But God has addressed His messages to us earth-dwellers out of a heart of love. And He wants to form such a heart of love within us! So He tells us what and whom to love, and how. He also tells us what and what not to love.

Almost 3000 years ago God said, “Hate the evil, and love the good” (Amos 5:15).

When God sent His own Son, Jesus Christ, to share the life of us earth-dwellers, He sent many messages about love. Jesus showed that genuine love is expressed in obedience. “If a man love me, he will keep my words” (John 14:23). Now it is not so hard to love the lovely, or those who love us. But Jesus says, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?” (Matthew 5:44-46).

Love of self must not crowd out love for others. The neighbor will taste the flavor of your religion by your love. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbor: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law” (Romans 13:9, 10).

A special, divine love flows between Christians who are to regard one another as brethren of a common holy Father. “We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren” (1 John 3:14). This love is purified of carnal, lustful elements and self-seeking.

“Seeing ye have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit unto unfeigned love of the brethren, see that ye love one another with a pure heart fervently: Being born again” (1 Peter 1:22, 23). It is not “put on” as a politeness or device. It is wholly refined of God.

Not only in and through all, but also over and above all must be the love reserved for God alone. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:37-39). Such pure, wholehearted love as God requires cannot live in the same life with forbidden loves. Even legitimate things become forbidden when they interfere with devotion to God. One of these is the love of money: “For the love of money is the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

The all-inclusive message God has for us concerning forbidden loves is found in 1 John 2:15-17: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”

When you think about it, isn’t most of today’s advertising calculated to arouse love of the world and the things in the world? The heart must be weaned away from the world, become “dead” unto sin, and “alive” unto God. These words from God speak plainly and painfully. Read them over and over. Measure yourself by them. Let them “sink down in your ears.” Let God deliver you from the bondage of fashion, culture, pleasure, ease, prosperity, self. “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36).

-by Harold Brenneman

Whether you ever thought of it or not, you do have some relation to God. But how near is that relation? Is God only a powerful Supreme Being, or has He come near to you and brought you near to Him? Has He only started the worlds spinning and drawn the curtain, or has He shown Himself to you and made you a part of His plans? Does the thought of God and His terrible judgments strike terror to your heart, or have you found Him to be your Father? Or, do you just prefer to forget God and say, “God’s in His heaven, and all’s well with the world”?

Now God is not only in His heaven, but He came down into our world—His world. The coming of Jesus Christ as perfect God and perfect Man to draw God and man together again is an established fact and experience. I say that Jesus Christ draws God and man together again because the “togetherness” in which man and God first delighted was broken by man’s sinful disobedience. The deepest springs of human nature were so incurably poisoned that cleansing and purifying could only be accomplished by the outside help of God. You, likewise, must look to power outside yourself for betterment. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”

When rebellious man comes to God for this renewal, this cleansing, this restoration, the process is so drastic and so painful to sinful nature that God likens it to a birth, a new beginning, a new creation. “Ye must be born again” is God’s express requirement. To change the rebellious mind of man into a loving, dependent submission to God requires the power of God Himself. But God will not usurp man’s power of choice. Man’s decision and surrender are his part. The transformation of man’s life can be imitated but not successfully duplicated. “It is the gift of God.“

The sure fact stands: all mankind is guilty before God and remains so until pardoned by Him. Is that your relation to God—guilty? Have you seen God’s way to forgiveness and pardon through Jesus Christ? Have you learned of His sacrifice and His blood which cleanses from all sin? Have you come to abandon your own opinions regarding your condition, agreeing with God to your guilt and shame? Will you prefer God’s Word to your own? Have you abandoned sin completely as God lays it bare before you and convicts you? Have you believed in the work of pardon accomplished by Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection? If you have so abandoned yourself to Jesus Christ for pardon, for cleansing, and for obedience, then your relation to God is right, straight, and plumb; your vertical relationship is then true and upright.

Some feel sure about this vertical relationship but not so sure about the horizontal relationship: with other people. How are you related to others? By love or by strife? Have you enemies you will not forgive? If so, God cannot forgive you. Can you say in truth of heart that you have no resentments or ill will? Can you further say that you have not only absence of ill will but the actual presence of love? Is your love for others a self-denying, sacrificial love or a kind of looking-down-on-others sort of love that wears a superior feeling while it sympathizes? Can you enjoy the prosperity of your rivals? Do you cater to the admiration of others, their praise of your person, your appearance, your talents, your possessions?

The carpenter’s square is true vertically only if the horizontal is level. So likewise is your relation to God truly upright only if your relations to men measure true. How, then, is your relation to other people? On the square?

