This same love is the love wherewith we can love one another too, thereby lifting earth's relationships into the heavenlies where all is divinely natural and ordinary. Paul cannot leave the theme: 'God commends His love toward us', he says, 'while we were yet without strength Christ died for the ungodly'. Herein lay our weakness — we were without holiness and love, therefore quite ungodly; we were loved but unloving in a world that needs love so much. We had no strength to love men and women as God loves them, and so often had no desire to; we were spiritually incapable of it, yet such is the strength and wonder of His love that He loved us even when we were too dead to know it. We were totally ungodly, yet in all our ungodliness He loved us and reconciled us to Himself, recreating in us something long since dead and non-existent between man and God. When Adam sinned, the communion between man and God died; God was inconsolable. From that moment man was irreconcilable to God until both natures were united in Jesus. In this perfection He lived all His days and despite every onslaught upon it maintained that unification without sin or rupture, so that He might bear His Godhead and Manhood whole to the cross and through the grave up to heaven. By Him God brought in the age of reconciliation; He could, for in Christ He has created and established it for man and restored him to Himself. God can now righteously do as He wills in man, since Christ has brought reconciliation into being and the Holy Spirit has brought it into human beings.
Reconciliation is man's restoration by God into the primal state of sinless love from which man fell at the beginning. That original love was the natural condition in which humans lived with God and each other at the first. It preceded the knowledge of righteousness; they were without consciousness of being righteous for they had no knowledge of sin; man and woman did not know personal sin any more than God did. Consequently they were not aware that they were righteous, for they had no means of comparison; they were aware of love though. Morality was nothing other than continuing to live in the state in which they were created, and walking and talking with God in perfect innocence, knowing that evil existed but being themselves unaffected by it.
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G.W. North (1913 - 2003)
G. W. North was born in London England in 1913. As a young man he became aware that the Lord was calling him into the work of the ministry. At timely stages the Lord placed folk in his path who were able to direct him into the truth of heart purity and a more expansive understanding of the ministry of the Holy Spirit. He held pastorates in Kent and Bradford. By the late 1960s, following a significant period of ministry in Liverpool, he began a more itinerant ministry. This led him to many parts of the world, and occupied him until well into his eighties. His powerful preaching and the unique sense of the Lord's presence, which seemed to brood over his meetings, were always intensely challenging.The true secret of his remarkable ministry stemmed from his personal communion with the Lord Jesus. To him, 'entering the holiest' was not merely a theological concept; it was a distinct spiritual reality - and the central feature of his spiritual life. It was here, in the place of worship, that his revelatory ministry found its source. He preached from understanding and conviction. He was never the echo of another, nor did he take on board the ebb and flow of various contemporary emphases. He was not a man of 'books'; he soaked himself in Scripture and allowed it to saturate his heart and mind. Truly, this is a man who has lifted up a standard for the people. Mr North went to be with the Lord on 29th April 2003, shortly after his ninetieth birthday.