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New
Website! Check out the new
Elijah Ministries Website! Want to Help? We are looking for a few volunteers that would like to help out Elijah Ministries. We would like to get more clips of Norm's messages on the internet (at our Vimeo, Youtube, and Tangle channels). There have been over 20,000 views of the clips we do have up! If you are someone that can volunteer a little bit of time and has some experience with computers and video (and even better, know some sections of Norm's messages that have blessed you that you would like to have online to bless others), please contact Micah at info@spiritofelijah.com. Speaking Engagements 1.
Anyone in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois is
welcome to attend the Family Life Conference at the United Methodist
Church in Monroe, WI, Feb. 26-28. www.christianlifeconference.com 2. Father/Daughter banquet is being held March 15 in the southern Chicagoland area at Dinolfo's Banquet Hall in Homer Glen, IL, hosted by Christian Heritage Church and CHESS. Contact Steve Grutzius at sgrutzius@ymail.com. 3. Norm will be the keynote speaker at the Southwest Indiana Home Educators Convention, March 12-13 in Evansville, IN. Chariot February 2010 - Norm Wakefield Unfailing
Love, Part 1 In 1 Corinthians 13:7-8, Paul wrote, "Love bears all
things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love
never fails." What a bold, confident statement about love! I'm
interested in this kind of love that never fails. How about you? In the
next few months, I invite you to join me in learning about God's unfailing
love, how we can experience it and express it to others. The
Love Lesson
My first thoughts after reading Paul's description of love came in the
form of questions. Almost weekly I hear of couple's whose marriages are on
the rocks. The wife of a popular televangelist filed for divorce recently,
and it grieves my heart. Doesn't something inside of us cringe every time
we hear of the disintegration of a so-called Christian marriage? What is
the explanation? In light of 1 Corinthians 13:7-8, here are my deductions. •
If love
never fails, how come so many people divorce when they began thinking that
they loved each other? Answer: They
didn't both truly love. •
How can I
say they didn't love each other? Answer:
Because love never fails. •
What kind
of love fails? Answer:
A counterfeit kind of love from the world. •
What kind
of love never fails? Answer:
A love that comes from God. •
Conclusion:
Love that comes from God never fails, and love that comes from the world
always fails.
Have you learned The Love Lesson?
Unfailing love is a gift from God to those who know Him and live through
Jesus. Unless we make a distinction between the kind of love the world
promotes and the kind of love God gives through Jesus Christ, it is easy
and natural to assume that the so-called love we have for others is the
real deal. However, when the test comes and we feel bitter, revengeful,
and unforgiving, we often ask the question, "Do I love my husband or wife?"
Usually we don't learn The Love
Lesson the easy way. It is learned through testing. This morning, a
wife (I'll call her Cheryl) called to tell me she discovered four days
earlier that her husband had been unfaithful. In the midst of the shock,
hurt, and knee-jerk reaction to divorce him, the Lord reminded her that
she had purchased a book on love four years ago at a homeschool convention
and never read it. She found the book on her shelf and began reading Equipped
to Love. After reading five chapters, she called to thank me for
writing the book and how it was transforming her view of love. She made
this remark, "I thought I had loved my husband, but now I see that it was
totally idolatrous. I have never loved him with God's love." Cheryl
is on the road to experiencing and expressing God's unfailing love because
she is learning The Love Lesson. (Pray that God will reveal this to her husband as
well and grant him true repentance.) The spirit of her love is being
tested by her marriage relationship. What relationship is God using to
test the spirit of your love?
Having looked at The Love Lesson,
let's consider the scriptural basis for the truth that unfailing love is a
gift from God to those who know Him and live through Jesus Christ. It is
best seen in the Fourth Chapter of John's first letter. The real challenge
facing couples in marriage is being able to distinguish between real
unfailing love and the counterfeit love which always fails. What John
wrote in Chapter Four is very helpful. How can you distinguish between a
false spirit which implants failing love and the Holy Spirit of Christ
which implants unfailing love? The
Love Test
If you are to
have unfailing love flowing through your marriage relationship, you must
test the spirit of your love. When I use the term spirit,
I mean the influences on your life. When Jesus was on his way to
Jerusalem, He sent some of his disciples ahead of him to find a village
which would welcome them for the night. A Samaritan city rejected them,
and upon returning, one of those disciples asked, "Shall we call down fire
from heaven on them?" Jesus replied, "You do not know what spirit you
are of." Jesus tested the spirit of their thoughts, but the disciples
had not tested their thoughts to discover their source. Was the influence
which produced such an idea from heaven? Or from the world? You
must test the spirits to see if they are from God or the world.
