01/10/2016

Overturning Tainted Love

Posted in Encouragement, Finding Faith, Self-Awareness tagged Cruel God, deception, Force, hate, Hell, love, Lust, selfish, selfless, True Love, World at 8:04 am by The Water Bearer

I have held two completely opposing views of Love throughout my life. In my youth one version took the lead role, to put it bluntly this version was selfish and unstable. In my adult years my Dad introduced me to the other version, the selfless, unwavering Love of God. It took a great deal of effort, self-awareness, and many prayers to undo some of the automatic thinking patterns that my misguided version of Love had established inside my heart, and in my behaviour. Even after 17 years of walking closely with God, straining in pursuit of Christ-likeness, I still battle over which version of love will show up. I am astounded when I unconsciously perform acts of unselfish love, because I recognise it is really Christ working in me, changing me. And yet I am still aware and filled with regret over the times my selfish love rears its ugly head.

This battle between the two versions of love, is as old as time itself, and the biggest misconception of love has been applied to the character of God, God who not only is the very source of all pure love, but who in fact IS LOVE. I feel an enormous amount of urgency to restore the reputation of God, and overturn our understanding of Love, love without coercion or expectation, the freedom and peace true love brings, as opposed to the selfish version the enemies of God have flooded throughout the world. These enemies deny the very existence of love, replacing it with obsession, possession, lust and self-satisfaction, in complete apostasy to the self-sacrificial heart of Christ. Christ came to show us what God’s love looks like, for we unconsciously accepted the falsehood that the enemy was spilling across the earth.

Learning of God’s love revolutionised my life, and I pray my words don’t fall on deaf ears as I hope to shine some light on the battle between deceptive versions and the incomparable version of true love, God’s love.

Love yearns for deep truthful connection, with no equivocation, no hidden secrets, no self-serving agenda. It waits patiently for the chords of love to grow in secure freedom, with loyal untainted unwavering hope. The love that Yeshua imparted to the world took nothing but gave everything. It held nothing back for itself, almost as if love was worthless without loving us perfectly and completely.

Human nature convinces us that we are loving when we feel the desire to connect with others, and yet we have little concept of gaining nothing from it. We push for it because in some way we expect it to satisfy us. We make promises founded on our fragile willingness to hope, then at the first sign that our expectations won’t be met, our promises disintegrate into dust. God’s love keeps its promises because it has no alternative. This is founded in the fact that His promises are based on His character and not on our ability to deserve them, to earn them, or even request them in hope. We only need accept them, trust them, believe in them.

So what about that flood of misguided love that has misrepresented the character of God? What about all those scary threats in the Bible that religious institutions have been using as a means to coerce the world into crouching into a position of slavery and fear under the hypercritical God we’ve all heard about?

The warnings of Hell or Destruction are not threats of punishment. They are a sign post, severely cautioning us as to the unavoidable results of a life separate from God’s love. For He can not protect us from the hellish suffering we are reaping upon ourselves by keeping our hearts and souls hidden from His grace-filled love.

If our souls are energy and energy never dies, but only changes form, then what else is to be concluded but an eternal existence for our souls? What kind of eternal existence our souls obtain is completely up to us. And because True Love doesn’t coerce, God gave us a choice. He gave us the freedom to choose His loving protection and freedom from slavery to sin, or to continue on believing the deceptions. Deceptions which taint our understanding of love and keep us trapped within the selfish empty character of our human nature. A nature that causes us to act in ways that have negative consequences, consequences we then blame God for even after professing that we don’t believe in Him.

The world system sees might, muscle and domination as powerful, and yet the power of God’s love restores what the worlds ‘power’ has destroyed.

God uses the world stage as a template of what eternity will look like without being connected to God’s love. This place is a temporary speck in time compared to the infinite permanent Love of God. His ‘wrath’ is a perfect response to His perfect assessment of who we become when selfishness taints the love He created us to need. His response shows His intense concern for our souls. In His omnipotent wisdom He knows that our desires and self-indulgent hearts are not only taking us away from His love and Blessings, but leading us into the toxic wasteland of Satanic slavery and encouraging others to join us, our children included.

God’s wrath against sin doesn’t come from hatred or impatience or cruelty, as it would from our tainted versions of love. It comes from an all knowing concern for us and our impending existence without the abundant gifts, the eternal freedom and peace that only His love can give. Our belief in His love transforms us, making us able to truly love as Christ loved.

God’s love is made available to us and through us, a free gift offered, wrapped with drops of blood shed to prove its authenticity. The most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to look upward, let His love change us and set us free, so that we can reciprocate and share that Love with our own overturned love, no longer tainted.