiritual life of the Church Age.

(2) We do not establish rapport with God on the basis of what He can do for us. We establish rapport with God only through the fulfillment of the unique spiritual life of the Church Age.

(3) Rapport with God must precede rapport with people. You are always going to be in trouble with people if there is something wrong with your rapport with God. Love relationship interacting in the human race only is effective for the believer when he has utilized impersonal love for others and the principle of spiritual self-esteem as a basis for impersonal love.

(4) The believer cannot love God or even have compatibility with God apart from the unique spiritual life. We establish rapport God and His terms—the virtue and values of the postsalvation spiritual life.

(5) We cannot love God apart from capacity for love and this capacity is extrapolated from the four spiritual mechanics of the spiritual life.

(6) Under self-absorption, human capacity for love is self- serving. Resultant pseudo love functions under self-deception by responding to flattery and various lust patterns of the sin nature always lead believers astray. The result is self-justification which distorts pseudo love into failure to take the responsibility for one’s own bad decisions.

f. All of the adult spiritual life is based on true love. Everything before the adult spiritual life is based on rebound, the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith-rest drill, the spiritual orientation envelope of grace orientation and doctrinal orientation, and a personal sense of destiny.

2. We must understand how God uses His love to solve problems. We are born spiritually dead and helpless to do anything about it. God the Son used His love as the motivation to go the Cross and bear our sins as a substitute for us.

a. Rom 5:8, “But God demonstrates His own love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died as a substitute for us.”

b. Jn 3:16, “For God loved the world so much that He gave His uniquely-born Son that anyone who believes in Him shall never perish but have eternal life.”

3. No one has to tell you how to love someone else or please someone else, if you are virtuous. You must have the capacity in your soul to love them. Love is not a matter of attraction, but capacity. We are born arrogant and without capacity for love. We need parents with personal and impersonal love and a great sense of justice and discipline. You must parlay a personal sense of destiny into occupation with Christ, in order to have any capacity for love. One person cannot tell another person how to love someone. If you do not have capacity for love in your soul, you live your life as a lie all of your life. If you only have pseudo love, you are of all people most miserable. You never have to teach someone with integrity in their soul how to love someone else.

4. Occasional love.

a. Virtue love is true love with a doctrinal capacity for love. But all doctrinal capacity for love is based on the accumulated doctrine circulating in the seven compartments of your stream of consciousness through metabolization. Occasional love is not used in the sense of true love or virtue love but in the sense of pseudo love.

b. Occasional love is not true love nor does it represent any capacity for true love. Occasional love has no capacity for true love. It is not what the Bible calls virtue love. Virtue love only comes through the virtue and values found in the spiritual life. There is no sense loving anyone until you have the capacity. Virtue love is true love with a doctrinal capacity for love.

c. Occasional love represents infatuation, lust, a temporary state of pseudo love which is totally hostile to virtue-love. Once you find out what this type of person is like, you start reacting to them. You are so arrogant, you cannot stand having an arrogant person around you, and you react to them. Occasional love is totally hostile to virtue love in all three of its categories: personal love for God, impersonal love for mankind, and occupation with Christ.

d. Occasional love is based strictly on emotion. Emotion wears out and has a hangover.

e. Under occasional love the carnal or loser believer only comes to God in time of trouble for help. The loser believer has an occasional love related to certain times of the year, like mother’s day, Christmas, Easter.

f. Occasional love is related to human beings in social acquaintances, immoral sexual relationships, flirting, falsely motivated love (“I love you because of what you can do for me.”) .This is the love of the arrogance skills. We do not establish rapport or love for God because of what He can do for us. Rapport with God must precede rapport with people. The believer cannot love God apart from the unique spiritual life of the Church Age. We do not establish rapport with God based on what He can do for us. We establish rapport with God based on His terms—the virtue and values of the protocol plan of God.

g. The failure of marriage is always the fact that it was an occasional love. Occasional love cannot make it in marriage. The believers who cannot make it in marriage are losers.

h. Romance and Need in Love.

(1) Romance is often occasional love. Romance is not fulfilling a need, it is discovering a person of the opposite sex.

(2) Need is oppression, enslavement, and bondage. People gravitate to people on the basis of their need, and that is not love. When you enter romance because you have a need for romance or friendship, you are in bondage and slavery as a believer.

(3) Need makes people dependent. Dependent need opens the door for frustration and disappointment and a very miserable life with no problem solving with the spiritual life.

(4) Without need you are free to love. Having a need is love with strings attached. If you need romance, there are strings attached. You have a spiritual life which is far greater than any need. You are related to God in such a way that the chains of your slavery to need are broken.

(5) Unrealistic expectations are the enemy of love and the friend of need. If you have unrealistic expectations, you have needs. These expectations develop a need, a vacuum in your soul and you are looking for someone to fulfill them.

(6) Fantasizing self as a role model contradicts true love. If you are in a state of arrogance, you fantasize yourself as the answer to everyone’s needs.

(7) Making a role model out of the opposite sex conflicts with true love. This role model system of arrogance creates a large need that no one can really fulfill, so it conflicts with true love.

(8) Fear brings along insecurity. Insecurity brings along problems, so that fear sees the problem of love as need, but faith sees the problem of love as resolved. You do not solve a problem with a problem, but with a solution. There are three categories of love as problem solvers: personal love for God, impersonal love for all mankind, and occupation with Christ. Fear sees the problem of love as a need, but faith sees the problem of love as a divine solution.

(9) Is love blind? Scripture says that human love is very blind. When you have a need, you are looking for something you admire. Your values may be very inferior. They may be values related only to exterior beauty or values related to some personality you admire. Because love looks at a point of admiration in another person or a point of lust or a point of attraction, it focuses only on that one point. So human love does not see the entire person. It does not see the failures, faults, imperfections. Therefore you go into marriage blind. You are not able to deal with the problems of marriage unless you have parlayed a personal sense of destiny into occupation with Christ and spiritual maturity. This is why romance falls apart and why marriages fail. Erroneous evaluation of blind love results in unrealistic expectation, which, when not fulfilled, becomes disillusion, disenchantment, disappointment, and frustration. You do not see a person of the opposite sex for what they really are. You get stuck in marriage and it is hell on earth.

