Christian Living

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God loves and accepts us for exactly who we are. He cares for our mental, emotional, spiritual and social well being. He cares for our feelings about ourselves, our emotions, our perceptions of our responsibilities, our strength of character, our career fulfillment, our family life and personal life. We need to love and accept ourselves in the same way God accepts us, whatever are sins or situation. Only then can love flow out of us the way God intended.

Jesus gave us two instruction that will activate overflowing love. First, love the LORD with your entire being. Second, love others as you love yourself. Everything else in life will fall into place and are secondary to these two essential values.

Although it sounds simple, it is not always easy to do. To love your others as you would yourself encompasses all those things that concern you about your own life. Truly caring for someone goes far beyond physical well-being, food, and shelter. It means caring for the hope, encouragement, and dreams of others as if they were our hopes and dreams.

To love others as you would yourself is an awesome task that we have barely explored. It becomes a monumental task when we do not even know how to love ourselves. We are hindered from loving ourselves by denial of problems, denial of how things really are, denial of our own needs, denial of needs of others.

The first thing we must do is FACE REALITY. We are not perfect, so can we please just stop pretending to everyone around us, and especially to ourselves that we are? We tolerate avoidable situations that do not promote our well being, or help us be closer to GOD. We sabotage our own lives with behavior that we know is not helping us.

Sometimes everything seems to appear just wonderful, but something is not quite right. We become complacent with our comfort and security. We become contented with our friends, church, ministry, family. By all appearances, everything may look beautiful, or sometimes we just want everyone else to think our life looks beautiful, even when we know the truth.

Life is like the ocean much of the time. Standing on the shore looking out to sea, the ocean is gorgeous, the sea appears peaceful. Be aware, be on guard, as there are undertows operating in many places that will drag us down and destroy us. To ignore a fact that is causing us serious damage hinders the ability to truly love because energy and "delegated influence" is being used for self-defense instead of being projected outwardly toward others.

We need to rethink our motives and intentions. We need to abandon our human efforts to “appear good.” We need to go to the source of all the love we seek and ask God to fill us. Life can be easy and joyous when we let God do the work.

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