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see
whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into
the world (1 John 4:1).
Although we
should know this, we apparently need to be reminded that not every thought
we have or action has God as its source. We may have listened to the wrong
voices and have learned wrong ideas about love and relationships. I'm
speculating on this, but I wonder if the Apostle John was the one who
suggested that God would be pleased to "torch em." Jesus gave the
brothers, James and John, the name, Sons of Thunder, and lightning or fire
from heaven is what makes the thunder. Perhaps Jesus tagged them with the
name so every time He wanted to remind them not to listen to the spirit of
the world He would call them, Sons of Thunder.
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that
Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God; and every spirit that does
not confess Jesus is not from God; this is the spirit of the antichrist,
of which you have heard that it is coming, and now it is already in the
world (1 John 4:2-3).
Within the
context of this chapter, it appears John had this in mind: The
spirit which says Jesus came to reveal the true definition of love is the
Spirit of God. On the other hand, the spirit of idolatry creates
another god and puts it in the place of the true God, so it wouldn't
confess that Jesus' love is the only real love. The prefix anti
means in the place of. Therefore any spirit promoting a different kind of
love with a different source than the love revealed in Jesus is the antichrist
spirit. If love fails, then a spirit of antichrist is at work.
There is very
little difference between the spirit of idolatry and the spirit of
antichrist. The spirit of idolatry and the spirit of antichrist do the
same thing: look to anything or anyone other than Jesus as a source of
happiness, peace, or love. If Jesus Christ is God in the flesh, then He
revealed God's definition of love. His spirit is the Spirit of God. When I
suggested above that a divorced couple didn't love each other in the first
place, I was applying the "love never fails" test from 1 Corinthians
13:8. The Apostle John used the "antichrist" test. The point is that
if love fails, then a spirit of idolatry is present or the spirit of
antichrist is at work. If love fails, then one doesn't
know God.
The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love (1 John 4:8).
There is no
confusion in what John wrote about the one who doesn't love: he doesn't
know God since God is love. However, if one knows God, then he knows the
love of God by experience, and thus knows how to express unfailing love.
If one doesn't know God and His love, then how can he express unfailing
love? That's why John wrote verse 8. This allows us to conclude that God's
love is what Jesus did to love us. What did He do to love us? What did His
love look like? He emptied Himself and gave to us expecting nothing in
return for the purpose of revealing His Father's love. So we empty
ourselves and give expecting nothing in return to reveal the love of God. If love endures, then one is born of God and knows God.
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and
everyone who loves is born of God and knows God (1 John 4:7).
In contrast to
failing love, if love endures or is unfailing, then with John, we draw
this conclusion: Since unfailing love only comes from God, it can only be
possessed by those who are born of God and know Him. The way one can test
the spirit in a person is to test its fruit. If love fails, then there's
no new birth, and the person is still under the influence of the
antichrist spirit in the world. If love endures, then the person is born
of God and knows Him. Additionally, we can know... If
love endures, then the Spirit of God is present.
No one
has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and
His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He
in us, because He has given us of His Spirit (1 John 4:12-13).
We can also draw
another conclusion about unfailing love. If unfailing love is present,
then God abides in us. The love of God working its way through us (love
being perfected or completed) is evidence that we abide in the love we
have experienced in Christ, and that means the Holy Spirit is present.
John wrote that we can know we
dwell in God and He in us because God has given us the fruit of the Holy
Spirit, namely, love. Thanks be to God!
