What Jesus Says About Love

 

What is the strongest force in all creation?

 

God? No, God is a person not a force.

Sin? No, through Jesus’ death and resurrection sin is overcome.

Darkness? No, light overcome darkness.

 

Love is the strongest force in all creation.

 

What does Jesus say about how we are to love God?

 

Mark 12:30

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

 

We are to love God with all of who we are and all we possess, our will, our emotions, our intellect, and our bodies. There is nothing about us that should not love God.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is loving God with all that we are and all we have.

 

How do we demonstrate our love for God?

 

John 14:23-24

Jesus answered him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love Me does not keep My words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent Me.”

 

We show God that we love Him by obeying His word. God’s word is the Bible and God’s word is true.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is obeying God’s word and thus showing that we really love Him.

 

What does Jesus say about God loving us?

 

John 3:16

For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.

God loves every person who has ever lived and who will ever live. And according to Romans 8:38-39 nothing can change that.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is receiving God’s love for us through establishing a relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior.

 

John 15:13

Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.

 

Jesus laid down His perfect, righteous, and sinless life for our imperfect, unrighteous, and sinful lives. Jesus did that because of His love for us.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is receiving Jesus’ death to pay the penalty for our sin.

 

What is the result of God loving us and us receiving that love?

 

John 15:9

As the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you. Abide in My love.

 

When we receive God’s love, we will in very real and practical ways experience that love and be able to abide or live every day in that love. God’s love is not just in words but in real actions in our daily lives.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is living daily experiencing God’s practical love for us.

 

What does Jesus say about who we are to love?

 

Mark 12:31

The second is this: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” There is no other command greater than these.

 

We are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. We are to be willing to do for our neighbor what we would do for ourselves. In Luke 10 Jesus tells us that our neighbor is any other human who has a need. Jesus connects loving God with all that we are and loving our neighbor as we love ourselves. You cannot love God and not love others.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is loving others as we love ourselves.

 

Matthew 5:43-44

You have herd that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate you

enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

 

We are also to love our enemies and those who harm us because of our faith in Jesus. This is a command that can only be obeyed through the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is loving our enemies and those who try to harm us.

 

Why is loving others so essential?

 

John 13:34-35

A new command I give to you, that you are to love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.

 

The way we love others will be what marks us as a disciple of Jesus. It is our love, not our morality or our theology, that will show the world that we are disciples of Jesus.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is recognizing that loving others is what shows the world that we are Jesus’ disciples.

 

What is the strongest force in the world – Loving Like God Loves!

 

Loving God and Others and Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                    Joe

Death and Life

 

We have many words and phrases that we use to refer to a person dying. One of those phrases is passed away.

 

In 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

 

Paul says that if we are in Jesus, we are a new creation and the old has passed away, the old is dead. The old does not exist anymore.

 

Romans 6:4 says, “We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

 

Again, Paul says that we died to our old life of sin and have been raised to a new life and that we have the power now in Jesus to walk daily in that newness.

 

What are the old things that have died and the new things that have come to life?

 

An old thing that must die.

 

James 4:6 says, “But he gives more grace. Therefore, it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.’”

 

Pride has to die. Pride exalts us in a very ungodly way, and it puts us in opposition to God.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is killing the pride that puts us in opposition to God.

 

A new thing that must come to life.

 

Being humble allows God to pour out more grace on us. Being humble means as Peter says in 1 Peter 5:6, putting ourselves under God’s authority. When we do that, it allows God to exalt us by His grace and when God exalts us, we will not fall.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is allowing God’s grace to make us humble and letting God rule in our lives.

An old thing that must die.

 

Ephesians 4:31-32 says, “Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ has forgiven you.”

 

Unrighteous anger. Any form of unrighteous anger.

 

Unrighteous anger does not allow us to experience the love of Jesus because we are so focused on our anger, and it stops us from showing the love of Jesus.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is turning our anger over to Jesus and not letting it control our lives.

 

A new thing that must come to life

 

The desire and ability to forgive.

 

We in Jesus have the power to forgive others just as God through Jesus has forgiven us. Jesus forgave us unconditionally, completely, and when we asked. We are to forgive others like that.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is forgiving those who have hurt us in the same why that God has forgiven us through Jesus’ death on the cross.

 

Mark 9:23-24 says, “And Jesus said to him, ‘If you can! All things are possible for one who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out and said, ‘I believe; help my unbelief.’”

 

An old thing that must die.

 

Unbelief must die.

 

Unbelief stops the work of God through the Holy Spirit in a person’s life. When we don’t believe God, we don’t let God work because we don’t believe God is or that God is willing or that God cannot.

