Seeketh Not Her Own – Legit Love Has Limits

Here I am, at 6 am on St. Valentine’s Day, writing to you about love. Some of you may consider this a great gift in celebration, while others may think this to be some kind of ridiculous joke and you are waiting for me to slip in a subtle punchline. There is no punchline, because society has been punching us in the gut for decades and I am just hoping to use the atmosphere of this ‘holiday’ to have a deeper impact than those who hide their destruction behind the veil of love.

Please give this statement ample gravity: Not everything we call love is love.

It has become popular for tattoo-faced, ‘artists,’ and social media, ‘influencers,’ to come up with new and more debaucherous ways to cut the seams of a healthy society in their well-paid attempts to redefine humanity and rebuild us, ‘in their image.’ We already have a Creator Who has given us an image that we have a fervent desire to embody and display. That divine image is superior to any mockery that wokery can conjure up through their spirit-cooking seance parties in Hollywood and DC.

A major target-rich environment that has been incessantly attacked is ‘love.’ Every single human being has an intrinsic value and innate knowledge of the universal necessity for love and its importance for survival. This survival comes at the most intimate level for each individual in acknowledging that a life without love is uselessly attempted. We have witnessed this truth vividly in modernity, which has borne the rotten fruits of skyrocketing suicide rates due to the systematic destruction of authentic divine love that uniquely fills that God-shaped hole in every human soul. At the most basic level, every person must know and experience love to have life energy. This need to experience and express love is the compelling force behind the pain, hardships, and selflessness that is necessary to build a family. But, if built by love, the rewards greatly outweigh the sacrifice. Only love can truly drive sacrifice, just ask Jesus.

Love is the anchor line that builds and holds a society together as well. Any cultural group that has been formed without the tendons that only love can produce will collapse… and great will be its ruin. We have seen this over and over, too many times, where divorces ravage the psyches of innocent children, bullies who terrorize a weaker group into fearful subjugation, governments drunken on greed and control who will pressure societies into conformity, and propagandistic media oligarchs who purposefully deceive the masses… ALL of these activities are done under the faux-virtuous idea of, “it is for your good.” This is just another way of twisting love.

I was formerly a higher-up kinda manager-type in a big, billion-dollar corporation before submitting completely to the call of ministry. In my supervisory role, I was honored to have thousands of people working for me with whom I had regular access and contact. Many of these employees were minimum-wage folks, and a majority of them were gals. It was a common occurrence, sometimes my week would have multiple instances, where I would be making my rounds and encounter one of these young ladies with a black eye or some other form of the wickedness of ungodly masculinity. I would nearly always ask what happened… I would nearly always get the capitulatory, “I fell…” or some other misdirection attempt… then I would attempt to minister truth to her… then, nearly always, she would say, “But, he LOVES me!”

No… no, he does not… not even a little… not real love.

Legit love has limits. (Read it again.)

The Creator of love is the only One Who gets to define what He created. Any other definition is wrong.

These attributes about love listed here can also be true about God because scripture declares God IS love (1 John 4:8 & 16). So I am going to list them here, each of them individually so we can consider them more deeply.

1. Love/God is patient and kind.
2. Love/God is not jealous.
3. Love/God is not boastful.
4. Love/God is not proud.
5. Love/God is not rude.
6. Love/God does not demand its/His own way.
7. Love/God is not irritable.
8. Love/God keeps no record of being wronged.
9. Love/God does not rejoice about injustice.
10. Love/God rejoices when the truth wins out.
11. Love/God never gives up.
12. Love/God never loses faith.
13. Love/God is always hopeful.
14. Love/God endures through every circumstance.

We see that this list contains fourteen attributes or characteristics of Love. If you noticed, I made some of them Bold to highlight an important truth: sometimes, in order to truthfully define something, we need to say what it is NOT. If you are keeping score, this list says Love is NOT things (10), more than it IS things (4)…

I would love to take the next three hours, do some expository exegesis on these verses, and explore tons of divine truth with y’all in a Big Blog Bible Blowout Bash! But, alas, as Polonius in Shakespeare’s Hamlet lamented, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” So, I am just drilling into one of these virtues for my current, culturally relative application of truth.

Love/God does not demand its/His own way.

Look at a few other translations of that phrase:

It is not self-seeking (BSB, NIV, AMP)

It does not insist on its own way (ESV)

Is not selfish (Holman, CEV)

Seeketh not her own (KJV – my personal favorite wording)

This is the antithesis, the archenemy, the embodied villain of nearly the entire system that surrounds us in our modern, progressive, church-i-anity culture today. Psychology is built around the separation of the ‘id, ego, and superego’ and how they clash in our thinking. Spirituality is described as the Spirit of God striving for preeminence internally against the lusts of the flesh and the imperfections in our souls.

