The Master‘s Class, LifeChange Church Wichita

Why do you obey the commandments of God?

It is because you are afraid of God?  Certainly, there have been times when somebody says something particularly stupid about God that I have said, “Wait just a minute while I step over here so that I will not get in the way of the lightning bolt that is getting ready to come down upon you.”  And I certainly believe that for God’s love to be real, so must His wrath be real.  

But, as believers, we obey the commandments of God because we love God and we want to please Him, and we can do that because the question of our salvation, or eternal life, has already been settled by our faith in Christ.  This means that our obedience is because we love God. 

Why do you obey the laws of the various governments and employers that God has placed in authority over you?

Because you are afraid of the consequences?  Perhaps, but our lessons over the last several weeks would say that the believer is to obey the laws of man because we love God, and we want to please Him.  Right?

Why are you committed to being faithful to your spouse?  Certainly it is because we love them, but more importantly, we love God, and we want to glorify Him by the way that we love our spouse.   

So in each case, it is our love of God that is the motive behind our obedience.  Not fear, but love.  

So how do we show the people who we meet in the world around us that we love them?  

The answer is the same as it was for the other three questions I just asked, we show our neighbors that we love them by obeying God’s commandments.  The Lord Jesus simplified this for us by saying that if we obeyed just two commandments, all of the others would just fall into place.  

The first was to love God with all of our heart, with all of our soul, with all of our mind, and with all of our strength, and the second was to love our neighbor as ourselves.

This is what our lesson is about today, our love of God, and how we show that love.  

We live in a society where everything changes, where nothing is permanent.  A majority of people in our state can define marriage as being between one man and one woman, and yet a set of activist judges, with no regard for the constitution of the U.S., can overrule the will of the people.  

We can live in this nation for hundreds of years with clearly defined morals about what is right and wrong based on the absolute truths established by God, and then suddenly anything that God says must be disregarded.  Where man is involved, everything changes, nothing is secure.  

So it is easy to understand why people have a hard time accepting God’s gift of salvation as permanent.  Surely there must be things that we can do to take that salvation away, or perhaps God will change His mind as He looks at the depravity of man in our current world.   

This is the way man acts, right?  Our love towards others is generally dictated by how that other person treats us.  It is easy to love someone who loves us back.  It is much harder to love someone who intentionally harms us.  So this is man’s concept of love, do unto others as they have done unto me.  

However, God’s concept of love is very different from ours.  In our lesson today, Paul will tell us that God loves even the ungodly.  He loves us even if we have rejected Him.  He loves us even if we have done things that He has established as evil and wrong.  God loves us in spite of what we do, say, or even if we do not love Him back.  Paul will go on to say that it is because God’s love for us does not change that our salvation, once accepted, is unchangeable.  Once we have become a reborn, sanctified, justified, and adopted child of God, we cannot be unborn, nor can our adoption to the family of God be revoked.  Once we are in the hand of our Lord, nothing can remove us.  Our salvation is secure, because God’s love for us is secure.  

It is the love of God that guarantees our eternal security.  That same love that planned our redemption at the foundation of the universe, that sent His own beloved Son to die on a cross, will be the same love that will fling wide open the gates of glory to welcome us home. 

What is the perfect law of liberty?

Have you ever considered what it would be like to go someplace where there were no laws, and no police officers to enforce those laws?  To be totally free to do whatever you wanted, for as long as you wanted, and in any way that you wanted to do it?

Sounds pretty good doesn't it?  If I don’t want to get up in the morning, I don’t have to.  If I want to drive my car as fast as it will go, then I can.  

This is pretty much what it was like for the early pioneers who opened up the western part of the United States.  When they stepped out into that wilderness, they were free from the laws and those that would enforce it.  They lived by their wits, their strength, and their courage, for even though there were no societal laws, there were always the laws of nature, and the laws of the strongest shall prevail.  

So the question is, are you truly free when you step out of the boundaries of the laws of a civil society?  Is this true liberty?

Without laws, is there such a thing as criminal behavior?  To be a lawbreaker there must be a law to break.

God, as our Creator, knew that man needed laws to establish the absolute truths about right and wrong, so He gave us His Word that we call the Bible.  It contains the Mosaic Law, The Sermon on the Mount, and it contains Christ’s Law, which is the perfect law of liberty.  These laws identify what is sin for man.  They let man know that he has broken those laws, that the penalty of that sin is death, and that man needs a Savior.  The very Savior named Jesus Christ who died on a cross to pay the penalty for man’s sin.  

As a believer we are no longer under the Mosaic Laws, but our behavior is to be controlled by two commandments.  

The first is, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind.  This is a believer’s responsibility to God.  

The second is, To love thy neighbor as thyself.  This is a believer’s responsibility to others.

How do we find perfect liberty?  Listen to this podcast to learn that the answer is to be redeemed, released, and ruled by Christ.  

In this lesson Paul completes his description of agape love, and then he compares it and the gift of prophecy to the gift of tongues.   He tells us of the permanence of agape love and how tongues fail.  He tells us of the supremacy of prophecy over tongues.  He tells us to desire that which is permanent and that which is of more value to the body of Christ.  Here what Paul has to say in this verse-by-verse study of 1 Corinthians 13:8 to 14:6.  Listen and be blessed by the Word of God as we learn a description of Jesus Christ.

Paul describes the gift of love as the more excellent way.  But this kind of love is more than an emotion.  It is an act of will.  Love involves the heart, the mind, and the will.  Love is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.  Although we are to covet earnestly the best gifts, they are to be exercised in love, and only the Spirit of God can do that.  Love is the thing that needs to be added to every gift of the Spirit.  Without love your gift is worthless.  Paul describes this wonderful gift in a verse-by-verse study of 1 Corinthians 13:1-7.  Listen to how the Word of God describes agape love and be blessed.