The Right Heart Can Forgive and Tolerate

John 3:16 " For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

Let's begin with the heart of God. "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." That is the first Verse of the Bible. When He got done, He looked at it all and said, "It is good." He liked it. In all of His holiness He loved it. The crowning point of His creation, as it says in 1:26, was His making of man and woman, whom He made to mirror Him. It says they were made in His image. They are His reflection. He loved them and walked on the earth in that Garden of Eden with them, fellowshipping with them in holiness. But one day Lucifer, one of the three arch angels, who had taken a third of the angels and had launched an attack on God to dethrone Him, and was cast out and down with that one third of the angels, had entered the garden under a new title…Satan. He proceeded to tempt Eve to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that God had told them to not eat. Satan convinced Eve to just take a bit and then she invited Adam to do so. This act of disobedience to God killed the fellowship between them and the holy God. Disobedience of God is sin and sin and God cannot fellowship, cannot exist in the same place. So, He cast Adam out and every child born to Adam and every child born to his children and on down to us today is born in sin. The nature of man and therein the heart (the soul) of man was slain in sin and is dead spiritually, separated in that death from God. Death passed upon all (Romans 5:12; Ephesians 2:1-3). So, as our last article stated, the heart of man was lost to God…dead to God. 

Without a heart of God, a heart of righteousness and therein a heart of righteous (pure and holy) love, man is not capable of loving and tolerating to the extent of staying in harmony. In this fact we can understand the myriads of broken relationships between people of every circumstance, including marriage and the failing love between parents and children and between neighbors and countries…just the broken human race we are and are displaying it daily in the news. We can understand the need of God ordained police forces, magistrates and armies to fight against evil…evil hearts.

Then we can understand why God needs His government of His brand of holy love established on earth. It begins by each person being established by faith in Jesus Christ by grace through faith in each person's heart. Then we see how Jesus brought together a number of believing hearts and established His first church and for the purpose it was established. It was to be a center of His love taught and practiced and the place from which his love was to be sent out into the world to win others to His love and gather them in to prepare to go back out and love others and call them in with them week after week on the first day of the week. Churches of the Lord Jesus Christ are the centers of love and Jesus said that "where two or three are gathered together, there I am also." 

If we don't re-visit and build up again these centers of worship and love, God-love, where we learn to love one another, their is no hope for America. It is not filling the streets with violence that will unit us, it will only come through the love of Jesus Christ the Lord, God in the flesh (Emmanuel), and only the building up of current and the building of more churches, centers of God's love, will we win and prepare a people to love the world like God does. Only then will peace on earth come again.

Charles Empey is the Pastor of Cove Baptist Church, Orange, TX.