2016.12.11_Your Neighbor As Yourself

Enjoy Eternal Life by Keeping Jesus’ Commandment

God is our Father. Although we previously did not know who God is, we now call God our Father because we have been born again as the children of God by believing in Jesus Christ. God loves us just as parents love their children. The expression ‘We became the children of God’ is the same as saying ‘We became those beloved by God’. Our faith lies in believing God’s love for us. It is just hypocrisy to profess faith without believing in God’s love for us. If we are the children of God, we must know God’s love.

Mankind did not deserve God’s love. Man was created from dust of ground just like the beasts. Of course, mankind is above beasts in that mankind has intelligence, will, and emotion. But, even though mankind is superior to the other beings, without a soul, mankind cannot attain eternal attention from God. In the time of Noah, all men except Noah’s family were swept away and died in a great flood, God did not show sympathy toward them. For God, people without souls are no different than beasts.

When mankind multiplied and prevailed on the earth, God chose one person and breathed into his nostrils, making him a living being (spiritual being). With this, mankind became a spiritual being who could have fellowship with God. Just as men sustain their flesh by eating food, so too do they sustain their soul with spiritual food. That is why God gave Adam (who became a spiritual being) the commandment, ‘Do not eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil’. And God also said to him, ‘If you eat the fruit, you will surely die.’ (Genesis 2:17) That means that if he were to break the commandment, his soul would surely die.

Adam, having been deceived by the devil, disobeyed the commandment of God and the first spiritual man, was faced with spiritual death. For the flesh death means passing away and returning to dust, for soul, which never dies, death means eternal punishment. You can imagine how terrible the eternal punishment is if you consider the scene in the Bible where the demons shudder and plead with Jesus. Since God did not want mankind to fall into such a situation, He sent His only begotten Son, Jesus, to the world to save mankind.

The Word was with God from eternity . That Word came to the earth in the flesh and He is Jesus Christ. Although Jesus experienced a man’s life on the earth, He was never a descendant of Adam. He is the Son of God, independent of Adam’s lineage. In other words, He is sinless, unlike the first Adam who was corrupted.

God sent Jesus to the world, that is, He sent Himself. Jesus is the express image of God’s person. In other words, knowing Jesus means knowing God, and seeing Jesus means seeing God. All the words, commandments and power of God reside in Jesus. Sadly, just as the people of Israel could not recognize who Jesus really was even when he was before their eyes, people today tend to make their own image of God, thinking, ‘God must be like this’ all the while ignoring Jesus..

We must recognize that we cannot have eternal life if we do not know God. Not having eternal life means eternal death. Jesus is the faith that God sent to mankind. In order for us to be saved, and to enjoy eternal life, we must have the faith that God gives, not our own.

Even if a baby is born healthy, it must be fed continuously in order to sustain life. Likewise, those who are saved by receiving Jesus must be fed with spiritual food. That is why Jesus commanded His disciples, ‘Eat my flesh, and drink my blood!’ What we need is not only to rely on the Lord’s word for a moment, but we must let Him abide in us.

Let Us Love with a Mother’s Heart

The commandment that God gave to our souls, who have been raised to life through Christ’s merit, to ‘love one another’; that is our spiritual food. (John 13:34) A commandment is not just a directive that we hear and ignore. Because Adam disobeyed God’s commandment, all mankind was condemned to eternal punishment. Yet today, even knowing this, people still ignore the Lord’s commandments. We must recognize that even if we keep the Ten commandments perfectly, all those efforts are meaningless if we do not keep the new commandments.

Love is the character of God. If you have been forgiven, if you believe in God, if you have eaten His flesh and drank His blood, then the character of God must be manifest in you. God’s character appears only when we practice love. Practicing love does not simply mean being sympathetic to someone. The important element in practicing love is a ‘constant sacrifice’. A one-time act of kindness does not enable you to bear the fruit of perfect love.

Jesus commanded us to ‘love your neighbor as yourself To love someone as you love your own body means loving them as your children. Loving someone as one’s own body can be seen in a mother’s love for her children. In other words, in order to practice perfect love, we must love maternally. Only when you evangelize others with the love a mother has for her child can you bear fruit.

This is what I experienced when I was quite young. A pastor came to me and asked me to pray for his son. His son’s feet were putrefied. As I arrived at his house I could smell a terrible odor from the yard. Cow poop was applied to his feet as a folk remedy, which was so disgusting. When I was about to pray, laying my hand on his shoulder, at that moment I came to think, “What if I were his mother! What if I were his mother!” Then, I began to squeeze the pus from his feet with my hands. As the pus was coming out of the wound, I was thinking, “I’d better wash my hands right now. What if I get infected?” But to erase the thought, I prayed harder.

At the very moment, I recalled a childhood memory of my grandmother sucking the pus out of the wound when I had a boil as a child. At that moment a voice echoed in my soul saying, “suck it out!”. So I knelt down and put my mouth on the wound and I started sucking the pus until red blood came out. His parents and neighbors who witnessed this were crying. And that very evening the young man repented of his stubbornness. He repented of the past when he had rejected faith in Christ because of the shame of his father’s poverty, and later he attended a theological seminary.

I was leading a revival service in a church, praying and laying my hands on the sick, and a boy came to me wearing a hat. He asked me to lay my hands on his hat, but I managed to get the hat off of him. His appearance hidden behind the hat shocked me. He had no hair, and no skin at all on his eyes, nose, and lip. He was a leper. I immediately regretted making him take off the hat, but I overcame the thought and laid my hand on his head. I prayed hard in order to remove the thought of wanting to avoid the boy.

And then I was about to lay my hand on another person, she was also leper. She was the mother of the boy I had just laid my hand on, and she had also been infected while caring for him. I repeated in my heart, saying, “What if I were her mother! What if I were her mother!” I prayed hard for her for some time, she who had become a leper, saying in my heart, I “If she were my child, even though she were a leper, would I not embrace her?’ About a month later during another revival in that area the same boy approached me, took off his hat, and said, “Teacher, blow a breath on my head.” I blew on his head, and then the boy said, “Oh, it is hot!.” All of the sensation which he had lost had been restored.

Anyone who has been pierced by a thorn-bush, would try to break the branch. But if you were the mother of the thorns, you would not be able to do it. Without a mother’s heart you cannot love. Without a mother’s heart continuous sacrifice is impossible. The character of a mother’s love is the very nature that God has given us.

No matter how many good deeds you do, you cannot save yourself. Only the righteousness of God can save your soul. The righteousness that God has given us is the commandment of Jesus Christ. When Adam broke the commandment, God paid the price of sin with the death of the Son. The commandment of Jesus is the last opportunity that God has given us. We must not miss the last chance. If you believe in Jesus, you must keep His commandments. You must have the love of a mother. When you love with a mother’s heart, your neighbor will be changed, and your church will revive. Let us have the mother’s love that God has given us. Let us love our neighbors as our own body.