Life and Death part 5
Love is the difference between life and death. Because love and life are the same thing. No love, no life. Know love, know life. And what got Adam--and all of humanity before the cross--into trouble is that he thought he needed to earn God's love through the knowledge of good and evil so that he could do good and not do evil. But that's not how it works. Look at 2 Peter 3:17-18, "Ye therefore, beloved, seeing ye know these things before, beware lest ye also, being led away with the error of the wicked, fall from your own stedfastness. But grow in grace, and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and for ever. Amen." There's a lot there, but let's unwrap some of it. And first things first, we need to know what we know. The ultimate truth of the universe: God is love and He loves you. That's where we have to start. That's the foundation. And when we're rooted and grounded in love, standing firm on that foundation, that's when we can move upward and Godward. That's when we can begin to grow. Grow in grace and in the knowledge of Christ. The knowledge of LOVE. Our steadfastness IS love. Love is longsuffering. Love never fails. Love endures. When we're talking about eternal life, we're talking about eternal love. And when Jesus, when love, is Alpha and Omega, beginning and ending... when we start with love and end with love... that's where we can begin to truly live. We know that we have passed out of death and into life because we love each other. Its the New Commandment: Love one another as Jesus loves you. Receive and release the Father's love. That's what life is all about. That's what life IS. And its available to us. Right now. It is the gift of God that He gave to us when He gave us His only begotten Son. So we can either get busy living, or get busy dying. We can choose life. We can choose love. We can guard our hearts by keeping them open. Keeping them open to love. Letting God love us. Filling ourselves up to overflowing with the love that we have already been filled with. We don't have to GET anything. That's how you work yourself to death. As my mother always says, "When you work your fingers to the bone, you only get bony fingers." As the old saying goes, "If you work for a living, why do you kill yourself working?" You can't earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. A gift cannot be earned. It has already been given, and must simply be received. Jesus sweated out great drops of blood to redeem us from the cursed earth dimension. So that we could experience heaven on earth. So that we could stop trying to earn something we think we haven't got by being someone we're not. So that we can embrace ourselves and just be who we are. So that we could truly live. A life of love. God loving us, and us loving Him back by loving each other. That's what any father wants for his children--a good, full, abundant, everlasting, eternal, Resurrection Life of love! And that's what we have been given. That's what we have. That's what's available to us. Death died on the cross, and now we can live. Because now we can love. Because now we know that we are loved. Now we know that we ARE love!