(10) As you develop in your spiritual life, your needs change. They switch from people to rapport with God. Our need as believers is rapport with God. It is not rapport with people.

(11) Where little or no intimate knowledge of the entire person exists, avoid the phrase, “I love you.” If you do not know the whole person and you say “I love you", you are not speaking the truth.

(12) There is a matter of honor, integrity and virtue that will take away this blindness. You get this virtue, honor, and integrity from rapport with God through the four spiritual mechanics. When you have rapport with God, you acquire wisdom, and you never look at anyone on the basis of need.

(13) People can be admired from a distance, but that does not qualify them to be brought into your bosom and made out to be something they are not. Do not rationalize people.

(14) The mutual love for Bible doctrine is the only point of admiration between a pastor and a congregation. You do not love a pastor because he makes you feel good or gives you attention. If you really love Bible doctrine, you will be consistent in hearing it taught and will come to the ultimate of spiritual dynamics—personal love for God the Father, impersonal love for all mankind, and occupation with the person of Christ. There is one exception to blind love, stated in Jn 9:25, “Once I was blind, but now I see.”

(15) Blind love explains bitterness and the arrogance skills. When you are frustrated because you always keep your eyes on a few things you admire in others, it is inevitable that you will fail in your spiritual life because you will react with bitterness minus rebound. You go from bitterness to anger, from anger to vindictiveness, from vindictiveness to malice, revenge, vituperation, and vilification. Bitterness takes no responsibility for his or her decisions and enters into self-justification. Bitterness combines self-conceit with the irrationality of the emotional complex of sins. The self-conceit of bitterness often rationalizes egocentricity into pseudo self-esteem. Bitterness works the arrogance skills both forward and backward. Bitterness uses self-justification to enter into anger. Anger minus rebound plus vindictiveness loads revenge motivation in an unforgiving function of malice. The hatred of self- deception is so great, it often resembles insanity. The hatred of self- deception is irrationality and hostility to the object of bitterness. Bitterness is now ruthless, giving no forgiveness. Jealousy and bitterness now combine to form the strongest form of self-justification.

5. Divine Versus Pseudo Love.

a. Love is a part of the essence of being of God. Love belongs eternally to God. God is perfect and eternal love. 2 Thes 3:5, “And may the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God.” There is an absolute standard of love found in the love between the members of the Godhead. God has three categories of love.

(1) Perfect love for Himself as a part of divine self- esteem.

(2) Perfect personal love for the other members of the Trinity.

(3) Impersonal love for all creatures, especially for fallen and sinful mankind.

b. You are never going to have true love or capacity for love without Bible doctrine circulating in the seven compartments of the stream of consciousness and ten problem solving devices deployed in your soul.

c. All pseudo love is related to self-absorption. Pseudo love is an arrogance, a demand syndrome that certain people treat you a certain way or they are rejected. From there you develop self-deception and self- justification. You never get away from associating love with what someone else can do for you. Under self-absorption, human capacity for love is self-serving. The result is pseudo love function under self-deception by responding to flattery and various lust patterns of the sin nature. The result is then self-justification, which distorts pseudo love into failure to take the responsibility for one’s own decisions.

d. When mankind was created, the point of contact for man with God was the divine love of God. Once man sinned, the point of contact became the integrity of God. People in pseudo love use the love of God just as they use people to satisfy their desires and their lusts. There never was a time when God has been unfair to any creature. That is true love. People can say, “I love you", and they are expressing their total depravity, the lust of their sin nature.

e. Divine Love Principles.

(1) God is sovereign. Therefore, His love is self-motivated and is compatible with the divine decrees and all other divine decisions, past, present, and future.

(2) Whom the Lord loves, He disciplines, Heb 12:6. God’s discipline comes from His integrity, from His capacity for love.

(3) God’s love is eternal. Therefore, God’s love exists eternally, unsustained by Himself or any other source.

(4) God is holy. Therefore, divine love possesses perfect integrity which includes incorruptible justice and immutable righteousness. This means that the perfect love of God has perfect and eternal, unchangeable virtue.

(5) God is immutable. Because God is immutable, His divine love cannot be compromised by man’s sins, human good, dead works, or evil. Divine love cannot be corrupted by creature failure. God’s love cannot improve or decline, increase or decrease. Therefore, the rejection of God’s love never results in any form of retaliation from God.

(6) God is omniscient. Therefore, divine love always functions in a rational manner. Divine love is devoid of any emotional content or any system of irrationality. God does not have and does not need emotion; yet His love is the highest quality of love that could ever exist. It is integrity, not emotion, that makes love great.

(7) God is absolute truth and veracity. Therefore, divine love is revealed and integrated into every category of Bible doctrine.

(8) Because God is perfect and absolute righteousness and integrity, His divine love cannot be prejudice, unfair, or in any way discriminating.

(9) The combination of God’s perfect righteousness and immutability indicates that divine love is eternally consistent and revealed in the doctrinal content of the infallible Word.

(10) The combination of God’s omniscient and immutability means that God’s love cannot be complicated by ignorance, silliness, or absurdities.

