The Alchemy of Love - Part 1

by Larry Hodges

"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not Love,
I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal" --I Corinthians 13:1.

    If there is any one subject upon which so little is heard and the essence of which so much is sorely needed by all of us, it is Love. Not human love, but that transforming Love which not only emanates from God, but is God. I chose the word alchemy for this month's title because of its meaning: "a power or process of turning something common into something precious." Love is the antidote and cure for every ill and shortcoming found in the Church in general and you and me in particular. I fully believe that so little is said about it because so many, including myself, feel so pitifully lacking and therefore so little qualified to address it. But if walking in it perfectly is what qualifies one to speak on it, then no one I know is qualified to speak of it.

    Unless otherwise noted, Love, in this article, is to be understood to be that Divine essence that God is, and will therefore be capitalized throughout the article. Otherwise, it will be other kinds of love, printed in the lower case. The Love with which we are herein interested is both a Person and an Essence, which we both desire and need desperately. It cannot be learned, copied, or lived without an inward birth from the center of our beings by Love's Spirit.

    Love is as completely unlike man in his natural condition as God is, because Love is God. It is as ridiculous to suppose that Love could ever do anything that is not a direct expression of Love, as it is to suppose that one can take a dry shower or warm themselves with a block of ice.

    In an hour when God will produce a people who exemplify His character, His nature, His heart; He is revealing Himself to them in a manner and on a scale not heretofore known. Thus, it seems inconceivable to me that one may presume to be of that number which shall make up the Firstfruits, the Manchild, who know so little of the true nature of this great Loving Heart as to represent it as anything less than willing and able, and intending to save every last one of His creatures, either now or later. It cannot be otherwise, for Love never fails, gives up or stops short of its goal. And beloved, what has qualified you and me for entrance into the very heart of God is the fact that Love does not require that its object be loveable!

    Oh, you may think you are nice and kind and loveable, even in your natural estate, but if so, you are very much mistaken, for in your natural, fallen condition you are as hateful, as abominable, as anti-Christian as the worst of mankind, bar none. It is this beautiful, Golden Flower of Love, fully abloom within each of God's Lily plants which makes them His own in a singular and most peculiar way. Without its opening within us, we will find that every effort to conform to Love's ways will be but fruitless attempts at the impossible, and yet, without that Golden Flower opening itself within us and shedding abroad its transforming power in our hearts, we are not representative of Him and therefore, not of that select company.

    Love is the "White Stone" reserved for "him that overcometh." It is the seal of endorsement borne upon the heart of each one of that "dying and yet living" company which lives only upon the ground of resurrection. That White Stone signifies that its bearer has right to reach freely into Wisdom's store and basket to receive and to impart to others of its revenue and increase. It is that by which every one of Wisdom's instructions and all of her counsel is carried out and put into action. It is that hidden vein of Gold whose location is known to all Wisdom's children and no others.

    This White Stone has the power to transform and to transmute. As the ancient alchemists sought to transform common lead into pure gold, this White Stone (Love) has the all-working, acting power spiritually to transmute the gross essences of a fallen, degenerated nature into an all New Creation of Divine nature which in turn is able to recast any fallen nature it comes into contact with into its own New Creative Nature. Only this White Stone can work this strange work which nothing else can.

    I ask you this question today (as I direct it to myself also), not as a merely rhetorical one, but as a measuring rod of reality; are you following Christ? Notice that I did not ask, "Do you believe Christ, or do you have congenial feelings toward Christ, or do you agree with Christ's teachings?" The question is, "Are you following Christ?" That question might and ought to raise another in your mind. What is meant by following? To follow Christ is to go where He goes, even when He goes where we do not wish to go; to do what He does, even when He does what we do not wish to do; to say what He says, even when it incriminates us; to Love those He Loves, even when we do not want to Love them.

    It means to so walk with Him that one is able to go places where one could not go without Love's enabling grace; to do things one could not do without Love's enabling grace; to be what one could not be without Love's enabling grace. And Love's enabling grace will never, never come where there is no need for it. Are you following Christ? It is a question we need to carefully consider before the Lord today, regardless of how we may have answered it yesterday. He is always calling us to do what we cannot do in and of ourselves.

