Then one of them, [who was] a lawyer, asked [him a question], testing him, and saying,
Master, which [is] the great commandment in the law?
Jesus said to him, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the first and great commandment.
And the second [is] similar to it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

John 13:34 to 35 says:

A new commandment I give to you, That you love one another; as I have loved you, so you also love one another.
By this shall all [men] know that you are my disciples, if you have [agape] love one for another.

In this section I want to speak about the force of love.

Love is the most essential ingredient in the world. Songs have been written about it. People talk about it. Everybody desires it and we all need it.

It is the most essential ingredient, yet it is the one thing that is probably lacking the most in the world. We sing a song that says,

It's love that makes the world go round.

The trouble is the love is not there to make the world go round. That is why people are always singing about love, aspiring to love, and weeping when there hasn't been any. They have been hurting because love is missing from their life.

But what is love? Do we really understand what it is? We know how desperately we need it and we know when it is there. But when we come down to the final analysis, different people have different ideas about what love is.

Perhaps that is why there is so much confusion and why there is so little true love in the world. So in this final section I want to have a look at this subject in quite a lot of detail under various different headings.

Existed From the Beginning

I am going to start with the necessity for love. Love is absolutely essential and necessary for all existence.

I want to go back to the beginning of creation and see where love first surfaced. We will see where it first appeared, what God first created and how He put love into motion.

If you look at the original creation you will discover something very interesting about love. You will find that love needs to be reciprocated. In other words it needs to be shown and given back again.

Love is not always a one-way thing. It is meant to be a two-way thing. There is meant to be a giving out and a receiving back. Love is a communication or an interaction.

Different Kinds of Love

As we look at the way God made the creation we see that He made various levels of creation. He started with plant life, then the animal kingdom and finally up to His final creation of man.

We see that as God created physical beings, He created a love that relates to the physical. God created in some of His creatures another life force called the soul, and we see that He created a form of love that relates to the soul.

Then God came to His final and highest creation which was man. Man was made in His own image, having a spirit which the animals don't have, and God also created a kind of love that relates to the spirit.

I want to look very quickly at those three types of love. I want to see how they relate, how they function and how necessary they are. I also want to show you the result of the expression of those loves.

Physical Love

As we look at physical love we see that this love requires something to respond to. Physical love requires a mate or a partner.

It is expressed to somebody else and received back again in return. There has to be a physical communication between two people for it to be expressed.

This type of love can even be expressed by the animals because they have bodies. They express that physical love. And as that physical love is expressed there comes a communication of a deeper level. There comes an actual generation or an offspring.

Something results from the expression of that love. And so when physical love is expressed between two bodies there comes a transmission; a reproduction and a mixture of genes.

It doesn't take long after a child is born to look at it and say,

"Oh yes, he looks just like his father. He has his big nose and his mother's big mouth."

You begin to see the genes. Something was transmitted in that expression of love. Something was communicated and it resulted in an offspring being created.

So there is a lot more involved in expressing that love than just the passions. And those people who indulge in the love of the passions soon begin to find out that there is a price to pay for it.

Sometimes it is a price that you want to pay. Other times it is a price that you don't want to pay. Sometimes you want to enjoy the physical love and not take the consequences. You don't want to produce something.

Contraception and prevention of pregnancy is a big thing in the world isn't it? But you see God made it that when physical love is expressed that is what takes place.

Emotions and Soulical Love

God also created soulical love, and soulical love also requires a partner. It requires companionship.

It needs somebody else having a soul, where you can unite with that person in their soul - in the mind, emotions and will. There is a communication of the personality, and any creature that has a soul is able to do that.

You see how even the animals can play with each other and make friends with each other. They can also fight with each other.

Of course we are talking about human beings here and we too have a soul. We can communicate with one another and stir one another emotionally. We can communicate emotional love to one another and also receive that love from one another.

As you express that love there comes a deeper communication. There comes a generation and a reproduction. Did you know that?

Did you know that when you express emotional love to somebody you actually reproduce? The Scripture says in 1 Corinthians 15:33:

Do not be deceived: evil communications corrupt good manners.

You hang around with a certain kind of person, and after a while they will start to rub off on you.

After a while you start to behave just like them. You will start to speak like them, think like them and begin to have the same desires as them.

If you are a parent you can see right away when your kids start to get involved with the wrong crowd. You begin to see the change in them. You get them into the right crowd though and you begin to see a positive change.

It is peer pressure and communication, but there is something more that takes place. When two people begin to express emotional, soulical love to one another a communication takes place.

Sometimes you begin to use the other person's expressions. You begin to imitate them and act like them. Something is produced in you and it was communicated to you from the soul of that person, so there comes a unity and a bond in the soul.

You cannot express love without both communicating and receiving something from the person that you are communicating that love to or from.

Whether it is physical love or soulical love, there is an effect that will take place.

Spiritual Love

Now we come to the highest form of love - the love of the Spirit. I am sure you have heard the Greek words that are associated with these.

There is the Greek word eros, from which we get erotic love which is the love of the passions. We get filio love, which is the love of the emotions. And I'm sure you have heard of the third and highest one which is agape love.

If you look into the original Greek language you will find that the word agape was used very sparingly. It described a kind of love that you did not see very often. I will get to the reason for this shortly.

You see God made man to have a spirit. He breathed into man His very own life and made man in His image - a spiritual being and creature.

God made it so that man could also express love in his spirit. In order to express love in the spirit there has to be a communication of spirits.

The Bible says that God made Adam and He placed him in the Garden. He made all the plant life and the animal life and He brought them to Adam.

But there was nobody suitable for Adam to express his love to. There was no other creature on the earth that had a spirit.

Sure God came down and communicated with Adam and poured His love into him. Adam poured His love back to God and there was a communication of spirit to spirit.

But God only visited once a day. What about the rest of the day? Adam probably thought,

"Who do I pour my love out to?"

You cannot pour spiritual love out to a creature that doesn't have a spirit. So God made another being that had a spirit. He took a rib out of Adam's side and made the woman Eve. Then He brought her to Adam.

Now there was a full expression of love in the physical, the soul and now also in the spirit.

Deep Expression of Love

What happens when there is a communion of spirits?

There is an expression of love that is far deeper than uniting two bodies or two souls together. It is a unity and a communion of two spirits together.

I want to tell you something. When that kind of love is expressed there comes a communication, a generation and an impartation. Something is born of that union.

When you begin to communicate with another fellow human being in the spirit there is an inter-communication between you and that person; a spirit to spirit communication and something gets communicated.

As that expression of love is maintained, something gets created. The Bible calls it spiritual impartation, and that is a whole big subject we will look at all on its own.

I am just giving you some basic principles here that are involved in the expression of love.

That is the way God made man to be and the way things were created in the beginning.

As Adam and Eve came together and they expressed all three kinds of love, there came an inter-communication between each other. There was an imparting to one another of everything that they had.

There came a sharing of all of their thoughts and desires; a sharing of their bodies in openness, without humiliation, and a sharing of everything that came from deep within their spirit. There was a total unity of spirit, soul and body.

Effects of the Fall

We know that there was a fall though. We know that sin came in, and when that took place the spirit of man became ineffective. Man wrapped up his spirit in his soul and his body.

Man's body began to dominate and he lost the love of the spirit. The power of divine love that God had built into the spirit was gone.

That is why agape love is foreign to human nature. It doesn't exist. It is a far deeper love, and we are going to look at that love in detail here as we go on and see the power that there is in it.

We will see that this love has been restored in Christ. It has been restored by the Holy Spirit who has come to dwell in every person that is born again of the Spirit of God.

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