6. Scripture.

a. We are told in Jude 21 to “Guard yourselves by means of the love for God as you wait with anticipation for the lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ with reference to eternal life.” When you deploy the tandem problem solving devices on the FLOT line of your soul, then you are guarding yourself in the love of God.

b. 1 Cor 13:4, “Virtue love is patient. Virtue love is kind [grace orientation in the soul reaching out to others]. Virtue love is not jealous. Virtue love does not brag. Virtue love is not arrogant.”

c. Rom 5:5b, “...because the love for God has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.”

d. 1 Tim 6:3-6, “If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not occupy himself with sound doctrine, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrines conforming to our spiritual life, he is arrogant, understanding nothing. In fact he has a morbid interest in word battles and unprofitable controversies, out of which come jealousy, strife, slander, evil conjectures, and constant friction between persons of corrupted thinking even those who have suffered loss of truth, who assume that the spiritual life is a way of profit, but the spiritual life is a way of profit, when accompanied by spiritual self-esteem.”

e. Gal 5:22a, “The fruit of the Spirit is virtue-love, joy...”

f. Eph 1:17, “That Christ may be at home in your hearts through doctrine when we have been rooted and grounded in virtue-love.”

g. 1 Thes 5:8, “But since you are of the day, let us attain spiritual self-esteem after we have put on the breastplate of faith [faith rest drill] and virtue-love.”

h. 1 Cor 2:9, “But just as it stands written, `Things which the eye has not seen and the ear has not heard and it has not entered into the heart of man all that God has prepared for those who love Him.’”

i. 1 Jn 2:5, “Whoever keeps his doctrines, truly in him the love for God has been perfected.”

j. 1 Jn 5:1-3, “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born again from God. Furthermore, everyone who loves the Father loves everyone who has been born from Him. For this is love for God that we keep His mandates and His commandments are not burdensome.”

k. Jn 1:12, “Blessed is the believer who perseveres under testing because when he becomes approved, he shall receive the crown of life which God has promised to those who love Him.”

R. Capacity For Love or Virtue-Love Capacity.

1. We cannot love God apart from capacity for love, which is extrapolated from the four spiritual mechanics of the postsalvation spiritual life. If we do not fulfill this, then we have no capacity for love or witness before the angels.

2. Under self-absorption, human capacity for love is self-serving. It may be occasional love or no love, but in either case it is pseudo love. Under self-deception, the person with occasional or pseudo love responds only to flattery. Self-justification fails to take responsibility for your own bad decisions in the hostile repercussions and inevitable frustrations and antagonisms created by pseudo love.

3. All capacity for true love, virtue love, rapport with God is based on thinking. The spiritual life is thinking. No one has staying power in love or capacity for true love without virtue and values which are related to thinking metabolized doctrine. Rapport is compatibility with God on the basis of thinking resulting in capacity for love. The spiritual life has provided the basis for this.

a. Phil 2:5, “Keep on thinking this in you which was also in Christ Jesus.” Our Lord tested and proved the prototype spiritual life and it has been adopted for the Church Age only. No one ever had greater love for the human race than the humanity of Jesus Christ. Only you can execute your spiritual life. The spiritual life is rational thinking, not emotion. How you feel is not your spiritual life.

b. 1 Cor 2:16, “For who has known the thinking of the Lord that we should instruct Him. But we have the thinking of Christ.” A comparison of Phil 2:5 and 1 Cor 2:16 gives us the basis for capacity for true love— the thinking of Christ.

4. Rom 8:5-7, “For those [carnal believers] who are in conformity with the flesh [sin nature] keep thinking about the things of the flesh, but those who are in conformity with the Spirit keep thinking about the things of the Spirit. Consequently the way of thinking of the flesh is death [carnal death], but the way of thinking of the Spirit [the filling of the Spirit] is [the spiritual] life and harmony, because the way of thinking of the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subordinate itself to the law of God, for it is not even able.”

a. The “things of the Spirit” is a reference to the four spiritual mechanics of the spiritual life of the Church Age—the two power options, the three spiritual skills, the ten problem solving devices, and the three stages of the adult spiritual life. Out of these mechanics comes the virtue and values of the spiritual life, and from those virtue and values comes capacity for true love. The advance stages of the spiritual life are where you fulfill the divine mandates for love. No believer have true love or capacity for virtue love apart from the virtue and the values provided by this unique spiritual life. True love does not come easily because it is based on virtue and values.

b. There is no true love when you are functioning under the arrogance skills and living in the arrogance complex of sins and emotional complex of sins.

c. Harmony is rapport with God based on metabolized doctrine in the stream of consciousness.

5. The spiritual life is the key to your love life.

a. The key to love is to have the capacity for love. The key to capacity for love is your spiritual life. As goes your spiritual life, so goes your capacity for true love. You have the highest opportunity for integrity, for virtue, for values that has ever existed in the history of the human race.

b. The greatest lovers in the world are believers who fulfill the unique spiritual life of all history. If believers fail to fulfill this spiritual life, they are the worst lovers.

c. True love is always a potential in life that may or may not be fulfilled. The potential depends on faith alone in Christ alone and your volition toward Bible doctrine. The potential becomes a postsalvation issue related to the unique spiritual life of the Church Age. The secret to love is virtue, which must begin with personal love for God the Father, which is the foundation for impersonal love for all mankind. Personal love for God and impersonal love for man is the integrity envelope of virtue and values which establish the principle of true love.

d. True love must be related to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. True love is based on the relationship between the three members of the Trinity. Their love is based on their virtue, their integrity, their holiness, their righteousness and justice. God has personal love for the other members of the Trinity and impersonal love toward creatures. Each member of the Trinity also loves his own righteousness which is divine self-esteem. All three of these categories of virtue love have been given to the believer in Jesus Christ under the unique spiritual life for the Church Age.

e. Any time you are unhappy in your so-called love life it is because it is not true love. It has no virtue; it has no values; it is not in the soul. There is no true love without the last five problem solving devices, the advance stage of the spiritual life. Capacity for personal love functions inside the integrity envelope from the tandem problem solving devices.

f. Since true love must originate in the soul of the believer, and since true love is the key to the advanced spiritual life, it is necessary to understand the significance of two Bible verses.

(1) The origin of true love, 1 Jn 4:19, “We love, because He first loved us.”

(a) Before we reach the adult spiritual life we only have a foundation for love, but not the capacity for love that comes with the advanced problem solving devices. Because of the subjunctive mood of the verb AGAPAO, this verse should be translated, “We have the potential for love, because He first loved us.” We have the potential for true love and the secret to happiness depending on how far we go in our spiritual life.

(b) God loved us impersonally as unbelievers the moment He imputed a human soul to us. God cannot love us personally until we believe in Christ and are born again.

© With the spiritual life, we can come to a personal love for God. Personal love for God is a true love monopoly of the believer, and you have it potentially, because it is in your portfolio of invisible assets. Until we straighten out love with God, we have no love.

(2) The nature of the spiritual life, which is thinking, Eph 4:23, “then become renewed through the agency of the Spirit by means of your thinking.”

(a) The first agent in the passive voice represents the grace provision of the divine power for the fulfillment of the unique spiritual life of the Church Age—the filling of the Holy Spirit, Acts 1:8. The second agent of the passive voice is a system of thinking divine viewpoint.

(b) Without the renewal of the filling of the Holy Spirit through the use of the rebound technique of 1 Jn 1:9 you have no spiritual life. © Being renewed by means of your thinking has nothing to do with emotion. God has provided a system of happiness that does not need emotion. You apply truth by means of your thinking—the use of the ten problem solving devices.

(d) This verse can be translated three ways:

i. “Then become renewed.” This refers to the function of the rebound technique and describes the approach to rebound.

ii. “Then become reinvigorated.” This refers to the recovery of the filling of the Spirit and describes the use of rebound.

iii. “Then become refreshed.” This refers to the resumption of the spiritual life as a result of rebound.

g. True love is always accompanied by true happiness.

6. Your spiritual life is designed for virtue, and without virtue life becomes complicated, and a complicated life is an unhappy life.

a. An unhappy life minus virtue has no capacity for true love. Virtue is the capacity for true love. Capacity for true love is found in the advanced problem solving devices of your spiritual life. Virtue is a potential because has provided everything necessary for you to have that virtue, but He cannot provide positive volition. The advanced spiritual life is based on true love. The greatest thing in the spiritual life is virtue, not emotion.

b. Phil 4:11, “Not that I speak because of a need; for I have learned spiritual self-esteem in whatever circumstances I am.” The spiritual life is not based on fulfilling a need. The spiritual life is not designed to be a complicated life. A complicated life is an unhappy life. Virtue love eliminates the complications of life based on pseudo love and false doctrine.

c. When you execute the fantastic spiritual life and plan provided for you, you “come to know the love for Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled resulting in all the fullness from God,” Eph 3:19.

d. 2 Cor 5:14a, “For the love for Christ motivates us...”

S. The Integrity Envelope of Love.

1. The integrity envelope is problem solving devices number seven and number eight, the tandem problem solving devices of personal love for God the Father and impersonal love for all mankind.

2. For the believer love is a system of virtue and values living inside the integrity envelope. Christian marriage is corporate testimony to answer Satan’s argument: why am I being condemned to the eternal lake of fire, when Adam and the woman failed in the first marriage and are not being condemned to that same lake of fire? The assets of the Christian marriage are far, far greater than the assets given to the first marriage in the garden of Eden.

3. The integrity envelope is the basis for true capacity for love. There is no true love apart from these two problem solving devices. Personal love in the soul is formed and shaped from the spiritual life, from the two tandem problem solving devices.

4. It is the teaching of the word of God that is going to change your attitude and idea as to what love is. Love is the advanced spiritual life; it is love that God has provided; and it is always provided in virtue. It is not dependent on emotion. Since love is not dependent on emotion, it is not dependent on lust. God’s plan is not emoting, but thinking. This thinking includes a system of virtue love that distinguishes the believer from all the rest of humanity. The greatest Christian service is a system of thinking under virtue love.

a. Rapport with God must precede rapport with people. The believer is designed to be made totally miserable and distracted by people in every status quo of love (friendship, romance, and marriage) unless he has rapport with God. You will never find happiness with people unless you have rapport with God, and that means having virtue.

b. Rapport with God can only exist where the believer fulfills or is in the process of fulfilling the unique spiritual life of the dispensation of the Church.

(1) The spiritual life of the Old Testament was based on the basic problem solving device of the faith-rest drill and the advanced problem solving devices of grace orientation and doctrinal orientation leading to a personal sense of destiny. Yet these things are only basic problem solving devices to Church Age believers. We start our advanced spiritual life where they stopped. We have an advanced spiritual life that will never exist again after the Rapture of the Church. Old Testament believers also had personal love for God and impersonal love for mankind as part of their spiritual life and as problem solving devices. (2) Until you have personal love for God the Father, you do not have the love that God requires for people. If you do not have personal love for God first in your life, then you will be distracted until the day you die by people. In your distraction you will be hustling and doing things for people. People will always be a distraction until you fulfill your spiritual heritage and destiny of personal love for God the Father.

(3) The entire advanced spiritual life of the Church Age only is made up of virtue love and true happiness. God gives His very own happiness to people who live in the integrity envelope.

c. If the believer fails to fulfill the principle “Rapport with God must precede rapport with people,” he will become permanently distracted by people, and those people will only make him very unhappy.

d. The spiritual gift of pastor-teacher will become distracted by relationships in life that will keep him from studying. These relationships will be related to ambition for human success, approbation lust, sexual lust, power lust, seeking fame motivated by aspirations related to the three arrogance skills.

e. All of these tendencies become a distraction to the fulfillment of the unique spiritual life of history.

f. The spiritual life of the Church Age gives every believer fantastic potential under equal opportunity to glorify God both in time and eternity, and this alone makes life meaningful.

g. For the first and only time in history every Church Age believer is a priest, both male and female, both Jew and Gentile, having the same spiritual assets and potential for a life of meaning, purpose, and definition. You do not need miracles, the temporary spiritual gifts, or to talk with God personally.

h. Our ignorance of these Bible doctrines destroys the purpose of spiritual freedom in the exercise of our options in the unique spiritual life.

i. Our enemies to prevent the attainment of these spiritual objectives our threefold: Satan, self, and others.

j. It is far more important to be loved by God than to be loved by people. God is infinitely more important in our relationships with people than people are important in our relationships with people. Therefore, infinitely more benefits accrue to the believer from being loved by God than being loved by people. Our capacity for love is based on the fact that God loved us first, 1 Jn 4:19.