    "It is, I think, our failure to grasp the truth that the appalling thing that happened to the whole Human Race when sin entered the world, and just what it means to every single member of the race to be born into this sin-diseased Body of Mankind, and that we are all suffering together, is the real root and cause of the problem of our LOVElessness towards one another. It is why so many of us find ourselves unable to keep the Lord's one commandment that we should "love one another as [He] loves us."

    "We are so hard of heart towards each other just because we have failed to realize this truth. When we see the blemishes and ugly failures in one another, we suppose that we may feel irritation and indignation and even contempt, because we suppose that God, with His far greater holiness, and far higher standard of what is right and wrong, feels a "righteous wrath," and also a desire to punish the wrongdoer who is stumbling others through selfishness, tyranny, laziness, bad temper, dishonesty or cruelty.

    "Whereas ought we not to realize that these things awaken in Him the same feelings of agonized compassion and grief which horrible symptoms of a malignant disease awaken in the hearts of those who dearly love the patient? All the hideous, loathsome and disgusting manifestations of sin, far from stirring up wrath against the one in whom they appear, arouse Holy Love to rise up in all His strength and determination that the beloved must and shall be cured.

    "In my own personal experience I have discovered that I simply cannot love any person as long as I continue to criticize them to others and to talk about them disparagingly behind their backs. To discuss the failings of another person, unless it is absolutely necessary to do so, is to shut the doors of the mind with a slam on the heavenly light of Love and to reinclose oneself in dark thoughts, which in turn produce the irritated and unloving feelings which are so dreadful. What we talk about to others we do not, and cannot forgive and forget. Every expression of our irritation and dislike or resentment in words, confirms us in that irritation and resentment and lack of Love.

    "This is also true, I find, in prayer. I cannot talk to the Lord about the blemishes and unloveliness of others without finding myself alone and His Presence withdrawn from me. I simply share this point because in my own case it has proved perhaps the most important point of all, and for so many years I did not realize that this is the case, and so did not understand why I was so unable to gain the victory of Love. Every time I spoke disparagingly or prayed critically about others, I was shutting the door in the Face of Love Himself, and only darkness was left.

    "Certainly I had always known well enough in theory that Christians must love one another and should have "a passion for the souls of all men." But how to do so remained a dreadful mystery! There were some people I could not Love; some seemed so annoying and unlovely (I called it un-Christlike but didn't see how appallingly un-Christlike I myself must be simply because I could not Love as He did) that really I did not even want to Love them, but only to keep away from them as much as possible.

    "Not until this secret of Glory unveiled to us by the ascended life of the Lord broke in upon my own understanding, did I see at last that no love is real Love until it is willing to love all, with no exceptions at all; and that the more sinful, blemished and unlovely a person is, the more they need Love. More Love, not less, towards those who are obviously spoiled and marred and sin-sick human beings. Then I was shown that Love does not begin in the feelings at all, it begins in the will.

    "To be willing at last to love all, individual by individual, as we are brought into contact with them, is to be able to Love all. Just as soon as we begin quite deliberately to act towards them as though we really did Love them and were willing to bear everything unlovely about them just because we want to love them, then Love comes; first as a trickle, then as a stream, then as a flood, until, like the river of life in Ezekiel, the waters, which at first came only to the ankles, then to the knees, then higher still, became at last, 'waters to swim in.'"' End of Quote by Hannah Hurnard, "Unveiled Glory." Also the author of Hinds Feet Upon High Places.

    The great crowning work and final touch to be added to God's workmanship in a people of His unveiled glory in this hour is Love. Without it, the work is not complete, for until this Love is established in them, they are not representative of Him and therefore not qualified to be unveiled as His image.

