Love, pure and simple; part 1

Some see love as a kind of soft, mushy feeling. Not many see love as a force – a force for good (God good). Why would love be a force? Love is what creates. When we would “love” to be doing something, we create that in our lives. We envision it and we make it happen. Therefore, love is a force that magnetizes to us what we desire, if we use it. Love also magnifies, for as we focus our love on something, it increases or expands; it becomes more. Perhaps “more” is exactly the key to knowing love. More is expansion, creation, giving, generosity, growing, learning, inspiration and enlightenment. This is love.

Compassion is an aspect of love because compassion is a way of helping someone to be more, while sympathy holds them to less. Compassion says, “You’ve got a challenge for sure, but you are up to it because you are a child of God. I will hold the highest vision of your victory for you.” There is no attempt here to identify the person with their circumstances, rather to see them as “more”. Sympathy says, “You poor sod, you are down on your luck for sure. Woe is you.” Here we see that the person is made less than their “powerful” circumstances. Empathy attempts to join the other in their predicament through identification with their problem, as in “you and I are both less”. How can we help someone by holding a lesser vision of them or by joining them in their misery? Does this sound like love?

It sounds, for sure, like mushiness. If we stand on mushy ground, we will sink. If we stand on the rock of Christ, we will stand tall and rise. From up there, we see clearly and help others to rise. Standing on the rock of Christ doesn’t mean that we are hard-hearted; it means that our heart is elevated. If love is a force, that means that it is out-going, but love is also receptive – not receptive of that which is not of God, but a flow of giving and receiving in and with God. When we stand on the rock of Christ our heart is like a beacon light in a lighthouse giving and receiving the light of God, lighting up our corner of the world and directing the lost home.

Now doesn’t this sound better than standing in the mushy muck of sympathy and New Age “unconditional love”? Does it make sense that love could be unconditional in a world full of so many ungodly conditions? Would we be one with ungodly conditions – conditions of selfishness and misery? Would we seek to magnify them? Or would we stand above them and invite others to come up higher by shining our light from up on the rock of Christ? Those of Christ know that the conditions of the world have to be judged according to Christ reality. Christ is not silent in the face of ungodliness.

“And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” (Luke 19:40)

“It’s all good” is a popular New Age expression, but it is not “all good” if we are talking about God-good. We live in an often confusing world alongside those who are sometimes two-faced or conflicted, dishonest or deviously deceptive. Just the fact that we have these words in our language, along with the word “discernment” shows that these are issues to be dealt with.

If it were an “unconditional” world with nothing but God-good in it, then maybe love could be “unconditional” on earth. Yet to the contrary, adhering to the philosophy of “unconditional love” in a “conditional” world is collusion with the “enemy”, or sympathy with ungodliness. How can that be helpful or right? It certainly can make one look good, as in appearing to be peaceful, tolerant and “loving”. But it is a superficial peace, a non-discerning tolerance and it is a mushy love that sinks to a low level, not being of Christ. Therefore, it is a counterfeit love, not of God at all. “Unconditional love” is actually a condition that the true love of Christ would rise above and expose for the unreality it is. It seems funny to say that “unconditional love” is itself a condition for love to abolish, but it is true.

part 2