5. 1 Pet 5:5, “In the same manner, you younger men [congregation] become subordinate to your elders [pastor]; and all of you, clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because `God makes war against the arrogant believer, but gives grace to the humble believer.’” a. The entire system of the advanced spiritual life is related to love and happiness, but it is a love and happiness that will not tolerate any form of arrogance.

b. There is no true humility unless there is subordination to authority.

(1) This is why wives cannot love their husbands unless they are humble. A woman with any slight bit of arrogance has no capability of loving a man she might otherwise love. Without humility there is no capacity for a woman to love a man. From the time a woman makes the decision to marry a man, her capability or capacity for love is based upon subordination, because subordination is humility.

(2) The man’s capacity for love is based on responsibility in leadership. If he has no sense of responsibility in leadership, then he cannot love either.

c. Therefore, what opens the door for the adult spiritual life of the Church Age closes the door for true love if it is rejected, resisted, or an area of ignorance to you.

d. The arrogant believer is a self-centered, self-justifying person. He has a lust for approbation, a lust to be recognized. His happiness depends on all of the lust patterns: for money, sex, approbation, etc. His lust for money, sex, approbation is his life, and it is a life of misery. The supreme court of heaven does not guarantee one moment of happiness for the arrogant believer.

T. Virtue-Love Defined, 1 Cor 13.

1. 1 Cor 13:13, “But now there remains in place faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is virtue-love.” The faith-rest drill and a personal sense of destiny as problem solving devices are still in place in the Church Age, but even greater than these is the problem solving device of virtue-love.

a. “Faith” is the faith-rest drill. “Hope” is a personal sense of destiny, the first objective of the spiritual life and opens the door to the advanced spiritual life. “Love” is the tandem problem solving device of virtue-love or personal love for God and impersonal love for all mankind.

b. The faith-rest drill represents the basic problem solving devices for spiritual childhood. A personal sense of destiny is the dividing line between spiritual childhood and spiritual adulthood. Virtue- love represents the problem solving devices for spiritual adulthood.

c. “Faith” is the faith-rest drill of the spiritual life of the Old Testament, which is still operational as a basic function of the spiritual life.

(1) There are four stages of the faith-rest drill:

(a) The mixing of the promises of God with faith, Heb 3:1-4:3.

(b) You begin to put together doctrines and apply them as doctrinal rationales—the essence of God rationale, the plan of God rationale, the policy of God rationale, the a fortiori rationale, the four spiritual mechanics rationale. You come to doctrinal conclusions and faith takes control of the situation.

(d) The forth stage is the plaintiff function before the supreme court of heaven. All injustices are put into the hands of the justice of God, the supreme court of heaven. This avoids the function of the three arrogance skills, malice, revenge, and other forms of evil.

(2) The transition from faith to hope is taught in Heb 10:39-11:1, “But we are not shrinking back to ruin [failure in the spiritual life], but by faith possessing the soul. Now faith is the essence [actual being, reality] of things being hoped for, the evidence of things not being seen.”

d. “Hope” is the dividing line between the basic problem solving devices and the advanced problem solving devices. It is the dividing line between spiritual childhood and spiritual adulthood.

(1) Hope or a personal sense of destiny is an open door to the most fantastic treasure house of human history called “virtue-love.”

(2) You cannot bring your own agenda to the advanced spiritual life; you must check it at the door to enter into the happiness of God. What is more important to you in your life: your agenda or God’s agenda. One of the most dangerous and vulnerable areas of the spiritual life is when you face that open door. If you approach that open door and still have your own agenda and do not check it at the door, you will never enter the adult spiritual life.

(3) Very few believers ever walk through this door. Your invisible assets bring you right to the door of a personal sense of destiny. If you walk through this door, you walk right into the integrity envelope of virtue-love.

(4) “Hope” in the Bible is absolute confidence, confident expectation, “expectation or prospect especially hope pertaining to matters spoken of in God’s promises, the One in whom one places his hope,” Bauer Lexicon, p. 252f. Hope is identified with the spiritual life of the Church Age in the following ways.

(a) Hope is the first tactical objective of the spiritual life.

(b) Hope is a personal sense of destiny or problem solving device number six deployed on the FLOT line of the soul.

(d) Hope is spiritual self-esteem, the first stage of the adult spiritual life.

(5) Rom 5:5, “And hope does not put us to shame [disgrace, disappointment] because the love for God has been poured out in our hearts through the agency of the Holy Spirit who has been given to us [the filling of the Holy Spirit] for our benefit.”

(6) Rom 4:18a, “In hope against hope he believed...” Abraham had hope against his own agenda (hope) that was not God’s will. Abraham, Moses and David looked at the solution rather than at the problem.

e. “Love” represents the advanced problem solving devices in the status of spiritual adulthood. Virtue-love is the entrance into the adult spiritual life.

(1) If there is no rapport with God, people become a source of maximum misery to you, total distraction from the unique spiritual life of the Church Age, and you have a complete loss of values.

(2) Virtue and values originate through that open door in the advanced spiritual life through the deployment of the advanced problem solving devices related to virtue-love and true happiness. When you walk through that door, whatever problems you consider insurmountable in this life are dwelt with in that treasure house by personal love for God, impersonal love for mankind, sharing the perfect happiness of God, and occupation with Christ.

(3) Infinitely more permanent and eternal are the benefits which accrue to the believer as a result of being loved by God from eternity past. This is recognized in your very own portfolio of invisible assets.

(4) In the Church Age, the advanced problem solving devices of the spiritual life are related to virtue-love and perfect happiness. Arrogance reacts to things in life and you are at your worst, while virtue- love responds. When you have your own agenda, you reject grace, bow your neck, and walk into evil.

(5) Virtue-love is related to sharing the happiness of God and occupation with Christ, 1 Pet 1:8, “And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you are not seeing Him now but believing, you greatly rejoice with inexpressible joy [+H], having been clothed in glory.” Being clothed in glory means you have executed the greatest spiritual life that has ever existed in human history, and you have a fantastic testimony to the fallen angels, and your invisible impact is recorded in heaven forever.

(a) Personal love for God must precede any capacity for true love for any member of the human race. Straighten out the soul and you will have capacity for true love. You do not have to see someone to have true love for them; you have to have capacity in the soul.

(b) Living the adult spiritual life is a matter of coordination. The spiritual life is a system of coordination, a system of power which begins with the filling of the Holy Spirit. Coordination means putting it all together after you have learned it. Faith is coordinated with hope; hope is coordinated with love. The spiritual life is the coordination of two power options, three spiritual skills, ten problem solving devices, and the three stages of the adult spiritual life. To be uncoordinated is to be distracted. If you emphasize one thing to the exclusion of the whole picture of the spiritual life, you will fail in the spiritual life.

(6) Heb 12:2, “Be concentrating on Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our doctrine, who because of His exhibited happiness He endured the cross and disregarded the shame, then He sat down on the right hand of the throne of God.”

(7) Eph 3:17, 19, “so that Christ may be at home in your hearts through doctrine, when you have been rooted and established in virtue-love.” “And come to know the love for Christ which goes beyond gnosis that you may be filled resulting in all the fullness from God.”

(8) 2 Cor 5:14, “The love for Christ keeps motivating us.”

2. Virtue-love is defined in 1 Cor 13:4-8a, “Love is patient, love is kind, is not jealous; love does not brag, is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love is never phased out.” 1 Cor 13:8b-12 is a parenthesis about the temporary spiritual gifts. Virtue-love is the adult spiritual life and is never phased out of the Church Age. 3. The Outline of 1 Cor 13.

a. Vulnerability to Failure, verse 1.

b. Two Premises, verses 2-3

c. The Characteristics of Virtue-Love, verse 4-7.

d. The First Conclusion, verse 8a.

e. The Parenthesis, verses 8b-12.

f. The Second Conclusion, verse 13.

4. 1 Cor 13:1, “If I speak with the tongues [languages] of mankind and angels, but do not have virtue-love, I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.”

a. Paul had spoken tongues more than anyone else in the Church Age, 1 Cor 14:18. This gave him the advantage of being able to give an accurate account of the spiritual gift. No one had the gift of speaking a foreign language that was angelic.

b. Therefore, because there is no spiritual gift of speaking in the language of the angels, this is a hypothetical case to explain the importance of virtue-love as the adult stage and the unique phase of the spiritual life for the Church.

c. Tongues reminded the Corinthians of the culture out of which they had come with all its ectatic experiences in the worship of the Greek deities. The influence of the Greek culture on women believers in Corinth was so bad that Paul had to tell the women to keep silent in church so that they would not shout out like they did in the worship of the Greek deities. They thought that if you spoke in tongues, you were the greatest of all believers. The gift of tongues had a special purpose, but it was not a sign of spirituality. The function of the gift of tongues went from the human spirit to the believer’s mouth, completely by-passing the right lobe of the soul, so that the person who spoke in tongues had no idea what they were saying.

d. The purpose for the gift of tongues is explained in 1 Cor 14:21-22, “In the Torah it is written, `By people speaking a foreign language and by the lips of foreigners I will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to Me,’ says the Lord. For this reason the tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe, but to those who are unbelievers.”

e. The sounding brass or peddler’s gong called attention to the copy cat tactics of the carnal believers in Corinth who were seeking to gain the approbation of others by pseudo tongues. Therefore, the “sounding brass” represents the distraction of arrogance in two categories: the arrogance skills and the arrogance complex of sins. The “clanging cymbal” refers to the ecstatic noise of the cults in the ancient world famous for uses cymbals to make noise as a part of their worship. This is a description of noise without meaning. This is emphasis on self rather than on the message, emphasis on emotion rather than on the content of doctrine. Sound without meaning is love without virtue.

5. 1 Cor 13:2, “And if I have the spiritual gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have the temporary gift of faith, so that I could remove mountains from one place to another, but do not have virtue-love, I am nothing.” This is both a hypothesis and a hyperbole or exaggeration.

U. The Synthesis of God’s Love.

1. The background for this doctrine is Jude 21, “Guard yourselves by means of love for God, as you wait with anticipation for the lovingkindness of our Lord Jesus Christ with reference to eternal life.”

a. The verb TEREO is a military word for the Roman security system of guarding an encampment. It means to guard or to keep watch over something. We are guarding ourselves in relationship to a system of security. This is a mandate for each of us to have as a part of our spiritual life our very own security system given to us by God. We are mandated to have true love in our soul as a system of security to grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. We are to guard ourselves, so that we can have momentum in the spiritual life. The constative aorist means that this is something we do day-by-day. It is not your business to guard someone else. We are to guard ourselves. No one can guard your spiritual life for you.

b. The instrument for our security that we are to guard is by means of love for God. The objective genitive of THEOS is correctly translated “for God” not “of God.” It is our love for God which guards our soul.

c. You have a security system—love for God, which is guarding your soul. Love for God is the security system which guards your soul.

d. You have no security system in your soul until you have true personal love for God the Father and impersonal love for all mankind. You cannot keep up your momentum without true virtue-love.

e. This security system of love for God is the greatest dynamic given to us. All true love is based on capacity righteousness, and this righteousness must come first.

f. Eternal life always refers to immortality. Our life on this earth is our mortal life. We are to guard ourselves by means of love for God as long as we are in our mortal body.

(1) Immortality comes through resurrection. Not one believer of the Church Age has immortality before anyone else. We all receive our resurrection bodies at the same time at the Rapture of the Church.

(2) Occupation with Christ and PLEROMA is the ultimate in mortality.

(3) Death before resurrection is the ultimate of the interim body. The interim body is the greatest thing that can happen after death and before the resurrection.

g. The love of God must be understood as a part of the life of God.

(1) God does not possess life. We possess life. God is life. God is infinite, eternal, unchanging life. Part of God’s life is God’s love. Love is a part of the being or essence of God.

(2) Love belongs eternally and co-equally to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The love of God has always existed.

