Masters of the Soul Love or Lust

A real saint of God will be certain that his life is ruled by love and not by lust. Everyone of us will be under the mastery of one or the other. Both love and lust are incredible emotional powers and neither can rule in harmony with the opposite. If love is the master in your life it will break and subdue every lust that arises. But so will lust rule and destroy the powers of love when it is allowed to live and grow in your heart. Lust will reduce a man or woman to a piece of meat and destroy every ounce of virtue that may have once been present.

Love is kind but lust is rebellious. Love is gentle but lust is rough and rides roughshod over everything but its own appetite. Love is understanding and full of compassion but lust is independent and selfish. Love is forgiving and ready to forget but lust is angry and full of grudges. Love is self-control but lust is out of control. Love is honest and forthright and easily entreated but lust will connive, lie and cheat. The power of love comes from above but the bondage of lust arises from beneath. They are worlds apart.

Love is a liberating virtue. It sets its servant free to become everything that was intended by our Creator. Love unlocks the best that man was designed to become. We certainly were intended to be servants of love but love is so designed by God that it instead turns the servant into a joint-heir with Christ. Love is death to the old nature and transforms the soul into a new creation. Divine love does not love to get love back but finds its joy in loving for the pure joy of its own nature. Every act of love makes the lover more like the source of all life. The Bible says, “…God is love.” (1 John 4:8) and every expression of true love makes us more like Him.

The Bible says of the Christian, “Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.” (Matthew 7:20) Fruit is an expression of our nature but works is an act of our devotion. We are not to be known by our works because they can save no one. It is our fruit that reveals our faith. We produce the exact same fruit as the nature that we are in our soul. Grapes are grown on grape branches and love is grown on a redeemed branch connected to the Vine Himself. Love is natural for a saint because of the new nature of our redemption.

The Spirit of God is imparted to every “born again” believer at the very moment of our supernatural change. “…Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.” (Romans 8:9b) He is in residence in our spirit from the moment we are redeemed but He longs to become President. It is Christ’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, that will baptize us in Himself just as He did for the one hundred and twenty at Pentecost as love broke upon that city of Jerusalem like a torrent of fire from above. We can never have more of Him but He can surely have more of us. That was what Pentecost was all about. When He is allowed to baptize us in Himself, “love” is literally saturated in us.

Divine love cannot be produced by human energy. It is the fruit of Christ’s Spirit flowing freely in yielded hearts. The Apostle Paul said, “And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.” (Romans 5:5) This love will transform us until we are conformed into the image of Christ. As this truth continues the Spirit said, “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.” (Romans 8:29-30) The world will shut up and listen when the believers mirror the image of Christ. The early church was called by the world “Christians” because they saw the image of the Christ. Love had won the day.

While lust is certainly the natural energies of Satan and his evil world it is also the natural results of unregenerated and undisciplined lives. The Adamic nature has the capacity of making humans into devils. When lust is unbridled it is as vicious as any spirit out of hell. The suicide brigades developing all over our world are forms of religious lust that literally rejoice in their destructive powers. Nothing is more vicious than lust formed by false religious ideas. Our world is increasingly filled with misconstrued religions. Lust takes on many forms from sexual escapades, the powers of unbridled pleasures, lust for wealth and acclaim by others. The power of lust is at the very heart of all that evil manifests. SatanÂ’s lust for power and control is at the center of every act of evil in our world.

The only defeat of lust is the love of God shed abroad by the Holy Ghost. Love is everything beautiful but lust is at the heart of everything ugly. You must choose which great emotion will be the master of your soul. “And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” (Isaiah 58:11)