    It is, I think, worthy of special note that this Love does not begin in the emotions or feelings. It is not to be associated with nice, warm, fuzzy feelings. It begins instead as a deliberate act of the will, believing that what we have undertaken, God will make possible. Nor are we to lose heart when there is no sudden overflowing flood of Love immediately resulting from our first weak, perhaps imperfect, attempts. We must expect it to begin as a mere trickle that is a promise of more to come! Gradually, as we continue to persist, it shall increase until there are veritable waters to swim in. Then shall the heady, intoxicating perfume (the aroma of life) of this Golden Lily plant, now fully opened within, attract and captivate all who chance within its conquering sphere of influence. Here all noxious weeds are transformed by Love's irresistible and compelling might into still more new springing Lily plants, and venomous serpents into angels.

    It is not in the nature of those regenerated spirits, now the new-born children of Wisdom, who can hear or know of such royalties and incomes from Love's investiture who shall not find stirred up within them such a vehement desire for it in themselves. Indeed, the Lord is faithful to bring such a word in this hour as will leave His Dove-flock even more desperately panting after Him and after the proposed conferral of Love's victory garland. For indeed, we must know and admit that Love is one and the same as maturity. There is no maturity without Love.

    Here it comes about that we must touch on that most abhorred of all subjects --giving! The reason for this is that it simply is not possible to Love without giving. "For God so Loved, that He gave . . ." Giving is the natural, automatic result of Loving. Because the grace of giving is so very important in the maturation of the believer, the Enemy has sought to so take advantage, to so bring disgrace and shame in connection with giving, that today few will broach the subject for fear of immediately coming under suspicion of being wrong about money. The teaching on the grace of giving is so very important that to withhold it is to fail to declare the whole counsel of God. I would much rather come under unjustified suspicion than to have to answer to God for failing to obey Him.

    It does not automatically follow, though many believe it does, that giving is about money. It may include money, but it doesn't stop there. Many are quite ready to give financially if it means they may not have to expend themselves or their time or lose their own life.

    God desires that His people who will make up that select company of Firstfruits who are out-resurrected from among the dead, know how to give joyfully, from a heart so governed by Love that it cannot help itself. There is no way to represent God without this indispensable attribute of giving the way God gives. And believe me when I tell you, He is not interested in halfhearted giving. He is not found grateful for whatever He can get.

    I am reminded of a story about an incident in the life of Demas Shakarian, founder of the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International. I think it was in Armenia where his family was still living when some prophets visited their small village and one of the men of the village went out and killed a calf in order to feed the prophets. When the meal was served, one of the prophets arose from the meal and went out to the barn where he found hidden away under some hay, the deformed head of the calf the man had killed and offered as unto the Lord. He brought this head and plopped it on the table for all to see, whereupon the man confessed his sin and repented of it. God was not grateful for whatever He could get, but demands the best of us for His namesake and for our blessing.

    Does God need your money? Obviously not. He made the worlds without taking a single offering. He can completely fulfill His ultimate purposes for mankind without a cent from any one of us. It is not the money that He is after; it is our whole heart that He is after and which He will not share. He means to see His people free from the love of uncertain riches and laden down with the true riches of the kingdom of God.

    You may think, "Why is he addressing such a basic subject, and one which most of us have dealt with long ago?" It may surprise you to learn that there are some even in the "remnant" who have not yet come to grips with the issue of "giving." I know people who know the message, agree with it (to an extent), and who desire with all their hearts to walk in all its good, who simply do not yet know how to give as unto the Lord. They do well when they are giving directly to a ministry, but when it comes to another member of the Body of Christ or of the universal Body of Mankind, they flunk terribly and do not even know it.

    Rather than giving from the ground of joy and Love, they loan. There are not a few who do this. As Christ is immanent in every man, woman and child living, what we do to the least of these His brethren, whether they are alive to Christ or as yet dead to Him, "we do it unto Him." Love does not so discriminate. It spends and expends Itself upon all of humanity.

    If you do not believe that Love has the power and the will to transform, to alter and to turn something that is vile into something precious, let me share a story with you.