Just as real as God and other people is the world about us. This “world” is the whole system of customs, ways, and standards by which men without God live. What is your relation to this social order? Are you living by these customs, ways, and standards? Are you devoting your time and affection and interest to the “arts,” the “sciences,” or to “wine, women, and song”? Are you a slave to the values of your social order or political order? The apostle had to count them all as worthless in relation to Christ. Likewise, the religion which is acceptable to the social orders of the world is not the religion of the meek and lowly Jesus. The most sophisticated of world cultures is, after all, pagan.

Let the question be put in the words of the Scriptures: Do you love the world? the things that are in the world? its entertainments, its pleasures, its goals which are designed to appeal to human honors and accomplishments, to satisfaction of the flesh and the carnal mind? Its religions are designed to appeal to the carnal mind too. What is your relation to this world? “If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” Could any pronouncement be clearer than this?

Lest you feel happy about your relation to God and to your fellowmen, consider carefully your relation to the world. This may well be the proof of your first two relationships.

God has an open book, the Bible, revealing His will in these three relationships: man to God, man to man, man to the world. No other authority exists for safe steering from here to eternity.

I urge you, while opportunity is at hand (for it may be cut off at any moment), to take serious, sober thought of your inescapable relation to God, for someday you will give account of yourself to Him and will answer as to what you did with this opportunity. As God clears your vertical relationship with Him, He will enable you to clear your relations with other people. He will likewise give you power to live above the sub-Christian standards of the world.

“If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

-by Harold Brenneman

Do you know the things you really ought to know? “Whadda ya know” about this old world and what it’s coming to? about God’s plans for the future? about God’s plan for you? What do you know about that? “Nothin’ much?” The outcome of life is either heaven or hell, joy or pain, saint or sinner, God or the devil. Let’s think soberly and ask the question the way it ought to be asked, “What do you know about God and His plans for you?”

First, you need to know that God must punish evil, inasmuch as He is holy and righteous, and all evil is a transgression of His will. “Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it. . . . And I will punish the world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay low the haughtiness of the terrible. I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man [more precious] than the golden wedge of Ophir. Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger” (Isaiah 13:9-13).

Second, you need to know that the goodness of God planned a way of escape for all who cease to be His enemies: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. . . . There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. . . . The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge” (Psalm 46:1-7).

Now, what do you know about the way to become God’s friend? You may say you don’t dislike God, you thank Him often, you even go to church and may be a member of a church. But the question is: Do you love Him? Jesus said, “If ye love me, keep my commandments.” Do you know enough of Jesus and His Word to know His commandments? Do you know what kind of Person He is, and that He wants you to be like Him? And do you know that such likeness is impossible without first being humbled, penitent, emptied of sin and self, “loving all, forgiving all, confessing all” in response to the Holy Spirit’s work in your heart? Of all this, “What do you know?” And of all that you may know with your head, how much of it do you know by heart experience?

Nothin’ much? If that is your answer, you are in a tragic state—far worse than if you had terminal cancer. To be “dead in trespasses and sins” and not to know it; to already bear the sentence of death and consignment to hell and not to know it; and, worse yet, to stand eligible for a free pardon from Almighty God and not to know it—ah, friend, it’s high time to “wise up” and turn from a lighthearted view of life that knows “nothin’ much” and cares little more. Turn to the things that do matter.

When the “great and terrible day of the Lord” comes “as a thief in the night,” then you will wish you had awakened out of sleep.

“Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light. See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is. And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:14-18).

“Seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” Seek Him. Search His Word, the Bible. Read God’s Word. Begin with the Gospel of John or the Book of Romans which tell us how to be saved. “Those that seek me early shall find me” is His sure promise.

-by Harold Brenneman

But let us see if the “religious” professor could be right, even by the laws of reasoning. If “all roads that lead to God are good” then the end gained justifies the means used in reaching that end. But is this necessarily true? Joe Brown wanted to support his family, a very good end in itself. Using the professor’s idea that it doesn’t matter at all how one reaches that good end, Joe Brown chose stealing as a means of livelihood. Does the end justify the means of reaching it? Absolutely not!

What does God say? Shall we do evil that good may come? (Romans 3:8) Any sober-thinking person could easily answer that question. Does man’s way to heaven reach there? God plainly says that “it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps “(Jeremiah 10:23). God has declared the human race to be blind and walking in darkness. Shall we then agree with the brilliant professor that it hardly matters which road man takes to God? Shall we then accept his inference that man doesn’t need a revelation from God, a new life from God, a new direction from God?

Truly, “the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God.” Listen to God’s prophet: “And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them“(Isaiah 8:19, 20).

“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12). “Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it. Beware of false prophets” (Matthew 7:13-15).

Who has been getting your ear? The televangelist, the clever magazine writer, the college professor? Give God a hearing. “Take heed what ye hear,” is God’s command. Give ear to the Bible. Give ear to its message in the Gospels and the Epistles. Hear the message of God. There is only one right road to God and it has been revealed in the person of Jesus Christ who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

“Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

-by Harold Brenneman