5 The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. 6 Some have wandered away from these and turned to meaningless talk.
Love flows from a heart that has fulfilled all it responsibilities. We each have roles and functions to perform, just as each part of a body must do its part. Love flows from a pool of water that is clean because a person has been cleaned by accepting the payment made for them by Jesus. We could never fulfill that obligation. Our sin is too great for a mere person to fulfill. Our sins are too offensive for self-produced cleanliness to satisfy. Love has to flow from God. Any part of us that is not like God inhibits the flow of that love. WE get in the way! Our conscience becomes corrupt in the process. When we choose sin over righteousness, and that is a choice we make, we choose to rebel against the morally good God. We slowly dull our conscience one immoral choice at a time. Soon we have flipped the moral compass upside down, choosing to point it in our own direction, the needle having been moved from its fulcrum. Instead of our conscience moving us, we move our conscience. We intellectually dismiss the demands of God and replace them with feel-good platitudes. Then our faith loses its purity. We manufacture a new faith, patching together bits and pieces of those things that make us feel good. We become multi-faced. We view every circumstance and each person as objects to be manipulated toward our own ends. Others see our hypocrisy, but we become blind to it. How can God’s love ever flow from such an impure stream! When such a heart, conscience and faith try to express the love of God, the talk is empty, meaningless. I can think of a TV preacher who sugary sweetness never can confront sin. It can never tell the whole Truth because for him the Truth revolves around his own view of himself and the message he proclaims. There is no grounding is his message for he has cut the anchors to the Unchanging One and is afloat in a sea of shallow marshmallow messages. On the surface they sound good, but after moments of digestion all that you have gotten is a momentary sugar rush. There is no substance, no protein that can sustain you in life. When God’s love is present, our heart, conscience and faith all are in tune with God’s intentions for our lives. Then our talk has depth, substance and sustainability.
The Arnold Journey 