Love

WHAT GOOD IS ANY formal religion if it only adds to the long list of things one must do to feel love, respect, significance, or security? Cannot one who follows “Self” also feel these things? 

Before I met Jesus, I certainly felt love, respect, significance, and security, and while I did not truly follow Christianity, I knew the beliefs in “The Gospel According to Me” had some of its values. Being a good person, a good neighbor, and a good citizen, in my mind, led to love, respect, significance, and security. 

My mother, for example, is a good person, but she holds no claim to any formal religion and has declared herself to be an atheist. She has chosen to believe life after death is nonsense while I believe she will someday get to share that opinion with God himself. 

One of us is wrong in our beliefs. 

Nonetheless, I do not follow Christianity for what I believe is the bonus of eternity in heaven. I follow Jesus because I met him and experienced his love, and while he did not come down the chimney like Santa he did leave me with some gifts. 

The first gift was assurance. 

I knew he was real. My formal religion was not the figment of the imagination of the writers of the New Testament. Those writers met him, too, which explained why they were willing to proclaim his deity even though it cost them their lives.  

The second gift was forgiveness. 

I was living with a married man, knowing it was against my formal religion to do so and Jesus never mentioned it. Like the woman at the well, who had five husbands and was living with a man at the time he visited her, neither of us had been condemned. Instead, he offered his love and compassion. People in my church, on the other hand, would have condemned me; just as my own father, had I not kept it secret. 

The third gift was the ability to understand the words in my Bible. 

Never before had I been able to read more than a verse or two without finding the material archaic and meaningless to my life. After I met Jesus, the words transcended the dimensions of time and space and became the living person of God. I never again read any words, even in the Old Testament, as if they were from an angry God, but rather, from a God with an unending and exceedingly patient love for mankind. 

I do not know why Jesus chose to visit me. Granted, I know he had a purpose because he said he wanted my life, but I did not know why he wanted my life for he gave me nothing to do to earn his favor, and he had proved I did not deserve his kindness. 

I did not understand why I mattered to him enough that he would leave his father’s side and show up in an affluent suburb of the city to visit a regular girl off a farm who was not destined to be the next Billy Graham. I have pondered this phenomenon many times, and the only thing I can come up with is because of the most important gift he gave me that day. 

It was the gift of unconditional love.

I had never known unconditional love before I met Jesus. The only love I had ever known was love that had strings attached; love that was either earned or deserved; the kind of love that could be lost if I made a mistake, wasn’t good enough, or circumstances killed it off. 

It was for love that he came that day. It was for love that he required nothing of me and gave me the freedom to choose or reject him. It was for love that I served him and because of his love that I began to see the lethal flaws in “The Gospel According to Me.” 

One cannot know the difference between a certain measure of love, respect, significance, and security found in the religion of “Self” and the fullest measure of these things, which can only be found in something greater which lives outside the individual mind, heart and, experience. 

Until one knows, he does not know, and to try to explain it would be like trying to describe the color blue to a blind person who has never seen the sky. 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 

And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 

If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.

So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. –Paul (1Cor 13)

I Corinthians 13:4-8,Romans 12:9-10,Mark 12:29-31, Romans 13:8-10,Proverbs 20:6-7, I Corinthians 13:13

As always, it is my intent and hope that my words may encourage you wherever you are in your journey.

If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.–Jesus (Mark 4:23)

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