In our continuing study of the doctrine of love, we are discussing God's love as a model for the believer's virtue love.

Last time we saw that the believer with no problem solving devices often becomes a casualty in life becomes divorced from reality, and all too often becomes psychotic or neurotic.

The "insults and persecutions" of providential preventative suffering that Paul describes in 2Cor 12:10; demand impersonal love. The momentum tests of people, system, and thought testing require impersonal love for the test to be passed.

In his evidence testing, Job who was in spiritual maturity was being entered as evidence for the prosecution in the angelic conflict, and only succumbed and failed when he listened to his three friends who gave him wrong doctrinal application. This means that even in the evidence testing of spiritual maturity, impersonal love is the appropriate problem solving device.

Impersonal love is the problem solver in all categories of human relationships. It's a problem solver for love and hate, for friends and enemies, and for admiration and animosity.

Impersonal love is the unconditional guarantee of believers who, in spiritual adulthood, are able to maintain a perfect, honorable, and virtuous relationship with both friends and enemies.

Richard Lovelace's poem entitled, "Going to the Wars", ends with the line, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, loved I not honor more."

With this statement he is saying that his impersonal love was his greater love for honor. His personal love for a woman was based on the integrity and virtue of his impersonal love.

Impersonal love means you have virtue as a problem solving device, and consequently are able to handle people honestly, justly, and fairly. Therefore, you have the ability to have a very happy love relationship because, though both individuals are imperfect, impersonal love provides the ability to handle the inevitable problems of the relationship.

The object of impersonal love can be known or unknown, friend or enemy, beautiful or ugly, attractive or repulsive, honorable or dishonorable, good or evil, believer or unbeliever.

Impersonal love perpetuates its own honor, virtue, and integrity without retaliation, reaction, prejudice, discrimination, or revenge.

Impersonal love cannot be corrupted or deceived by flattery, human approbation, emotional rapport, or the exploitation of arrogance and personal ambition.

Impersonal love is free from arrogance, jealousy, bitterness, vindictiveness, fear, hatred, implacability, self-pity, guilt reaction or revenge.

Impersonal love cannot be destroyed by hatred, persecution, unjust treatment, vindictiveness, or any category of antagonism.

This is why the Bible commands believers never to go to court over slander. There is no impersonal love when you are motivated by revenge. You are to put it in the Lord's hands and leave it with the Supreme Court of Heaven.

Impersonal love is even seen in the eucharist. Our Lord demonstrated impersonal love when He went to the cross and was judged for the sins of the entire world. The communion elements recall both the motivational and functional virtue of our Lord's humanity in His prototype spiritual life.

The bread reminds us of our Lord's motivational virtue that was his personal love for God the Father, the Author of the plan for the incarnation. The cup reminds us of our Lord's impersonal love for all mankind and His bearing all our sins on the cross.

He didn't want to go to the cross if there was a way to avoid it, but He was obedient because He had personal love for God the Father and He willingly received the imputation and judgment for all our sins because He had impersonal love for all mankind.

Impersonal love disregards all malice, hatred, vindictiveness, and slander; and substitutes tolerance, patience from the function spiritual self esteem of spiritual autonomy.

A category problems in relationships with self and people that is solved with impersonal love is sensitivity versus hypersensitivity.

Every person in relationship with self has an area of vulnerability. If you are sensitive about what people think of you, then you may become hypersensitive about self and insensitive toward the thoughts and feelings of others.

When your area of vulnerability is touched, you lose your self-esteem, your self-confidence, and poise, and react to the persons or environment that is the source of the perceived threat.

Reaction in hypersensitivity results in loss of virtue causing the loss of personal love for God and impersonal love for man and the inability to function in spiritual self-esteem.

In contrast to this, sensitivity that is the manifestation of virtue-love and its problem solving capabilities our relationship with God, others, and self.

Sensitivity is the normal function of virtue in relationship with God, man and self.

Impersonal love is characterized by sensitivity, the expression of thoughtfulness, courtesy, good manners toward others, a willingness to accommodate oneself to an individual or group of individuals in any category of life.