 

 Raise the Roof and Remove the Wall is letting any doubt about Jesus’ power or love die.

 

A thing that must come to live.

 

Belief must come to life.

 

Belief allows Jesus to do things in our lives that go beyond anything we could hope or imagine. It allows Jesus to be truly Lord of your life.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is putting complete trust in Jesus as the Lord.

 

Letting the Old Die and the New Live

 by Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                         Joe

Being a Disciple of Jesus

 

What does it really mean to be a follower or a disciple of Jesus?

 

In 1 John 4 John gives us five evidences that we have surrendered our lives to Jesus and are relating to Him as Savior and Lord.

 

1 John 4:2-3

By this you know the Spirit of God; every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard was coming and now is in the world already.

 

A disciple of Jesus acknowledges that Jesus has come in the flesh and that He is from God.

 

John writes in John chapter 1 that the Word, Jesus, is God. If a person acknowledges that Jesus has come in the flesh and that He is God in the flesh, that person is of God. If a person does not acknowledge that Jesus has come in the flesh and is God in the flesh, then he is not of God and is expressing the spirit of an antichrist. The first key in being a disciple of Jesus is to believe that Jesus is who the Bible says He is, God come in the flesh.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is knowing Jesus as God in the flesh and living based on that truth.

 

1 John 4:6

We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

 

A disciple of Jesus listens to God’s word and receives it as truth.

 

John 17:17 tells us that we are sanctified by truth and that God’s word is truth. As disciples of Jesus, we have the Holy Spirit with us, and He will reveal truth and error to us.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is knowing and believing God’s word.

 

1 John 4:7-8

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.

 

A disciple of Jesus loves others.

 

Jesus made it clear in Mark 12 that the greatest commandment is to love God with all that you are and love others as you love yourself. Jesus said that our love for others is the mark of being His disciple.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is love others in the way that Jesus loves us.

 

1 John 4:13

By this we know that we abide in Him, and He in us, because He has given us His Spirit.

 

Disciples of Jesus are filled with the Holy Spirit.

 

Paul tells us in Ephesians 5:18 that we are to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit empowers us, reveals truth to us, guides us to obey Jesus, and He is our seal and guarantee of our salvation.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is being continually filled and thus empowered by the Holy Spirit.

 

1 John 4:18

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.

 

A disciple of Jesus is being led by love, not fear.

 

Jesus’ love is a perfect love and when Jesus’ perfect love is filling us and leading us, we will not give in to fear and let it control us.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is being filled with the love of Jesus and letting that love lead us and not letting fear control us.

 

Being a disciple of Jesus is not a matter of words we say but of what we allow God to do in and through us. Our belief must be seen in what we do, how we live. If it is not, then we do not really believe. A disciple of Jesus lives out their beliefs in every day living.

 

Living It Out as A Disciple of Jesus

by Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

Joe

Jesus is the Answer Because

 

 

I hear this phrase a lot and even say it myself frequently, “Jesus is the answer.” Now, this a totally true statement, but exactly what does it mean? Many times, the response is, “What is the question?”

 

In the New Testament Jesus and all the writers of the New Testament make the claim that Jesus is God in the flesh. So, as God, Jesus truly is the answer for everything we face.

 

The New Testament also makes it clear that we are to love Jesus with all that we are and above any other person, place, or thing.

 

What makes Jesus unique, to claim our highest and deepest love? There are so many reasons that I don’t have enough time or space to mention them all. I want to mention four.

 

Matthew 15:19

For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

 

Number 1: Because of the human condition of sin and evil

 

Romans 3:10-12 says, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no seeks God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.”

 

Romans 3:23 says that all have sinned and fall short of God’s glory.

 

Romans 6:23 says that the wages of sin is death.

 

Our nature is one of being unrighteous, turning away from God, and not desiring to seek God, and that is sin, and sin always leads us away from God and leads to death.

 

The depravity of humanity is the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

 

Because of our sinful nature and condition is why, as God, Jesus is the answer.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is acknowledging our sinful condition and realizing that Jesus is the only answer to our human condition.

 

1 Corinthians 1:18 says, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

 

#2: Jesus’ provision for our sinful human condition

 

The provision Jesus gives for you and me is absolutely one of a kind, and it is not cheap. It is the cross.

 

Every other religion or religious world view is about we as humans earning salvation. In Christianity salvation is from God based on His mercy and grace. When we choose to accept Jesus’ grace through His death on the cross it changes our heart and thus our life. The death of Jesus on the cross is the source of our salvation, the only source.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is depending on Jesus and Jesus alone for our salvation.

 

1 Peter 2:22 says, “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in His mouth.”

 

#3: The purity of Jesus

 

When Jesus stood before Pilate and was interrogated, it says that Pilate found no fault in Him.

