Seeing is, Believing

Seeing the world through the eyes of others.

The caption under the picture I chose for here was, “You must love yourself before you love another. By accepting yourself and fully being what you are, your simple presence can encourage others.”

One theme I am permanently stuck in and trust I will never get out of is, the “unconditional love” of God the Father!
The main reason I redundantly use the prefix of ‘unconditional’ with regards to Love, is because at best the only so called love any of us have ever experienced is about performing measuring up, ergo if it is sufficient, we will then ‘be loved.’ Interestingly Jesus said, “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

Only in seeing, knowing, experiencing this unconditional love will we ever discover the ability to move away from what is nailed down, obvious, and secure and walk out into the desert without rational explanations to justify our decisions or to guarantee our future.
The journey of faith across the chasm between knowledge and experience is what is calling out to us from within the Father’s unconditional love for us. We prefer to read the map rather than visit the place. The specter of our actual unbelief persuades us that it is not the experience that is real but our explanation of the experience. Often it’s our beliefs—which William Blake called “the mind-forged manacle”—distances us from the grip of personal experience.

Unlike the children of Israel being lead out of Egypt’s bondage, we are being lead out from something far more insidious, Adam.
We are either still in the first Adam, or in the last Adam-Christ. If any man be in Christ he is a whole new creation, the old has passed away and all things have become new.
It says that the god of this world (Satan) has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not SEE.
The Father’s intention is to open our blinded eyes causing us to see, and in seeing, we experientially enter into that which He has prepared for us.

Becoming rooted, grounded, founded and established in the truth of the Father’s unconditional love is going to encompass a life time. It is the Father’s good intention to press into our hearts a living knowing, that we ARE Loved!
Jesus, as the revealer of the Godhead, defines God as love. In light of this revelation, we have to abandon the cankerous, worm-eaten structure of legalism, moralism, and perfectionism that corrupts the Good News into an ethical code rather than a love affair.

We have the choice set before us to either keep believing in the distorted, disfigured, unpredictable mean God, the god of this world, (Satan) has and keeps before us or, we can allow ourselves to be fully, lovingly embraced by the God and Father that Jesus came to reveal.

Rich