Sensitivity is the function of the thinking in the adult believer. It is the function of spiritual self-esteem, spiritual autonomy, and spiritual maturity. The base for sensitivity is the genuine humility that impersonal love is built on that reaches its peak in spiritual autonomy.

Under the pressure of people and system testing sensitivity is invisible but very powerful. Sensitivity is the expression of genuine humility by the spiritual adult. It is the expression of impersonal love as a problem solving device in people, thought, and system testing.

Sensitivity contributes to the principle of spiritual autonomy by providing the ability to handle the momentum tests of people, system and thought testing.

You can always tell when you're failing the test when you become hypersensitive.

Hypersensitivity is to arrogance what sensitivity is to humility. Hypersensitivity is the function of arrogance and is a source of great suffering under the law of volitional responsibility.

Hypersensitivity is arrogant preoccupation with self, and distorts human relationships into a system of self-manufactured suffering and misery. Hypersensitivity injects self as a false issue into every relationship of life.

Hypersensitivity is devious. It seeks to control people. Often through the arrogance of the weak attempting to control the strong through guilt.

Obsessed with the arrogance of self-importance, hypersensitivity superimposes unsolicited advice and opinions on others and violates the privacy of those in one's periphery.

The hypersensitive are totally sensitive to the opinions of others around him about themselves but are simultaneously totally insensitive toward others.

When confronted with strength, hypersensitivity seeks to destroy it. When confronted with weakness, hypersensitivity seeks to bully and dominate it. It is frequently the reason for unfairness from authority in system testing.

Hypersensitive believers are unteachable. They always make an issue out of themselves rather than the content of doctrine. This negative volition toward doctrine blinds them to their own failures and creates self-induced misery.

Hypersensitive believers cannot achieve spiritual adulthood in the PPOG and therefore, they cannot attain impersonal love. They are hopelessly entangled in suffering of their own making, and they become a source of testing for believers who are advancing in the PPOG.

The person who controls your life controls your happiness unless you control your life in the PPOG.

When there is no virtue in personal love, the object of your love controls your life and becomes the custodian of your happiness. If this relationship involves personal animosity the object of your antagonism controls your life and happiness.

If you surrender the control of your life to someone else through personal love or hatred, you will blame that person for every bad decision you make and the unhappiness that results.

You therefore, destroy your own relationship with yourself through divorcement from reality and failure to take responsibility for your own decisions.

Reaction to others means you have given control of your life to someone else. The only protection from this is impersonal virtue-love.

Our happiness must not depend on others, but this cannot be avoided unless we have virtue-love from metabolized doctrine.

Impersonal love therefore is a major problem solving device in the Christian way of life. Contradictions cannot exist in the Christian way of life, and believers must account for their thoughts, decisions, and actions in definable terms. This establishes the importance of the Word of God that defines every part of God's will, plan, and purpose for our lives.

This means that Bible doctrine must circulate in the seven compartments of the stream of consciousness and the rate of learning must always exceed the rate of forgetting.

Distraction from cognition and inculcation of Bible doctrine results in forgetting what one has learned. We cannot apply what we do not know or have forgotten.

Believers cannot cram for a problem by trying to learn the whole realm of doctrine in one day. The believer must learn doctrine on daily basis such that the rate of learning exceeds the rate of forgetting.

In the final stage of Christian degeneracy or reversionism, the rate of forgetting doctrine always exceeds the rate of learning Bible doctrine. The stages of reaction where this occurs includes the frantic search for happiness, operation boomerang, emotional revolt of the soul, locked-in negative volition, blackout of the soul, scar tissue of the soul, and reverse process reversionism.

When the rate of learning of Bible doctrine exceeds the rate of forgetting Bible doctrine, the believer advances in the plan of God for the Church Age. When the rate of forgetting Bible doctrine is greater than the rate of learning, then the believer retrogresses and accumulates garbage in the subconscious of the heart or the right lobe and enters into the three stages of Christian degeneracy.

Christian degeneracy includes self-fragmentation or implosion, polarized fragmentation or explosion that results in trends toward either legalism or antinomianism, and reversion. This results in the believer reverting to moral or immoral Christian degeneracy.