All About Love part 2
It's all about love. What else could it possibly be about? Sin? Hell? Good and evil? Come on... it's about life! And that more abundant! And to live is to love. To love is to live. We get so caught up in anything and everything else that we miss out on the gift we've been given. We miss out on the very thing we crave. Psalm 37:4 tells us, "Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart." And somehow we have taken this to mean, "If I delight myself in the Lord, He'll give me what I want." And in a sense this is true. But we first have to understand what we want. What we REALLY want. And I'm convinced that what we--every single human being ever--want is to be loved. Plain and simple. We want to be accepted, and understood, and loved. And those three things--like faith, hope, and love--are really the same thing. Because you can't be loved unless you're accepted, and you can't be accepted unless you're understood. That's why we spend so much time trying to get to know ourselves and each other. But the trick is that we're so afraid of rejection that we very rarely show our true selves to each other. We hide things. We create this image of who we think other people want us to be. We try to enter into the sheepfold through another way besides the Door. And when we do that we become thieves and robbers. We rob OURSELVES from the gift that is freely given by trying to earn it. We miss out on being OURSELVES by trying to be someone we're not. And we think that by putting on a "holy face" we are delighting in the Lord. We think that a human trying to have a Spiritual experience is what "Christianity" is all about. But we don't seem to understand that the Word became FLESH and dwelt among US! Jesus came to show us the Father and He did it by showing us a man who loved people. The Spirit is always trying to have a HUMAN experience. That's why He took up abode, or dwelling, in us. That's why He took it a step further and stopped dwelling AMONG us and started dwelling IN us! That's why He gave us HIS Spirit--the love receptor! Let me say it this way: In order to "get" (a better word is "receive") what we want--which is to be loved--we have to go to the source. Stop looking for love in all the wrong places and go to the throne of grace to find grace to help in times of trouble! Ok. The desire of our heart is to be loved. And we can only "get" our desire by delighting ourselves in the Lord. Because He IS love! BY delighting ourselves in Him do we RECEIVE the desire of our heart! The gift that was freely given. The gift of ETERNAL LIFE. And eternal life is knowing the Father and the One whom He sent. Knowing God in the context of that unshakable, unbreakable, unconditional Father/Son relationship! It's about being loved and loving others with that love. Receiving and releasing. Helping people. Not FALLING in love, but RISING in love and helping people up when they're down. We experience love in the most true sense when we love others. When we delight in... others. When the Jesus in me connects with the Jesus in you. That's true love. And it casts out fear! It makes us perfect even as He is perfect in us!