Selfishness is primarily driven by the ‘id’ in psychology, which is the part of the personality that represents our primitive, instinctual drives. It is the ‘flesh,’ Biblically. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification of basic needs and desires without regard for consequences or reality. This can manifest as selfish behavior when the individual prioritizes their wants and needs above those of others. However, the ego and superego also play a role in selfishness, as they can sometimes be overpowered or compromised by the id’s demands. Even psychology agrees with the scriptural principles of how infectious the demands of the ‘flesh’ can be as we navigate life.

The enemy takes advantage of the reward/consequence reality of existence. There is an inarguable principle working at all times for all people in the background, whether we agree or not.

Galatians 6:7-8

Do not be deceived: God is not to be mocked. Whatever a man sows, he will reap in return. The one who sows to please his flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; but the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.

Please note that God is not directly causing the reaping. He is just the Creator of the system that has established the ‘spiritual physics’ of every action that produces an equal reaction. If a person makes good choices, they will reap the benefits of those choices. When one makes ignorant choices, they will reap the pain associated with being stupid. It is not God being mean or nice, it just is… like gravity. If you trip and bust your head, it is silly to assume gravity was mean. We all know that gravity is amoral, it was the tripping, the falling, and especially the sudden stop at the end that actually caused the hurt.

The enemy of mankind is aware of this immutable principle and uses it against us. In the Garden of Eden, his temptation gained traction with Eve by convincing her to make the wrong choice by calling it good. He said:

“For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5 BSB)

What Eve likely wanted more than anything in existence was to be like God, her Father, her Creator, the One she greatly loved. The trickery was to get her to make a wrong choice by calling it ‘good.’ The original ‘disinformation’ campaign was started in Eden and empowered by twisting love into a form that motivated humanity to ’seek its own.’

United States CIA4 Director, William Casey, voiced the following quote in 1981: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete, when everything the American public believes is false.”

The government has picked up where the snake left off. Media has joined the party, and even religion has goose-stepped into formation. By redefining and removing the limits on what love is and is not, destruction can be ushered into our lives inside the beautiful Trojan Horse in the shape of Cupid wearing a t-shirt that says, “Love Is Love.” They are getting away with ensnaring millions of Christian-ish, good people by convincing folks to make wrong choices, guaranteeing wrong reaping, by utilizing the righteous motivation of desiring good outcomes.

• “Our world’s people would all have a much greater quality of life if we reduced the population down to 500 million because then EVERYONE would have plenty of resources!”
• “The compassionate thing to do for that poor, struggling woman is to give her increased medical freedom so she can choose the loving health care that she desperately needs in this unwanted pregnancy.”
• “These traumatized refugees and convicts streaming across our borders are really just good, military-aged men coming to make our lives better by doing the kind of labor we do not want to do.”
• “Requiring ID to vote is racist because minorities are not intellectually capable of getting an ID… and you do not want to be a racist, do you?”
• “Jesus was friends with sinners, so if we are going to be like Jesus, then we need to have friendship with the world and lovingly tolerate, or even celebrate, different lifestyle choices by flying a rainbow flag.”
• “That oppressed little girl is just wrongly trapped in that obtuse male body, and if you actually LOVED your child you would liberate them through castration, hormone ‘therapy,’ and transition support.”

Can you see how duplicitous and cunning the forces of destruction have become?

“Never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself.”

— Napoleon

The only way to avert this successful strategy is to be well-educated and grounded in the truth. Rooted and grounded in love, real love, God’s love as defined by Him, so that any counterfeit will stand out like a sore thumb, or a pedophile drag queen in a library with satanic horns and a beard… same-same.

Then you, being rooted and grounded in love, will have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend the length and width and height and depth of the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Ephesians 3:17b-19 BSB

Being filled with the fullness of God is the fruit of having a knowledge that surpasses natural wisdom, which comes from a full comprehension of love, which derives from being rooted and grounded in authentic love. Did you follow that logic? Being filled with God, His power, His truth, His everything is the aftereffect of real love making up the foundations of our life. And God’s kind of love, “Seeketh not her own.”

This is the silver bullet that can strike the heart of the night-dwelling vampire lurking in the internet corners looking for an innocent, naked neck to sink his bloodthirsty jaws into. That vampire looks handsome in the LED lighting and makeup of his Social Media profile pic. To a lonely person, his tweaked smile could even look inviting and loving. But, God’s kind of love does not seek its own benefit. Because we walk in God’s love, we have the kind of discernment that puts that scoundrel in front of a mirror to expose his lack of substance.

The community that will thrive as we dive deeper into this Great Awakening is filled with patriots and parents, children and the aged, black and white, sons and daughters who have the genuine love of their eternal King.

That is our culture, Beloved… we do not seek our own way.

In sincere love,
Steve