The Real You!
Love is not really an action that you do. Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence. Love is a person that lives in you, but Who is greater than you. That’s the paradox. Love is within you and yet beyond you. This creates a sense of abundance and more-than-enoughness, which is precisely the Real You. You know you’ve found a well that will never go dry, as Jesus says (see John 4:13-14). Your Real You, God’s (who is Love) Love in you, cannot be exhausted.
Material gifts decrease when you give them away. Spiritual gifts, by contrast, increase the more you use them. Yes! You get more love by letting it flow through you. If you love, you will become more loving. If you practice patience, you will become more patient.
Love is not something you can earn or trade for, nor is it something you can perform for—because love is a person and that person is your true identity. It is who you truly are. Once you are united to Love you become that Love. When you are living in conscious connection with this Loving Presence, you are living from your original Real identity. God is forever united to this love within you; it is your heart and soul.
Many Christians live with a terrible sense of being rejected, because their imagination of "faith" is basically a worthiness game where no one really wins. That’s NOT the Good News. It’s bad news. The Gospel will always be misinterpreted by the false imagination of twisted faith in terms of some kind of achievment mentality. Since the false self can’t even understand the command to love one’s enemies, it has to disregard the message, which is exactly what most of Christian history has done.
Jesus’ teaching on love of enemies has been consistently ignored the church. Christians have been fighting one war after another, and excluding, torturing, and killing enemies right and left because the false self can never understand the Gospel.
After I had spoken on unconditional love; love of neighbor and love of enemies, this well meaing individual came up to me and said, “Well, Paster, maybe in an ideal world. . . .”
Of course, the ideal world is never going to come so we can just ignore 99% of the actual teaching of Jesus, as the institutional church (and I too!) have usually done. We concentrate instead on things that Jesus never once talked about. We shouldn't disregard those issues, but they are not the core problem.
Jesus focused on issues of power, prestige, and possession—which all of us have largely ignored. I don’t think the church has done this intentionally. It has simply tried to get the false self to live the Gospel, and that will never work.
In other words, we’ve tried to have a church without fundamental transformation. A transformation that restores us to the Real Identity of Love. Thus we whittle down the whole Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus’ direct teaching to our personal morality rather than our love for each other, our neighbors and our enemies. To live is to love. To live is to live out of that Love that resides in us, who is united to us and who loves the world unconditionally.
The God in me loves Everyone and Everything!