    A certain man seemed to hate all nationalities. He taught his son to hate them also. He hated the blacks, the Jews, the Italians, the Germans, the French, and almost every nationality known. This man's language was vile and filthy. He was an angry, tortured brute (himself probably abused as a child) who thought nothing at all of smashing his son or anyone else with his work-hardened fists. Emotionally, he was comparable to a paraplegic. He just couldn't function as he ought to.

    The son thought much about what must be wrong with all these nationalities until around the fifth grade he began having serious doubts as to the veracity of his dad's claims. One day after school, he asked his dad, "If all these other people are so awful, which nationality are we?" "Humph!", he snorted. "We're Americans!" The son saw the truth about the whole matter from this reason-deprived statement.

    Many years passed as the man became more hardened in sin and in his unloving ways. His wife and four children wonderfully came to Christ, each in his own time, and knew the marvelous change Love had begun to work in each of them. He remained untouched and unaltered. He was stricken by a sudden stroke which paralyzed him on one whole side. Prayer offered up by one of his children effected an immediate and complete healing. He still remained unchanged. But Love still had not given up on him.

    He came down with cancer. Again, prayer miraculously brought the healing that prolonged his life and sought to touch his heart. Still, he was unfazed and unchanged. One day, one of the sons asked him, "Dad, when you had the stroke and were healed, what happened to you?" "God healed me," was the gruff response. "And when you had cancer?" "He healed me again," he said. "Well, why is it that you won't surrender yourself to His forgiveness and serve Him?", asked the son. "I don't know," was the nearly unconcerned reply.

    A short time later, now very much up in years, while working on his truck in an enclosed garage, he was overcome with carbon monoxide poisoning and fell unconscious near the front of his truck in the enclosed garage. He lived in the country, understandably had very, very few friends and therefore expected no one to happen in on him. But a man who lived some two miles from him, upon whose heart God had strangely placed this sin-ridden man, had begun to stop by and just talk with him from time to time. He did not necessarily talk to him about the Lord, he just spent time with him.

    On this particular morning, the man passed his house and saw that his truck was gone and so decided to pass on by, not knowing the truck was inside the garage. A few minutes later upon his return from the store, he decided to turn in anyway, even though everything seemed to say that no one was home. As he walked near the garage he heard the motor running and saw the man lying near death on the floor. He ran to the highway and flagged down the deputy sheriff who just happened to be passing at that very moment, and the man was hurried to the hospital and saved (barely) once again.

    Still, his overall attitude toward God and his own need remained unchanged and it seemed that this one was just too much for Love. Then one day in 1990, the son came home and found his dad in a wheel chair, once again stricken with terminal cancer and given up by the doctors. The son had been told by a sister who had seen him just prior to his visit, "Dad is so nasty and mean I couldn't even mention the Lord to him." The son fully intended not to mention anything along these lines when he came. But as he sat in the kitchen with his dad in the wheel chair, everyone, as if on cue, got up and left the two of them alone. "Dad," the son asked, "are you ready to meet the Lord?" The head dropped. "No," came the soft reply. "But I don't know what to do." Shocked, the son reached for the Bible and read a few very simple verses that showed how simple it is to receive the Lord and His redemption.

    "Dad," said the son, "If you want, I will pray with you while you call upon the Lord." As they bowed their heads, the precious, persistent Holy Spirit fell in the most sweet and profound way upon them while they both wept. The man's first words after calling on God to save him was, "Son (only the second time in the son's life to hear this word from his dad), I'm sorry about the way I've treated you."

    It so happened that this man's hospice worker was a black woman, one of the man's most hated nationalities. It also so happened, this precious woman was Spirit-filled and full of Love. (Isn't God good?) One day just before his death, this hospice worker came in and as the son was leaving the room, he heard her say to the man, "Mr. , I Love you!" While the son stood marveling that God would go to such lengths for this man, whom, his whole life had shown no mercy, he heard an even greater display of Love's transforming power come from the man's own lips. "I Love you, too!"

