Author: watchstandpray

183 – We Were Created to Love and Be Loved

From the Beginning, God created us for the sake of love. We cannot exist without love. We cannot succeed at anything without love. Friendships, business, family ties, academics, government, society, international and domestic peace—everything depends on love in order to continue. This is because we as humans were made for love—both to give and to receive.

Our ability to love others is one in the same as our ability to receive love. Receiving and giving love are actually the same, single action. Sometimes we perceive and “feel” more receiving or more giving, but love really is always a two-way street.

No one can receive love without giving love. No one can love others without being capable of receiving love.

The person who leads the cause for compassion, head of an organization that helps those in need, but cannot accept the simple act of love, is not fully loving others, no matter how big the cause or organization may grow. Many people who are outwardly known as “the caregiver”, but don’t know how to accept love from others, are on a question to have love, but still haven’t found it yet. Don’t be surprised to find out who this is.

Just the same, many people seek to be loved by others. They know what they seek and they seek to be loved with conscious intent. They pray for God to send people who will love them. But, the truth holds just the same for them: Our human capacity to receive love and to give love are one in the same!

If you need to feel loved, then give love to others. If you feel love for others and you want to demonstrate that love for others, then pray for God to increase your own capacity to receive love that you might not be able to return.

Love between us and God is where it all begins and where it all ends. By loving God and accepting God’s great love for us, we automatically grow in our giving and receiving love with others—it’s an unavoidable consequence of true love with God and only flows from love with God first. Love is a God-centered circle.

182 – Two Types of ‘Victim’

There are two types of victimhood: 1. factual and 2. state-of-mind.

The first kind is when someone is literally overpowered by another person or institution. The second kind leads to “complete stories” about the bad things other people did, declaring, “I’m not going to be a victim anymore,” then looking for a gun, stick, bunker, faster car, supervisor to appeal to, or lawyer—all “devices” to stop or escape the abuser. Such “devices” are rarely an answer.

Preventative action is good and smart, home security systems and conceal carry permits even help police. But, don’t call a lawyer or get a gun because the people at work and home don’t listen; that’s the thinking of a mass shooter.

Never exploit your injury to blackmail or influence others. This is not justice, but it happens: Reporting abuse can reflect worse on oneself for getting injured in the first place, thereby appearing incompetent and losing employment, friends, even family. Report abusers, but don’t fall into this trap when you do!

One Asian friend was frequently taken advantage of by his friend and he wanted to change his English name to seem more tough. He did need a new name, but not to solve his “victim” problem.

I’ve had Asian employers deny me my legal papers more than once, even trying to take my passport. Rather than a battle in court, I chose to be educated and “sneaky” so my employers couldn’t take away my rights. I simply survived, nothing more, which slowly injured those employers more than any lawyer could have.

Sometimes we need to take legal or physical action, but there does also exist an often downplayed “inner-self power” that requires forgiveness in your heart, technical research on your own, and a lot of patience. That is what it fully means to “not let yourself become a victim”, where the slave is so shrewd and patient that he has more power than even the slave master.

We have seen this in history: Tank Man from China, MLK Jr., and Jesus Christ. Jesus was no victim, those who crucified him made themselves the victims because Christianity swelled into a tsunami movement and to this day holds the last word.

181 – We Are Only Entitled to Sonship by Faith

We are born with no rights except the right to choose whether to believe and trust the God who created us. An attitude of entitlement causes us to lower our guard and our work ethic. Being entitled means that one does not need to work to keep what one has. So, thinking oneself entitled to what must be earned leaves one with nothing.

As our Creator and Redeemer, God loves us, sees great value and potential in us, and gladly crawled through crucifixion to ensure that we could retain a pathway to live out that potential. But, that is all it is: potential. Jesus gave us no guarantees on the results in our lives, only that we would keep a choice in the matter of our own futures.

We can’t even change our past. We can only affect our future.

