TRUE LOVE IS LIKE A STAR
True love is less seen in the sunshine of prosperity...
Someone somewhere added the two words "true love" to what Charles Spurgeon once said, "True love and hope are often like a star - less seen in the sunshine of prosperity, and brightest in the night of adversity." I am not sure who added "true love", but true love really does shine brightest in the night of adversity. Adversity is the "litmus test" of who truly loves another.
"The world" shows the opposite version of this. When those who are in the world are in the sunshine of prosperity, the world rallies to their side in "the name of love". When those very same people find themselves in the night of adversity, those same people who once rallied to their side in the name of love, scatter and fall away. So in this context, the statement that true love is less seen in the sunshine of prosperity is equally true. And it speaks to the kind of love that is the love "of the world".
The world is nothing more than the value system that promotes a version of love that is "to seek first the blessings". It's about self love and morbid self gain. It's not about the love of community with man. It is the antithesis of Matthew 6:33. Its focus is entirely and exclusively on the love of self. It defines love by what one can accumulate and TAKE, not by what one can multiply by GIVING. Instead of feeding 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish, it's about feeding one person with the same, and then leaving the 5,000 naked, cold, alone and hungry.
The church, on the other hand, is called to show another way. And that is the way of the One that is "the way, and the truth, and the life." The world is peppered with fields of those in "the dark of adversity". The world is a catalogue of scores upon scores of "dead men walking". For those who are in "the long night of adversity" which is the "dark of friendship with the world", and for those who are in the night of adversity that is "umbilical separation from the love of the Father in heaven", a severed relationship from a Father who thoroughly adores each and every prodigal son and daughter, it is for this reason THAT we are called to love our neighbour as ourself. It is for THIS reason that we are to express the will and the love of our Father in heaven through community with man.
"Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honour and glory for ever and ever. Amen" - 1 TIMOTHY 1:17
God bless, Wayne Biehn