    Three months from the day He called on the Lord, he passed over as quietly, as peacefully and as serenely as one can. Not at all like the life he had lived. The son was so moved by this visible demonstration of Love's persistent determination to have this man that it made a lasting effect upon him and upon his relationship with his heavenly Father. On this man's gravestone are written these words, "Seventy-nine years lost, three months found!" What a testimony to the unwavering faithfulness of God, who will not cease His quest until that last sheep has been safely returned to His fold.

    And brother, sister, if you think that the mere taking of one's last breath can stop this persistent Love, then there is a glorious discovery concerning one of Love's qualities that awaits you. It is that Love N-E-V-E-R fails! It is stronger than death, it has the keys of death and the grave. "For this cause was the gospel preached (by Christ Jesus) also to them that are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit" --II Peter 4:6.

Concerning the Nature of Divine Love

by John Pordage

1683

    "In the first place, I find the Nature of Divine Love to be a perfect unity and simplicity. There is nothing more one, undivided, simple, pure, unmixed and uncompounded than Love. You will say, 'How do I prove this?' Very well: for this Love is God Himself. It is well known that there is nothing more essential to God than unity and simplicity, nothing more contrary to the Divine Nature than duality, division or composition. Besides, it is this Love which gives unity and harmony to all things. There is no unity in heaven nor on earth but what derives from Love and must acknowledge Him as the Author. Do you think Love can lack that unity which it gives to all others? Certainly not, rather conclude that that which makes all things one, which harmonizes and adjusts the most different and discordant natures, must needs be unity itself.

    "In the second place, I find Love to be a most perfect and absolute Liberty. Nothing can move Love, but Love; nothing can touch Love, but Love; nothing can constrain Love, but Love. It is free from all things, itself only gives Laws to itself, and those Laws are the Laws of liberty; for nothing acts more freely than Love, because it always acts from itself and is moved by itself, by which prerogatives Love shows Himself allied to the Divine Nature, yea, to be God Himself.

    "Thirdly, Love is all strength and power. Make a diligent search through heaven and earth and you will find nothing so powerful as Love. What is stronger than Hell and Death? Yet Love is the triumphant conqueror of both. What is more formidable than the wrath of God? Yet Love overcomes it, and dissolves and changes it into itself. In a word, nothing can withstand the prevailing strength of Love: it is the very munition of Rocks, and the strength of Mount Zion which can never be moved.

    "In the fourth place, Love is of a transmuting and transforming Nature. The great effect of Love is to turn all things into its own Nature, which is all goodness, sweetness and perfection. This is that Divine Power which turns water into wine, sorrow and hellish anguish into exulting and triumphing Joy; curse into blessings; where it meets with a barren earthy desert, it transmutes it into a Paradise of delights; yea it changes evil to good, and all imperfections into perfection. It is the Divine Stone, the White Stone with a Name written on it which none knows but he that hath it. In a word, it is the Divine Nature; it is God Himself, whose essential property it is to assimilate all things with Himself; or (if you will have it in Scripture phrase) to reconcile all things unto Himself, whether they be things in heaven or things on earth, and all by means of this Divine Elixir, whose transforming power and efficacy nothing can withstand.

    "In the fifth place, Love is of a fruitful, prolific, multiplying, diffusive and communicating Nature. It is Love which makes all other things to be fruitful and multiply and to be diffusive and communicative of themselves; therefore, Love, which gives to others this property, must needs possess it by way of immanence itself (it must be intrinsic or inherent or essential). Upon this account it is that Love saith, 'Shall I cause others to bring forth, and shall I not bring forth Myself?'" End of Quote.

Finally

    You who have set your faces unflinchingly toward Mount Zion, committed to bear any cost, suffer any loss, are to be encouraged by these enticements of Love. This concluding and adorning work to be conferred upon His pure, waiting Bride shall tincture her throughout with that Divine Essence, Divine Nature, that is the Father, the Spirit of Eternity. In this shall be fulfilled that saying, "If a man Love me, he will keep My words: and My Father will Love him, and We will come unto him and tabernacle with him" --John 14:23.