(3) 2 Thes 3:5, “And may the Lord direct your hearts to the love of God and to the perseverance of Jesus Christ.”

2. Synthesis is defined as combining of the constituent elements of separate material or abstract entities into a singular or unified entity.

a. The righteousness of God is the basis for the love of God as the subject of divine love. God’s love is based upon God’s righteousness and therefore never changes.

b. Divine righteousness causes the love of God to be perfect, totally compatible with the essence of God and the stabilizer of divine integrity. Love is the stabilizer of God’s integrity.

(1) The love of God always remains the same whether condemning or blessing us as believers.

(2) All divine discipline of the believer must come from that in God’s essence which does not change. When we sin, God does not think any less of us. He loves us exactly the same as when we are filled with the Spirit. This is a security system, which guarantees that you do not lose your salvation no matter what sin you commit.

(3) The personal love of God goes directly to the righteousness of God imputed to you at the moment of salvation, and it never changes no matter how low down you are as a believer. You will always have the righteousness of God in your soul. This is your security. Your other security is God’s personal love for you because you have His imputed righteousness.

c. In the realm of Bible doctrine there are two categories of divine love as a nominative subject—divine personal love and divine impersonal love.

d. Since God is perfect and love is a transitive verb, the direct object of love must be compatible with perfect righteousness in the subject. The righteousness of God must be the subject and the righteousness of God must be the object in God’s personal love for God (love among members of the Trinity). God’s personal love for believers is perfect righteousness to imputed perfect righteousness. You do not change the love of God for you by your failure or your success. God’s personal love to the unbeliever’s total depravity is God’s impersonal love.

e. There are four direct objects of God’s love.

(1) Plus R or absolute righteousness of the other members of the Trinity.

(2) The perfect righteousness of the impeccable human nature of Jesus Christ in hypostatic union. God the Father has always loved the absolute perfect righteousness of the perfect humanity of Christ.

(3) The imputed perfect righteousness of the believer in Christ.

(4) The direct object of the impersonal love of God is the unbeliever under two categories.

(a) At physical birth, we have the category of spiritual death or total depravity.

(b) The rejection of the love of God offered in the gospel.

3. The Synthesis of the Essence of God’s Love.

a. God does not possess life. God is life. He is infinite, eternity, unending, unchanging life.

b. Part of God’s life is love, which means that love is a part of the essence or being of God.

c. Love belongs eternity and co-equally to each person of the Trinity.

d. The love of God has always existed, and there never was a time when the love of God did not exist.

e. Divine love is compatible with the other attributes of God.

(1) God is sovereign; therefore, His love is self-motivated from that sovereignty. Whatever decisions God has made, have all been made in love.

(2) God is eternal. God’s love existed eternally unsustained by Himself or any other source.

(3) God is holy; therefore, divine love possesses perfect integrity, which includes incorruptible justice and immutable righteousness.

(4) This means that the perfect love of God has perfect and eternal virtue.

(5) God is immutable. Because God is holy and immutable, His divine love cannot be compromised by man’s sins, human good, evil, or any other function of the sin nature. In synthesizing, this means that divine love cannot be corrupted by any creature failure.

(6) God is omniscient. Divine love always functions in a rational manner. Divine love is rational, devoid of either emotional content or any system of irrationality. Bible doctrine is the thinking of Christ, 1 Cor 2:16. Divine love is rooted in every form of knowledge which resides in His perfect, eternal, and absolute being. Therefore, the most important thing in life to know is Bible doctrine.

(7) God is absolute truth. He is absolute veracity. Therefore, divine love is revealed and integrated into every category of Bible doctrine. God’s love only tells us the truth. God never lies to us.

(8) God is infinite. God is without boundary or limitation, and they unite in themselves those perfections which belong to their co- equal, co-infinite, and co-eternal essence.

4. Synthesis has applications.

a. Since divine integrity is maintained by the sovereignty of God plus His incorruptible, unchangeable virtue, God’s love can never be compromised or its capacity diminished or limited whether He is blessing you or punishing you.

b. Man’s sinfulness and failures cannot and does not change or effect God’s perfect, eternal, immutable and unchanging love. We do not have the power to change God’s love, but God’s love has the power to change us.

c. Even God’s pre-knowledge of our sins and failures in eternity past cannot cancel or diminish God’s love for each one of us.

d. Because God is perfect and absolute righteousness and integrity, His divine love cannot be prejudice, cannot be unfair, cannot be discriminatory.

e. The combination of God’s perfect righteousness and immutability indicates that divine love is eternal and consistent as revealed in the doctrinal content of the Bible. Those doctrinal principles of the canon of Scripture are beneficial to the believer without compromising the essence of God. This is illustrated by the salvation work of Christ on the Cross.

f. The combination of God’s omniscience and immutability means that God’s love cannot be complicated by ignorance, silliness, or absurdities.

g. God’s immutability means that divine love cannot change. Therefore, God’s love does not improve or decline. God’s love does not increase or decrease. Therefore, the rejection or spurning of God’s eternal love never results in any form of evil or sinful reaction. The human love of Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Punitive action does not imply any change in God’s love.

h. Divine love is perfect, infinite, and eternal in its stability and its function regardless of any set of circumstances. Why? Because God is veracity and truth.

i. Divine love has perfect and eternal capacity which cannot be diminished or changed by any failure or flaw of angelic creatures or human beings.

j. Therefore, because God is infinite, He cannot be complicated by ignorance, absurdities, silliness or emotion in the existence in the function of love. God is not emotional. 5. Divine Self-Esteem.

a. Divine self-esteem is God’s own love directed toward His own righteousness.

b. Each person of the Trinity possesses infinite, eternal, and perfect righteousness.

c. Each person of the Trinity loves His own perfect righteousness just as much as He loves the righteousness of the other two members of the Trinity.

d. This is classified as divine self-esteem, which means that no person in the Godhead ever feels threatened by another person in the Trinity.

e. Divine self-esteem means that no person of the Trinity ever feels threatened by any form of creature failure. This is why God’s love never changes toward us when we fail.

f. Divine self-esteem is the pattern for spiritual self-esteem, which is the first stage of spiritual adulthood in the royal family of God.

