I was part of a conversation about ‘the meaning of love’ when someone said that they are addicted to love. He explained what he meant and it was having casual affairs with random women! I was like “What?”. Unfortunately, I have come across many people who believe that this is the meaning of love
There is nothing about love in casual intimacies but a sad case of a deluded demonised human under the control of the flesh!
What is love then? What many call love is not love at all but lust of the flesh for sex. Similar to the flesh lusting for a peace of meat or a loaf of bread! An addictive behaviour that need not be celebrated!
Any addictive habit like sex, eating, smoking or drugs may stem from a need to cure depression! So, engaging in a lustful encounter with another human may feel good at the time but like any other addiction, it only aggravates your situation!
Real love can give happiness and cure depression but stirring up happiness from an addictive behaviour cannot give love! Happiness is a temporary state. It cannot last unless it is from the right source!
Love is the character of God the Creator of our bodies and soul Who loves us more than we can imagine!
Love can create an affectionate relationship but an affection on its own cannot create or give love.
The world has tried to categorize love but with disastrous results! Love of a child, love of God, love of your neighbor and romantic love are all the same but now exist as categories!
You cannot categorize love. Love is one and has one source, God the creator of your spiritual self. He demonstrates what love is by steadfastly holding His promise to love us no matter what!
Please, do not cheapen love by equating it to sex or a romantic involvement with human bodies! It is madness, wrong and evil. This type of a mindset is one of the many spiritual deceptions that plague humanity!
Love is the purest relationship between two spiritual beings when in a body or outside the body! That is, when dead or alive in our bodies! True love can be tested against the words of the scriptures. 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (NIV) Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.Love never fails….
Even in a marriage where there is peace and harmony, it does not mean that there is love! Why would Paul insist to married men in Ephesus to love their wives if sleeping with their wives is synonymous with love? Ephesians 5:25 (NIV) Husbands, love your wives…
That need for love in our soul cannot be filled with what our physical world offers, else you will be operating under a delusion.
The obvious symptoms that you are operating under a deception to calm your void of love, is when you start to ‘enjoy’ acts that gratify the flesh. These, as mentioned earlier, could be, excessive need for food or certain foods, sex with whoever, pride, the need to show off, excessive personal edification, alcoholism, abusing substances like drugs, seeking acceptance by a mob, going for anything that pleases your flesh to calm your inner turmoil, and immersing oneself in idolatry in the name of material gain at any cost! All these are attempts to spark a feel-good glow in your spirit or flesh to fill the emptiness created by lack of true love.
Love is one. Love is pure. Love does not go against God’s will. Love is channeled to our soul by the Holy Spirit through a living human spirit! Our spirit comes alive through the power of the Holy Spirit when we make a decision to accept Him in our lives! This is the act of being born of the Holy Spirit. Meaning, the birth of a relationship and fellowship with God the Holy Spirit, a process termed as ‘being born again’. If this genuinely happens in your life, then one goes through a spiritual transformation and a spiritual nourishment channel opens up, similar to an umbilical cord to a growing baby in the womb! Love is one of the most important spiritual nourishment that comes to us via this channel!
In order to achieve a stage where you can receive and give love to others, you need to fully understand the source of love. Please follow my discussion below.
The hunger for joy and intimacy which is an underlying need for true love, is spiritual. This is a human condition that can only be satisfied by God alone. The problem is, humans are rebellious to the only source of true joy and intimacy. That is, the love that flows from God.
God is loving and patient. He does not give up on us. He waits for us, hoping that one day, we will realize our mistake and seek the flow of his love. Although you may take it as a folktale, the story of Adam and Eve in the presence of God is our ultimate reference of how we lost out spiritual umbilical cord, that channeled us love from our Creator! We had the purest relationship but the two humans decided to listen to the deceiver and didn’t make any attempt to seek God’s forgiveness. Like spoiled brats, they justified themselves! Today almost all humans are still groping in the dark trying to hold on something that can give them the original love that was flowing in the garden of Eden!
Those of us who are parents, know the pain of unprovoked rejection from your own child. No person worthy of the label “parent” does not love their own child. Therefore, when a child disowns you in writing or to your face, it hurts badly.
As a parent you don’t curse your kid when this happens, you could, but you continue loving them and praying for them. You also hope and pray that one day, the child will realize their mistake and come back to you.
The story of the prodigal son is a touching example of the love of a parent. This is the kind of love that God has for each one of us.
Luke 15:20 (NIV) So he got up and went to his father.“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
Like the prodigal son, man has always sought for joy, love and intimacy outside God’s provision!
When we place our hope for love from a human being’s body or heart, we are making a grave mistake. Human nature is susceptible to evil and therefore make humans generally not good.
Jeremiah 17:9 (NLT)..The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?
Jesus was one time called a good teacher but He shot back at the person and said that nobody is good but God alone. Jesus did not even equate Himself with God at this point. He was human and he knew that human hearts are deceitful.
Mark 10:17-18 (NLT) As Jesus was starting out on his way to Jerusalem, a man came running up to him, knelt down, and asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked. “Only God is truly good.
Jesus knows that there is nothing good that can come from a human heart unless its from a good relationship with God.
