Eph 5 26 27 Obstacles To Love part 160

A Dignifying Love v.26 That he might sanctify
A Disinfecting Love and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word

What causes love to falter and flop? 1Corinthians 13 guarantees that love will never fail? If we know that love is the key to success, well why all the miscarriages of love, and why all the breakdowns in marriage?

I John 3:23 states, Faith works by love. Love is the outcome of faith so if the product of faith is love and love is not working then we have to get to the root, which is where we lack in faith.

Love is greater then faith but love is the fruit of faith.

Psalms 1 says we’re to be like a tree. So if we are trees the root of our life is to be planted by the rivers of the water of the Word. The root is our faith and the fruit of our tree is love.

The better the root system is drawing from the water of the Word and the water of the Spirit who inspired and flows through the pages of God’s word the more solid our faith.

The fruit of the Spirit is love and the fruit of faith is love.
If our delight is in the law of God which is all summed up in love and we meditate on love continuously our life will be will rooted and prospering in love that doesn’t fail.

I had a person, who claimed to have faith in Christ, maintained that they believed in the Word of God and walked with the Lord, tell me that they didn’t have to love me.

When I look into my own heart and examine my flaws of love and the inadequacies of loves fruit, I wonder over my lacks. Am I saying the same thing in my ingratitude and insecurities about others? Am I saying in my life that I don’t have to love?

In working on this idea I get aggravated and humiliated over lacks of kindness in me that are senseless and foolish.

Os Guinness in his book on Doubt In Two Minds devotes an entire chapter to ingratitude. He writes, that if we are viewing ingratitude rightly, he believes that this is our major cause for doubt and a step away from faith toward failure.

Guinness’s idea is that doubt is not unbelief but rather it’s a middle place between faith and unbelief. But that middle position is an unstable one. A double minded person is unstable in all their ways.

If we doubt, we will not doubt for long. Either we will move from doubt in the direction of a stronger faith, or we will move from doubt in the direction of unbelief.

Jesus said no person could serve two masters; two affections can’t master the heart at the same time. We’ll love one and hate the other or we’ll hold to the one and flee from the other.

And whether we do one or the other depends on how we deal with what causes us to be unsettled. Guinness sees the causes of our unsettling as: ingratitude, a faulty view of God, weak foundations, lack of commitment, lack of growth, unruly emotions, and fearing to believe.

He calls them “seven families of doubt.” Ingratitude is the cause of doubt he starts with.

Why is ingratitude so dangerous? Thanklessness is based upon a willful unawareness of basic facts about God. If we lack a proper relationship to him, think He is outside of our lives, and the circumstance we find ourselves in. When we worry over the providential dealings of a active involved God we will be ungrateful, lacking in adoration and affection for God and inadequate in our love for each other.

Romans 1:18–20 teaches that the existence of God is abundantly revealed in nature. Not only does the Lord exist but His existence is more of a reality then our own existence. He can be seen everywhere around us but we are free to ignore Him and cop a lack in expressions of worship, praise and gratitude for all He is constantly doing.

We routinely can react in anger, sour responses and complaining. What we’re doing is demonstrating our doubts in God. We see what He allows to go on around us, and what He allows into our life in the aspects of our health, mishaps and anguishes.

This can really stir a bitter acrimony about life because we doubt God’s good purposes in our life. We become complainers and reactors with anger spilling out in various ways. Sometimes it belches out in caustic comments, sometimes in criticisms, put downs, unkind comments, sarcasm, cynicism and pessimistic distrust. Then we can absolve it all by saying we’re kidding. This is all from a lack of faith and the fruit is the opposite of love. We lose perspective and spawn a crop of instability, insecurity, inadequacy and insubordination. Doubt drags us down into bitter unbelief.

We may know God is alive and active, of course, we are claiming to be believers, we see Him, and he has brought us into being. He is the Creator of everything.

So if we have life, it is from God. If we have health, it is from God. The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the friends we share, and everything good is from God. If we fail to be grateful for this, it is because we are not really acknowledging him or are rejecting a proper relationship to him.

But we sometimes experience bad things, too. We suffer pain and hunger. We get sick. Eventually we all die. Now these physical issues of our fallen world aren’t an excuse for aggravation and thanklessness? Not really, no, not in view of faith and the Lords using all for His glory in us. We are still not getting what we really deserve; we’ve received Jesus and escaped being cast into a lost eternity.

It’s not, what we don’t have, but what we do have. Nor is it our physical lacks for there are deformities and warps of disfigurement we’ve been kept from. My damages are caused by my own lack of discipline and my lack of love is caused by my doubts in God and His perfect love to me and for me in everything that is going on around me day in and day out.

Praise God, He is sovereign, holy, all knowing, all-powerful and perfect in His dealings in love to each of us. His abundant mercy is something I can take my shaky doubts too, and my fears, and place them thankfully at His throne of grace for forgiveness and compassion.

I suppress truth when I doubt. In doubting I then erect alterations of ingratitude when I take my daily circumstances and become irritated with those around me. I should be initiating acts of kindness in place of actions of doubt. Doubt emotes into derangements of insecurity. We can easily and often do habitually rationalize our doubts and crusty unloving actions.

Faith fosters gratitude and gratitude blooms by acts of kind words and actions. These circle back promoting faith which will in turn nurture love and thoughtfulness to God and to those He has surrounded us with for the expressions of love.

But if we’re not conscious of this we’ll erect a great mass of pestering obstacles of ingratitude. This broods multiple actions of doubt where we show how we’re unsure leading deeper into uncertain hesitancy. If we strip it all back we find that we’re involved in the sin of suppressing the truth and refusing God His place and His worship.

Martyn Lloyd Jones writes: We need to thank God for his mercy, for his goodness, for his dealings with us in providence. We take the sunshine for granted; we are annoyed if we don’t get it. We take the rain for granted. How often do we thank God for all these gifts and blessings!

God is the giver of every good and perfect gift; he is the Father of mercies. He deserves our thanks for everything. How can we completely ignore Him or worse vent invectives and unloving diatribes of disgust on those He’s surrounded us with. Jesus said in that you do it unto the least of these you do it unto me. Who is so stupid as to stagger around and curse God and those He’s given us to love and care about. We displaying our attitude toward God in every thing we say and do for He is doing a work in our day. We are foolish to curse God. Joseph said it well when he told his brothers you meant it for evil but God meant it for good. He had no doubts in all things working together for good and he loved God in all things.