6. The Historical Pattern of True Love.

a. True love is defined in the human being as two categories of soul or virtue love—personal love and impersonal love. (Virtue love and soul love are synonymous terms.) This is the first great present that God ever gave to the human race.

(1) Personal true love or soul love toward God comes in two subcategories.

(a) The aggressive love of enduring devotion.

i. Intensive love

ii. Enduring loyalty.

iii. Consecration.

iv. Dedication toward God.

(b) The responding love of respect.

i. Deference and admiration.

ii. Honor of God in worship.

iii. Esteem for God.

iv. Consideration and partiality toward God.

(2) Impersonal love is not just a problem solving device; it is a motivator.

b. There are two outstanding problem solving devices related to the spiritual life—rebound and impersonal love.

c. For the royal family of the Church Age the spiritual life is characterized by soul love or virtue love and is preceded by plus R or capacity righteousness, resulting in personal love for God the Father and impersonal love for all mankind. That is the greatest system of stability and tranquility we can have in this life.

d. Where does sexual love fit into this pattern? God gave mankind sexual love for pleasure and recreation, and always within the boundaries of marriage. (1) Jesus Christ created a husband and gave him the gender of male. Then He created the wife and gave her the gender of female. God married them immediately after their creation.

(2) He gave them two great wedding presents—perfect environment (which didn’t help their marriage at all) and sex (the greatest pleasure and recreation in life—but only within the boundary of marriage).

(3) God created some of the greatest punishments for those who jump out of bounds. No one ever gets away with sex outside of marriage.

(4) Sex is not a problem solving device.

(5) When there is soul love, then sex is enhanced beyond description.

(6) Sex was not originally designed for the perpetuation of the human race.

e. Sexual love is not a problem solving device. Sexual love outside of marriage is a problem manufacturing device, resulting in severe punishment from God.

f. In the case of sex outside of marriage there are two problem solving devices. For the unbeliever the solution is faith in Christ. For the believer the solution is the rebound technique of 1 Jn 1:9.

g. Sex outside of marriage is one of the greatest attacks on virtue or soul love; therefore, it is under severe punishment from the supreme court of heaven on both believers and unbelievers.

h. Sex between a man and a woman is one of the greatest pleasures in life inside the boundaries of marriage. But outside the boundaries of marriage sex is no longer a pleasure but the source of severe punishment from God as well as self-induced misery.

i. Sex outside of marriage is one of the greatest attacks on the structure and blessing of the human race in any given generation.

j. It is no accident that the spiritual life of the Church Age believer places great emphasis on true love in soul as the prerequisite for the bodies of the husband and wife united in sexual pleasure. It is no accident that the beginning of sexual love was assigned to the divine institution of marriage only.

(1) Gen 2:24, “For this cause [sexual intercourse] a man shall leave his father and mother and shall have sexual intercourse with his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the husband and his wife were both naked and they were not ashamed.”

(2) Eph 6:15, “Flee fornication. For every other sin that a person commits is outside the body, but the fornicating person sins against their own body.”

k. There is no such as true love without true righteousness. When people say, “I love you,” but they do not have true righteousness, they do not love you. True love is always based on righteousness, not on lust in the soul and sin in the body.

(1) The subject in personal love must always have righteousness.

(2) The only true love is the righteousness of God in the soul producing that true love. That true love is learned by grace and lived by grace. If you do not have this righteousness in the soul, then you do not have true love in the soul. The only love that has true integrity in the spiritual life is that which comes from the righteousness of God, and it is transmitted through the ministry of God the Holy Spirit through perception, metabolization, and application of Bible doctrine.

(3) Love starts in the soul, not in the body. A man can tell his wife he loves her a million times, but he has no righteousness in his soul, then he has no true love. We are to love our wife as Christ loved the Church. If you do not have the spiritual life under the ministry of God the Holy Spirit and Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness, you will fail to execute this command to love your wife. True love develops in the soul and overflows into the body. Without true love in the soul, there is no overflow into the body.

7. The love of God is the stabilizer of divine integrity.

a. The righteousness of God is the basis for God as the subject of divine love. What the righteousness of God demands, the justice of God executes, but always through the love of God as expressed in the grace of God. Righteousness may demand punishment of us or blessing of us, but the love of God does not change whether we are disciplined or blessed by the justice of God.

b. Divine righteousness causes the love of God to be perfect, totally compatible with divine essence, and the stabilizer of divine integrity.

c. Ps 33:4-5, “For the word of the Lord is righteous, And all of His work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice; The earth is full of the unfailing love of the Lord.”

d. Ps 89:14, “Righteousness and justice—the foundation of Your throne; Unfailing love and truth [Bible doctrine] go before You.” When you see God, what do you see first? You see that His love has never diminished in all of human history.

e. God’s love is always there for us whether we succeed or fail. The love of God for us never changes; it stabilizes the integrity of God whether punishing or blessing us. God’s love never diminishes whether we fail or succeed. The love of God is still there even when He judges the unbeliever and condemns them to the lake of fire at the Last Judgment.

f. When we learn this doctrine, then we live this doctrine, and it is the greatest spiritual life ever provided for mankind. If we fail to learn this doctrine, then we live without this doctrine, and live in divine discipline all our life.

8. The Function of God’s Love For the Believer.

a. Rom 3:21-28, “But now apart from the Law the righteousness of God has been revealed, being testified by the Law and the Prophets, that is, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all those who believe, (for there is no distinction [between Jew and Gentile]; for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God), who are justified by His grace through redemption which is in Christ Jesus, whom God [the Father] has displayed publicly by His blood as the mercy seat through faith, a demonstration of His righteousness, because of the passing over of previously committed sins by delay in judgment from God; for a demonstration of His righteousness at the present time, in order that He might be righteous and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Where then is boasting? It is excluded. By what principle? That Of works? Definitely not, but by the principle of faith. For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the Law.”

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