This is not a surprise, for the natural man is a playground to all types of unclean spirits. Unclean spirits are sad characters that torture the world’s population mercilessly. The unclean spirits are persons without bodies roaming the earth or living inside the physical bodies of people. Sorrow and need for love is one of the many signs that a human is a home to some of these sad characters. They change the good innocent personality of people from that of a childlike love, confidence and happiness to that of a needy and clingy nature.
When do they enter our bodies? Just like they did with Adam and Eve, this is when we reach a stage of knowing good and evil. In our case, the innocence disappears at a certain age when our mental capacity which is mostly around twelve years from birth, become accountable for what we do! Then the devil gets legal rights behind the scene (Luke 22:31(NIV) …Satan has asked to sift all of you as wheat… ) to plant unclean spirits inside you through your lifestyle. This can be avoided by living right with God. Please note that the devil is an accuser and can only attack someone when there is a legal reason like say pride, intentional sin, failing to forgive others or hate to mention but a few. So he gets permission from God to plant a spirit in someone or attack you in any way. Why does God allow it? Because He is loving and wants you to learn from it. In the process of learning you suffer but if you repent and don’t repeat it, you save your soul and experience peace and happiness.
The presence of demons in us is painful. Demons do not give you peace. Humans try to calm themselves from these dire condition by taking substances to calm their emotions. Others became serial thrill seekers hoping to calm themselves by engaging in casual sex. Humans still think that if they are involved with a “love” affair with someone random, then they will be happy!
When seeking love to fill the void inside us, its easy to think that what we call “romantic love” is the answer. You’ve heard people say that online dating is full of psychological cases. This is true to some extent, it has lots of desperate persons driven by hunger for intimacy with other humans. The depression, stress and loneliness associated with most of these cases is from demons living in people.
How do you expect to get love from someone who is surely a habitat of evil spiritual beings that represent nothing good but only the opposite of love?
Ephesians 6:12 (NLT) For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against persons without bodies….
Demons are loveless spiritual creatures! I get scared of thinking that one time I blindly pursued intimacy with people who were homes of unclean spirits. This was mainly because of ignorance, being stupid and demonized myself.
If you are not demonized and are happy and loving, extremely sad intimacy-seeking demagogues will be attracted to you like hawks to a piece of meat. Don’t be deceived by their good looks or plastic smiles that cover depression. These people have a living hell brewing inside of them. They are the saddest people on the planet. They carry with them all sorts of demons; anger, jealousy, unfaithfulness, hate, criticism, idolatry and many others. These people are sometimes identified as people with a clingy personality. They are clingy because they are trying to hold onto you to escape the hell in their lives. Married or not married, such people will coax you for sex at the earliest opportunity because its one way of calming the demons at war inside them.
Do you think such people can be faithful to you? Faithfulness is one of the fruit of the Holy Spirit (Gal 5:22) but such people have none of that because they have unclean spirits living in them.
God does not want you to get into problems by being in a relationship with such people. He wants to develop a lasting intimacy with you so that you can be sober enough to develop loving relationships with genuine humans.
In order to do this, you need to cut off your intimacy with the love tools that the physical world can offer. Stop any flirting with lust because lust is a form of idolatry. Lust tries to fill the same hole that needs to be filled by God’s intimacy with us!
Just like a loving parent, God is jealous of the type of bonding that you form with other things other than Him. Why? He is a loving Father (and Mother, He has both parental qualities) and He knows that whatever you do leads to no good but destruction. He would wish that His relationship with you is the strongest and its the only source of your strength.
There are two reasons that should persuade you to ditch all your other love pursuits for God’s love.
One, hunger for intimacy is spiritual and our only hope on lasting love is the Holy Spirit.
Lasting love cannot come through material things, parents, wife, children, girlfriend, boyfriend or even online dating!
Romans 5:5 (NLT) And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
Two, flirting with the world is flirting with unclean spirits through people and they will never give you love.
James 4:4 You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.
1 John 4:16 (NIV) And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them
God is love so when we seek him, we get love that is dependable and not exhaustible.
When two persons meet with this source of love, they will never be tired of loving each other because the source is assured.
John 15:9 (ESV) As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love…
If you are single and seeking intimacy with someone ask yourself the following questions first.
Do you have a lasting love and intimacy with God or are you seeking happiness from this person?
Do you think you can build a relationship with a random person who has no love and intimacy with God?
Does such a person have the love of God in them or are they a sad case and a bag of unclean spirits seeking random intimacy with you to reduce their sorrows?
If they have no genuine intimacy with God and are seeking this love from you, then what will happen when you can’t give them that much love that such people usually need? Will you not be tired? Will they hate you? Will they not turn against you and make you the problem? Will it not lead to a blame game about a problem you didn’t have in the first place.
If you are the one seeking intimacy at all costs, then make sure your first love is with your creator. Be clingy to God not to another human. God’s love is vast and you can’t exhaust it. So once you connect to it your condition will disappear overnight.
Please don’t be foolish or stupid ask yourself these questions before you tie your soul to anyone!
[Article Author: Joseph GM]
Live In Victory 