Simply accepting God’s gift adopts us back into the estrange family of our natural birth. God made us, we fell, and He welcomes us back if we simply return. We are always welcome as sons and daughters to live in and enjoy His estate. But, what we do with it remains up to us.

This makes God’s unconditional love perfect. We are always welcome in His own house, just as children believe that their parents’ home also belongs to them—because it truly does. Just the same, everything children own belongs to their parents. They are family, loved, and have a place to belong. But, we also have complete control over results. If one can work, practice, learn, and earn more, then one has more rightly and fairly, not because of any favoritism.

We find both inner strength and confidence in our hearts when we know how secure we are in God’s unconditional love, along with knowing that we are entitled to no particular results whatsoever where our work is concerned—except that our results are earned fairly. What a gift!—that we have nothing we didn’t rightly earn except the unconditional love of our adoptive biological Creator Father in Heaven!

Even our bad results are our own faults, while unavoidable hardship strengthens us. This, too, is liberating—to know God isn’t just some meanie.

180 – Jesus the Artisan

Jesus was not only sinless, not only a prayer warrior, teacher, and miracle worker; Jesus was a master craftsman.

With humanity’s nature of continuous learning, Jesus would not have been the perfect sacrifice as the Lamb of God who took sin from the whole world unless he had also mastered a skill of some kind. The religious leaders of his day did not merely sacrifice some common man, and not only the Son of God; they sacrificed an accomplished artisan.

Jesus was a master, not only of life and people, but also of trade.

David and Joseph both ascended to their place of rule at about the age of thirty. Likewise, Jesus began his public ministry at the age of thirty.

There is nothing magical about this age thirty, but it often makes sense on many levels. Tech leaders, such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, had great trouble in their mid and late twenties because they had not been through enough practice and natural life difficulties to prepare them for the wolf pit of piloting a large company. Joseph, David, and Jesus did not have this problem.

There is some value in pondering the implications of Jesus being a carpenter. God the Creator grows the trees as part of “creation”; man cuts the wood as part of “procreation”. Jesus worked with his hands closely to nature. One legend tells that Jesus made yokes for oxen and would feel the animals with his hand so he could cut them to fit. This has some plausibility from Scripture since Jesus used the yoke as an illustration, “Take my yoke upon you,” and Paul later talked about being “equally yoked”. Either way, yokes would not have been the only wood Jesus ever crafted.

Yokes, as well as other “building” terminology, in the New Testament occur in the context of Jesus the carpenter.

Beyond carpentry illustrations, Jesus had a trade; he himself had a skill. He is “preparing a place” for us in Eternity as a carpenter.

Jesus the master carpenter is also the perfect administrator, setting yet another example for us to work and learn and improve skills that make effective and qualified leaders, servants, and friends.

Matthew 11:29-30; 13:55, Mark 6:3; 14:58, John 2:18-22; 14:1-4, 2 Corinthians 6:14

179 – God Is not Entitled to Receive Our Love

Love is never entitled. Love must always be earned, won over. The moment anyone thinks oneself entitled to love, that person will become lax, negligent, unloving, and, consequentially, unlovable. God is not like this. God is perfectly lovable because, though always available, His love is perfectly optional.

God is a gentleman. He will never go where He is unwelcome. As a gentleman, He knows how to take a hint.

The young woman still learning to love will do things that repel other people. But, not understanding how repulsive her actions are, can’t figure out why people keep running from her. Eventually, she thinks the world is against her when, actually, she has not prepared herself to be a loving person whom people want to love in return. Just the same, a young man may annoy others or fail to carry his own weight, so his peers reject him, yet he will never figure out why until someone explains to him how to earn friendship.

To earn friends, first be a friend; to be a friend, do a good job of whatever you are doing. God understands these things perfectly. So, when we do small, little things that repel wisdom, life, strength, and the choice to be happy, He won’t darken our door with things we don’t want. Immorality uninvites the God who created morality for our benefit. He won’t force life on us if we don’t want to walk the path that leads to that life.