    This Sharon Rose is unlike that fading rose whose cursed, thorn-stemmed bloom finds its root in Adam. She instead, springs from the ground of Eternal Nature, from the ground of all Love and goodness and sweetness, bringing with her, whithersoever she may go, that rarefied atmosphere so charged with God's own original nature to subdue and defeat all opposing factions. Here are no longer doctrines or theology; here are no longer the words of men about the words of God. Here are realities brought forth at will by Wisdom's children to establish that of which Scripture and doctrine has but spoken.

    The mighty-acting power of the Holy Ghost shall so rest upon these clear bodies and in these pure, simplified spirits without measure that nothing shall be impossible to them. They, being moved only by Love to act and speak from Love's ground in and through this mighty-acting power, shall be Love's immaculate agents through which the gross, degenerate nature shall begin to be transmuted and renewed into the glory of Sharon and Paradise that Adam lost. Eventually, all things, both animal and vegetable, shall be transformed into Love's essential properties through her first-born children brought to birth through Her only begotten Son.

    We are therefore not to think it strange or out of reach that God should begin to manifest these free-working properties of Love, first in transfiguration of the vile body into a body like unto His glorious body. But do not speak to me of transfigurations and of signs and wonders. These demonstrations of the powers of the kingdom shall surely come to pass. Instead, tell me about Love's ability and all-willingness to do in us what It requires us to do, that is, to transmute the gross and degenerate nature of the worst of mankind into the pure nature of Deity. Spiritually, this is nothing less than the turning of gross matter into pure gold. It is the alchemy of Love. Then, as never before, we shall see Love's ultimate outworking, transmuting power as it is to go forth in a renewing work upon the old and wrinkled face of this present lapsed creation. For, as we have surely been told, Christ shall indeed appear in some chosen vessels to bring into the Promised Land, the New Creation state. Amen.

    In order to this, God shall not be slack to produce certain head powers who shall bear the first office and are to be persons in favor with God. Beloved, allow the stirrings of Love's Spirit within you to cause you to so run as to make your calling and election sure. Think not within yourself, "Others may rise to the occasion, but not me." Do not listen to king reason's faulty and misleading counsel. Remember that God has called "Are nots" to bring to nought the things that "Are." Take it as strong evidence that God would have it so, that such a desire is even now rising in you from the ground of Love's essence.

    Offer yourself again, afresh and anew, without reservation or rival in your entire life and all its interests and activities, believing that what you offer in faith, God will, in faithfulness, accept. Shall Love indeed say to us, "Bring forth!" And Herself not also bring forth in us? Believe God, and plunge yourself into the engulfing Ocean of His all-conquering Love with the attitude of, "If I perish, I perish." By such is a kingdom gained and to them is the golden scepter held out in tender mercies and eternal goodwill.

    Build an altar today in this place of your heart that is presently being dealt with, and give yourself, as a whole burnt offering, unto the Lord! For the promise is, "Beauty for ashes." They who believe the word of the Lord to them and subsequently offer themselves unreservedly shall know the everlasting joy that shall be upon their heads and the garment of praise. These shall be the planting of the Lord, and they will repair the old waste places because their own have already become Paradise.

Note

    For the benefit of those of you who have selflessly supported us in making available Jane Leade's writings, and for those of you who may be curious, we are very pleased to tell you that the effect of these books have been astonishing. We have received many reports, in tears, that these writings have transformed their lives! These are Christian lives. They bring us to an utterness that perhaps was missing before.

    We encourage you who may have found their reading to be more difficult than usual, to continue to read them and re-read them until they begin to open up by the Spirit. I am strongly against presenting them in such a way that they read like a Reader's Digest. The difficulty lies not in reading ability; it lies in ability to understand, and that is the Spirit's area of responsibility, to take the things of Christ and reveal them to us. These are spiritual writings which require the Spirit's assistance to understand, but when understood, carry with them an anointing and weight quite scarce in this day.

    Some have written, saying that they did not understand the books on a first reading but upon persistence found them to suddenly open to their minds so wonderfully, they marveled that they did not grasp their meaning at the first. Persist! Dig until you find that White Stone with your name written in it!

END OF MESSAGE