 

The thief on the cross being crucified with Jesus said that Jesus was being punished unjustly.

 

Jesus was a lamb without blemish. Jesus was unique because He was sinless. So, when He gave His life on the cross for our sin, He had no sin of His own that He had to die for.

 

2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”

 

Jesus could die for our sin because He had no sin of His own to die for.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is acknowledging Jesus’

sinlessness and that His death on the cross was Him sacrificing Himself for us.

 

Matthew 28:6 says, “He is not here, He is risen, as he said. Come, see the place where He lay.”

 

#4: Jesus’ resurrection from the dead

 

Many people have talked about coming back from the dead, but Jesus said that He would, and He did.

 

Jesus’ resurrection gives us victory over sin. Jesus not only died for our sin, but through His resurrection we are given power to not live our lives in sin and the enslavement sin brings.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is believing that Jesus rose from the dead and living in the victory that His resurrection gives through faith in Him.

 

Jesus is the answer because He is the sinless God who came in the flesh and died for our sin on the cross and rose from the dead.

 

Jesus as the Only True God

and Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

Joe

Experiencing God Everyday!

 

Jeremy Camp has a song called Getting Started. Some of the lines are:

To anyone who has ever lost their way

To everyone who ever felt ashamed

Here’s a song for the broken hearted

 

All of us have experienced those circumstances and those emotions. John chapter 14 helps us to overcome these circumstances.

 

John 14:16 says, “And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Helper, to be with you forever.” The word helper means one who comes along side of another and pleads his case to another. The word is capitalized showing Jesus is referring to the Holy Spirit.

 

The Holy Spirit is God, and He comes to us and empowers us and intercedes for us with the Father. He is another Helper meaning another like Jesus. God is with us to empower us and to intercede for us when we need something.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing the help of the Holy Spirit as He empowers us and intercedes for us.

 

John 14:18 says, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” When Jesus leaves the earth with His earthly body, He will not leave us as His disciples alone. He will not abandon; He will send the Holy Spirit.

 

 Jesus will not physically be with us but even better, the Holy Spirit will be with us everywhere and all the time. We will literally never go anywhere that the Holy Spirit is not with us. We as disciples will never face anything alone. When Hebrews 13:5 says that God will never leave us nor forsake us, we see the reality of why in this verse because we are not orphans but always have God with us.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is knowing that we always have the Holy Spirit with us and living every day based on that knowledge.

 

John 14:21 says, “Whoever has My commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves Me. And he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and manifest Myself to him.”

 

Jesus will manifest Himself to us. We as disciples of Jesus will be able to know Him and experience His presence in our lives. Just as Jesus showed who He was to the Twelve, so He shows us who He is through the Holy Spirit revealing Him to us.

 

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is, through the Holy Spirit, knowing who Jesus is and experiencing the full reality of Jesus in our lives every day.

 

John 14:23 says “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make our home with him.”

 

We will have God living in us. He will not be working in our lives from the outside in, but from the inside out. God working in us from the inside out is more powerful. The Holy Spirit will empower us to become more and more like Jesus.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is having God make His home with us and form in us the image of Christ.

 

The key to experiencing the Holy Spirit working in our lives is found in verse fifteen. It says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.”

 

The key to experiencing the work of the Holy Spirit is obeying what Jesus says. The Bible is God’s word and, as we yield our lives to Jesus and obey what God says in the Bible, we will experience the filling and working of the Holy Spirit.

 

Obeying and Being Filled with the Holy Spirit

by Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

Joe

Who Did Jesus Die For?

 

I am a paradox even to myself. I have been in local church ministry for over four decades and love the fact that God has used me in this way, and I love the church. But I am not a people person. I don’t need people and am very comfortable being with my family or being alone. I serve a God who loves people and wants people to know Him and love Him.

 

Jesus not only loves people, but He loves messy, broken people. Jesus says He didn’t come to call the righteous but sinners. Jesus also said that He came to seek and save the lost. Paul writes in Romans 5:6-8, “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person – though perhaps for a good person one would dare to die – but God shows His love for us in that while were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

 

Jesus died for us when we were:

Weak

Ungodly

Sinners

 

We were not good people when Jesus died for us, and we were not good people when Jesus called us to follow Him. We as disciples and followers of Jesus are to love the weak and the ungodly and the sinners.

 

We many times struggle with loving the people who are messy and broken. We tend to view them as an enemy. We need to view them as Jesus did, as victims.