Just the same, with guidance of the Holy Spirit, heightened joy from His presence, spirit-driven insight into our circumstances—God will not share these things with us unless we want it.

God leaves many standing offers on the table. It is our choice what we will accept from Him. Some people only want His forgiveness without the result of living wisely. So, forgiveness is all we will have as we enter into the next life with nothing else. Some people want to obey his moral code, but not grow in love and self-controlled joy. Many “Christians” reject miracles or spiritual encounters. Whatever our limits are on God’s love, He respects our boundaries and will never impose Himself beyond them.

178 – Know Love

Knowing love is central to everything social—relationships, teamwork, family, romance, leadership, neighbors, classmates, the work place, the school playground, government, consulting, client relations, sales. Everything that involves people succeeds where love abounds and fails where love is absent.

When there are hardships or frustrations in dealing with people, love is somewhere absent. Being “able” to receive love can be difficult and it causes people to be unloving. Usually, rude, disrespectful, angry, inconsiderate people have a love issue—firstly that they don’t know how to receive love from others.

Being “unlovable” isn’t about other people struggling to love a person; it’s about one’s own inability to receive love from others. Loving the unlovable is a challenge because unlovable people put up barriers and deterrent to keep other people away. They act inhospitable and unwelcoming specifically and intentionally so that other people will not want to be kind to them. Kindness is a risk and, for whatever reason, they don’t want people to love them. They hunger for love, but they have decided somewhere that no love can ever be real or that so-called “love” is a bait for the coming switch.

Loving the unlovable means one must learn to love more. You may think that you love others, but your level of understanding love will not be proven with people who are easy to love, but with people who resist your love. This is a problem all around and whichever side you find yourself on today, there remains only one way through for everyone—learn to love more.

If you want to love others, you must first know how to receive love. If you struggle to love anyone else, that directly shows your struggle to receive love from others. The first place to receive love is from God because He never stops loving us. He rarely gives us what we want, but He loves us enough to give us what we need every time. Love can be firm and tough at times.

Growing in love is a daily, constant choice. You will not become a more loving person if you take a day off from loving others. Like Bible and prayer, love also grows daily.

177 – Romance Is Overrated

It all goes back to fantasy. One of the biggest—if not the biggest—driving force behind the worldwide cultural obsession with romance is the genre. While fantasy does well as a genre, not a lifestyle, romance is better left to the mundane. Rising divorce rates at the dawn of the second millennium were just too high to say otherwise.

So much money and emotion goes into the marriage rituals that families start out with a pocket too light, just to meet the expected norms. If a fraction of the resources for the performance went into dedication and loyalty through the boring normality of life, the divorce rate might also be a fraction of what it is.

My sister got married across the country and held the reception at home. Mom said, “I wasn’t there for the wedding, but I was here for the marriage.” Sadly, not many married couples can say the same.

Marriage can’t be strong and lasting if it is worshiped as a false deity. But, the movies and stories and lyrics in pop music push a cultural expectation that so glorifies relationships that are, in actual life, nothing that we romanticize them to be. Romance itself has become romanticized.

When one makes a promise, one must envision the hardship of statistical obstacles and determine to keep going with neither reward nor pleasure, merely for the sake of keeping the promise being made. If it’s not worth it then don’t make the promise. But, it’s hard to envision the granular features of any rocky road when hypnotized by dreary, starry-eyed songs about a fake fantasy.

Love is much more than pop culture’s expression of it could ever be. The Bible’s most recurring illustration for the human relationship with God is that of a man and woman in marriage. This isn’t literal; it’s illustrative, the most-used illustration in the Bible. Consider Song of Songs, Hosea, John’s reference to Jesus as bridegroom, Jesus’s parable of ten bridesmaids, and the Book of Revelation closing with the words, “The Spirit and the bride say come!”

The Biblical concept of undying, sacrificial, there-through-it-all love is the standard for actual romance. Marriage was invented in Heaven, not Hollywood.