Thank God for
the love test. God has graciously given the truth about the spirit of love
so we won't be fooled by a counterfeit love, the fruit of the spirit of
idolatry. These verses of 1 John 4 are stunning. They wouldn't be
necessary if there were not people who believed they knew God even though
they didn't express unfailing love. My wife and I used to be in that
subset of the church. Because I had been deceived, I know the frustration,
emptiness, and fear that consumes people who ignore what God has revealed
through John in this letter. At this time in history, there are many who
believe they know God, call themselves Christians, yet do not love others
with God's kind of love revealed in Jesus Christ. It was the same in John's
day.
We need this
admonition to test the spirits today as much as the early church did.
Without testing the spirits, the church becomes a mixture of the Spirit of
God and the spirit of the antichrist which communicates a false gospel to
the world and more importantly, to our children. When they don't see
unfailing love in their home and church, it makes them doubt if the gospel
is really true and powerful.
Furthermore, we
need to know how to test the spirits to see if they are from God as a
protection from being deluded ourselves. Like Cheryl, it may be that you
have never loved your husband, wife, or children with an unfailing love,
and think that you are born again and that you know God. To know the
truth, you can be set free from a false religious spirit, a false christ,
and drawn into the knowledge of the true Jesus Christ who came in the
flesh and is the exact representation of God and His unfailing love.
I encourage you
to look back over the main points in this article. Can you give God thanks
for the love He has given you for others? I hope so. If not, then remember
what John also wrote in the first chapter. "If
we confess our sins, He is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins
and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness" (1 John 1:9). He made the
way for such forgiveness to be experienced before you ever loved Him or
anyone else. Fall before Him, gaze upon Christ on the cross, and stay
there until His love washes you clean. Then you will have a desire and
vision to be as He is in this world - a revelation of God's unfailing
love. God's love will begin coursing its way through your life when you
have experienced the power of the love of God revealed in Jesus Christ and
His work on the cross.
Would
you like to be on the Elijah Ministries Prayer Team? The backbone of Elijah Ministries is the prayer team who pray diligently for God to turn the hearts of men to Himself, their wives, and their children. Before I leave to speak, I send out a prayer team invitation to those who will intercede for God to work for His glory in us as a team for the Kingdom. Not only is it a blessing to those whom I speak and myself; but it is also a reminder to the team about the direction of their own hearts. If you would like to enter into the labor together with me, you may go to my website and click on "Prayer Team". Has Norm's Chariot or other resources been an encouragement to you? As a nonprofit organization, Elijah Ministries needs support from people like you in order to function. If God has ministered to you through Elijah Ministries and Norm Wakefield, would you consider supporting the work? You can do so here. (Elijah Ministries is a tax-deductible 501c3 and is financially accountable to an overseeing board of 8 non-paid members from around the country.) The Chariot is also available as a podcast. You can automatically receive the Chariot each month in iTunes by subscribing here. (An RSS capable browser such as Internet Explorer 7 or Safari is required.)
If you
haven't visited our website, www.spiritofelijah.com,
please stop by sometime. You'll find: * Resources to equip you and your family * Previous Chariot articles * Norm's speaking schedule *
Free MP3 downloads * Subscribe to the Chariot Podcast here. * Various resources/pages translated and available in Spanish * An online store to purchase resources and make tax-free contributions by credit card
I invite you to be a part of the
moving of the Spirit of Elijah in your church, community, and the world.
How?
1.
Send this article to other men or families that you know would
benefit from it. You might inform them of the previous articles
available on-line at our website.
2.
Share resources from the Spirit of Elijah Ministries with others.
If Equipping Men or Rising to the
Call have been a blessing to you, then you know it will be
beneficial to others. Either share your resources, tell them about the
resources, or purchase a set or two as an investment in their lives. 3. Share with others what you have learned and put into practice in turning your heart to God, your wife, and your children. If God has done this in you, then He wants to affect others through you.
4.
Join the Elijah Ministries email prayer team and make
intercession for others that their hearts would be turned in revival to
the Lord, their wives, and their children. This can be done on-line at www.spiritofelijah.com.
Norm
Wakefield 02.10 To unsubscribe, click here.
Do not change the subject of the email that launches when you click
above; just press send. Or send an email with the subject Unsubscribe
Chariot to chariot@spiritofelijah.com.
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