 

Paul says 2 Corinthians 4:4, “In their case the god of this world has blinded the mind of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”

 

Those who are weak, ungodly sinners have been blinded by Satan from seeing the truth of the gospel, God’s love and His grace that led to Jesus dying for every human. We have been given the privilege to be about showing them the truth of the gospel by how we love and accept them.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is loving as Jesus loved and loving who Jesus loved.

 

But not only did Jesus love messy broken people, and not only does Jesus love broken and messy people, but Jesus will also never not love or turn away from any of us.

 

Hebrews 13:5 says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”

 

Romans 8:37-39 says, “No, in these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

 

The promise given to us in these two passages is that Jesus will not ever turn His back on us and that He will always love us no matter what.

 

In John 10:29-30 Jesus says, “My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all, and no is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

 

God does not lose anyone who puts their faith in Him. Jesus and the Father are one, the same, so no one can snatch us out of Jesus’ hand.

 

Ephesians 2:8-9 tells us that we are saved by grace through faith and that it is not by works, doing all the right stuff, so that no one can boast about it.

 

Our salvation is not based on us, our working to deserving it, but it is based on God’s grace and our faith in Him.

 

Jesus does not change, so neither does how He provides salvation or how He views us as His human creation.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is trusting Jesus for our salvation and knowing it is by God’s grace to us and that His love for us will never change.

 

I see a nation divided by hate and anger.

I see marriages falling apart.

I see families being destroyed.

I see a generation losing itself to addiction and lies.

 

The answer for all this is knowing Jesus and living in a loving personal relationship with Him. We as disciples and followers of Jesus have the answer. The question is: Will we show our nation and the world the answer?

 

Experiencing the Reality of Jesus and

Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

Joe

Jesus Does It His Way

 

In John 5 Jesus encounters at the pool of Bethesda a man who had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. In this encounter we see several things about Jesus and a huge deficiency in us as humans.

 

In John 5:3 it says that at the pool of Bethesda there was a multitude of invalids. There were people who were blind, lame, or paralyzed at the pool. Jesus went to this one man and healed him.

 

Jesus is the sovereign Lord.

 

Psalm 135:6 says, “Whatever the Lord pleases, He does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps.”

 

Sovereign means that no one can tell Jesus what to do. There is no one above Jesus. Jesus as sovereign Lord does what He wants to do.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is relating to Jesus as our Sovereign Lord.

 

John 5:8-9 says, “Jesus said to him, ‘Get up, take up your bed and walk.’ And at once the man was healed, and he took up his bed and walked.”

 

Jesus is all-powerful.

 

Jesus healed the man with a command. Jesus did not touch him and do anything other than give him a verbal command to get up and walk.

 

Jesus as the all-power Lord has control over all creation, both the visible and invisible creation, as well as all diseases.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing the all-powerful person of Jesus in our lives every day.

 

At the very end of John 5:9 it says, “Now that day was the Sabbath.”

 

Jesus does not follow rules made by humans.

 

There were commands about the Sabbath given to the people of Israel by God. These commands did not prohibit doing good on the Sabbath. Good deeds such a healing come only by the approval and power of God.

In Matthew 12:8 Jesus says, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.” Jesus is the Son of Man meaning He is Lord of the Sabbath and has authority to do what He wants on the Sabbath.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is obeying the commands of Jesus but not being oppressed by human-made rules.

 

In John 5:17 Jesus answers the criticism of the religious leaders by saying to them, “My Father is working until now, and I am working.”

 

Jesus is working in the world all the time.

 

Jesus, unlike us as humans, is constant in who He is and what He does.

 

Jesus loves all the time, not just when He feels like it.

Jesus speaks the truth all the time, not just when it is to His advantage.

Jesus hates sin all the time, not just when it is certain sins.

Jesus is working in people’s lives all the time, not just at certain special times.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing the working of God daily in our lives.

 

The one huge deficiency we see in us as humans in the passage is in John 5:11-12. The man is told by the religious leaders in John 5:10 that is against the law for him to carry his bed on the Sabbath. In verse 11 the man tells the religious leaders that the man who healed him told him to carry it. In verse 12 the religious leaders ask the man who is the man who told him to take up his bed and walk.

 

The religious leaders are more upset about Jesus healing the man and telling him to take up his bed and walk than they are rejoicing over the fact that this man who had been in invalid for thirty-eight years has been healed.

 

We as human become focused on trivial things and miss the awesome work of Jesus in the world. We want Jesus to do it our way and when He does not, we miss the wonder of all that Jesus does.

 

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is trusting that Jesus is doing what is good and doing it in His way and rejoicing over what Jesus has done.

Jesus is the Sovereign Lord who is always working for good toward us and He makes the rules, not us.

 

Trusting Jesus by Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

Joe