Tuesday, January 26, 2016

A Love That Blinds


The god of this world has blinded unbelieving minds
so that they cannot behold the light of the glorious gospel of Christ.”
2Corinthians 4:4

Jesus again spoke to them, saying, ‘I am the light of the world.
He who follows me shall not walk in darkness
 but shall have the light of life. 
John 8:12

You’ve seen them on news programs, wailing before the cameras.  Mothers, whose sons have committed crimes and have been caught red-handed.  They are crying out for justice, telling the world that their sons have always been good boys and that their sons are innocent and are being mistreated.  But the truth is, those mothers did not discipline their boys, and their boys grew up expecting the world to give them whatever they want and to let them have their way, whatever that way is, as their foolish mothers always did.  Those boys were brought up by mothers who loved themselves too much to inconvenience themselves by making their children behave, and now their children love themselves too much to inconvenience themselves by behaving.  And the mothers see no wrong in either themselves or their rotten offspring.  It is easy for Satan to deceive and to use such blind people, and he often does.
There is an old saying, “Love is blind”.  But that saying is true only if you are talking about the kind of love that is in the flesh.  God’s kind of love is not blind at all.  God’s love knows the truth, and it rejoices in the truth it knows.  God’s love knows that every sinner can be changed by God, but before that change takes place, that same love knows who is a sinner that needs changing.  God’s kind of love holds out hope for sinners, but in the meantime, it knows that without Christ Jesus, sinners have no hope.  God’s love doesn’t blind us to the obvious.  On the contrary, it opens our eyes to see everything rightly: first, to see ourselves and others as we really are, and secondly, to see Jesus, who surrendered his life to deliver us from our deadly kind of love.
Our kind of love turns us into blind fools if we follow it long enough.  It is a love that blinds, a love that hates uncomfortable truth.  Nevertheless, to those who are laboring in the bondage of their own kind of love, God offers liberty and light.  Through His Son Jesus, He is freely offering liberty to us all from our flesh’s love of darkness by filling our hearts with the light of His kind of love.