Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries
What it means to be initiated into the secret of the mystery. Part 92. "He must increase, but I must decrease.".
Friday, September 23, 2005
1. Impersonal love emphasizes the subject while personal love emphasizes the object.
2. Impersonal love demands we operate on our own norms and standards.
3. Impersonal love is a command in which all members of the human race in your periphery are the objects.
JOH 15:12 “This is my commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you.”
JOH 15:17 “This I command you, that you love one another.”
1PE 2:17 honor all men; love the brotherhood, fear God, honor the king. [Impersonal unconditional love.]
4. Impersonal love excludes emotion, while personal love has great emotional function.
5. Impersonal love emphasizes the integrity of the subject, while personal love emphasizes the attractiveness of the object.
6. Impersonal love excludes carrying a grudge.
Impersonal love never mandates the believer to stoop to the level of vindication, implacability, hatred, arrogance, or bitterness toward other believers.
Impersonal love means we have been benefited by grace, therefore we function by grace.
Retaliation interferes with the justice of God punishing others.
Retaliation lowers the believer to the level of his antagonist.
Impersonal love = we never stoop to the level of evil, or are overcome by evil.
7. Impersonal love among believers includes respect for the imputed perfect righteousness residing in others.
8. Impersonal love is the relaxed mental attitude from the filling of the Holy Spirit rather than overt friendliness or gushy hypocrisy.
ROM 5:5; GAL 5:22 - both teach that the filling of the Holy Spirit produces impersonal love.
9. Under impersonal love the believer functions under his own standards rather than being influenced by flattery, attraction, attention, or reciprocation.
10. Not only does impersonal love exclude mental attitude sins and verbal sins, but it demands toleration, respect for privacy, and avoidance of distracting anyone from doctrine.
PRO 13:10 Through presumption comes nothing but strife, But with those who receive counsel is wisdom.
Humility means being led downward.
It means being content when others are elevated above us and letting others advance even at our own expense.
It means accepting every humiliation and looking upon every person who demeans us as a means of grace to humble us.
JOH 3:30 “He must increase, but I must decrease.”
In humbling yourself you are imitating and using the same means that TLJC used.
2CO 8:9 For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though He was rich, yet for your sake He became poor, that you through His poverty might become rich.
He was “meek and humble in heart” - not the least bit concerned about protecting His dignity or position.
Compassion for others comes from being humbled and grows through our own suffering.
2CO 1:3-4 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort; who comforts us in all our affliction so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.
2CO 1:6 But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and deliverance; or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer;