Endless love

Happy Valentine’s Day! Today is all about love, passion and of course, sadly, lust. This day is dedicated to lovers and a particularly commercial holiday geared toward money making when we should share our love with the people closest to us on the daily. If you died tomorrow would your people know you loved them? I am guilty too! We all fall prey to the world but it is important for people to know they are loved every day of their lives. If we cannot love someone right we need to leave them alone.

It is impossible to love like we are commanded without Christ dwelling in us through the Holy Spirit. I have tried and it is impossible if the people are not your children or family. Some family is hard to love if not next to impossible. With Christ I have learned how to forgive and to love in His manner.

We love because He loved us first. Can you even imagine dying for someone? Not just dying but being beat beyond recognition and then hung, on a cross? And, you had to carry that cross broken and battered… He knew He could put a stop to all of it, too, but He held the cup full of our sins. He is worthy to be worshipped, loved and praised. When you come to Christ and submit He literally gives you His heart, making it easy to love others. I could not stand people before my complete submission, and some I still do not want to be around. I can be though because God wants to show them a different kind of love through me. Is this weird to me and at times difficult? Absolutely! People are mean and hateful because of their own hard-hearts. The world can and does get in making it easy to harden your heart. Pain is what causes a heart to grow cold towards everything. A person with a hard heart will hurt everyone, or try to, in their wake. Once a person has a hard heart they begin to fall away from Christ through sin. The more we sin the further we are from Him and the harder it is to hear Him or to even know His voice. Repentance is what needs to take place and often times we must forgive others, and I mean, like, total forgiveness. That kind of forgiveness God extends to us which is impossible without Christ. I know this too because I have experienced that hate. I hated people for hurting me and would not forgive them because they didn’t deserve it- NONE of us do!! We do not deserve God’s forgiveness, but if we ask He is quick to forgive. We forgive because we are forgiven and if we don’t forgive we are not forgiven. When we learn to yield to the Holy Spirit we will love as God intended and have the relationships He desires for us. Some folks don’t always go with you no matter how long you have known or been friends with them. But we gotta love them anyway! We can just love them from afar.

Real love is unconditional.. when you put conditions on your love you are allowing your flesh to rule. We cannot be our own gods and this is most definitely a sign. We cannot have two masters! Your master could be self-gratification, money, lust, men.. or all of these making you your own God. I was my own for years, well, until I died. I loved the Lord and I knew Him, well I thought I did, but I never fully submitted. There was always a few aspects of my life I wouldn’t give control up to. Men, my finances, my kids, my career.. these were touchy areas of my life I didn’t know how to hand over. This has been a very hard process learning to depend on God. It is even harder when you have satan and his agents that try and make you fall away and sin. To purposely try and make you stumble and try their best to hold your past over your head. That is in no way, shape, or form love. I have learned since my total submission, to my entire life and handing it all to God, what love is and what love is not. I have also learned how to forgive, love and move on without some folks because they do not know how to really love. And, well, some folks are just not good for you. They suck the life out of you like a spiritual vampire.. ugh!

1 Cor. 13 is all about what love is and what love is not. Love is not self-seeking, proud, boastful, hateful, mean, but it does endure all things. Through brain injury I got to see who really loved me and who couldn’t care less about me. I couldn’t remember my life and that was held against me instead of everyone looking at it as getting to make new memories. This hurt me tremendously and it did harden my heart but I allowed it. I look back now and I should have stood my ground, known my worth through Jesus, and prayed harder. I am not condoning anyone’s actions but trauma can destroy families and people because we don’t and aren’t taught how to deal. I am a firm believer in counseling because of my past. It is so crazy people will totally think there is no way all of that actually happened to one person… it did! I say I have the craziest story ever told. That entire story is about to come out. I have learned that of all the gifts Christ deployed me back to earth with the greatest one is His love, with His heart. 1 Cor. 13:13 is so on point. I am nothing without He. I definitely am not strong enough to come out about everything without trying to have a little self-pity but I will gladly boast about my weakness because that is when He is the strongest! I love that and I love that I can see the entire Bible coming to life.

We know what love is not but what is love? Love is seeing the best in a person when they are at their worst. It is giving up for oneself for another. It is pure. It is a most beautiful thing and through all the pain I still firmly believe in love and the relationships love can and does create. It is unconditional and never using your past against you. It is getting up in the middle of the night because you are needed. It is being needed and wanted at the same time. I have had people that say they love me try and use my past against me.. that is not love! That is not how God intended for us to love. If He held our past against us we would all land in hell. Don’t think for a second people don’t go there either. He commanded us to love His church as He loves us, to love one another as we love ourselves because nobody would hurt themselves.. if you hurt yourself and inflict pain upon yourself you need to get some help, and a whole lot of Jesus. That is not love! We must know our worth through Jesus. You do know you bought at a HUGE price, right? Who would you die for? Most of us would only lay down our lives for our children but you know what? That is exactly what He did. We are all His babies! Love gives us hope. What do you put your hope in? God’s love for us in incomprehensible in our small minds. He not only died for us but He would literally go with us if we made our beds in hell.. ( Psalm 139:8) I know this as straight fact because He snatched me out of hell. It was not my time to die and I had to fight hard to come back but that is His love. If you need to repent please do so. He speaks to all of His kids and if He isn’t speaking to you it is because you dont really belong to Him. (John 8:47) You can always return like the prodigal son, (Luke 15:11-32) and He will welcome you with His arms outstretched for you to run into. He is the good father.

We are to do everything in love. If we don’t we have a lot of lust. Lust is misdirected love that should be supplied to God. I have had lust in my life and I am pretty sure it is part of growth but I had to get rid of all of it. Lust is also a spirit to make you misdirect your love from God- bind and loose it back to hell where it belongs. At all costs get it off of you! He is a very jealous God and tells us that numerous times in the Bible. If we redirect our love we are cheating on Him! Have you ever cheated or been cheated on? It does not matter which one you have done it has hurt you and other people but it mostly hurt God. Every time we break a covenant here in our realm, the natural, we also break it in the supernatural with God. Repent and move back to the Lord. He will take you back and there is nothing you can do to make Him not love you. He is a parent first. As a parent I get this because there is not anything my children could do to make me not love them. Trauma definitely tests love.. even between mother and children. I am not saying that any of us walked away from each other but trauma takes its toll and can harden a heart. It is important to turn to God when we are hurt so He can heal us. It has not been an easy road but we all made it through and we are better because of it. They could never do anything to make me disown them and I don’t understand parents that do this to their children or purposely hurt them. We are to make their lives better than ours and break down those generational curses or negativity spoken over them. There is life and death in the power of your tongue. (Proverbs 18:21) I have had negative junk spoke over me and said to me and have had to cancel it. That is a plot devised by the enemy. I have had to rebuke things and satan which was very hard for me, at first. I know my worth and my enemies now. I know the spirit world and I have looked in the eyes of satan.. I will never back down.

Some of this didn’t exactly go in the direction I saw, but it must be what He wanted out there for some reason. I am very transparent and not ashamed of my past, but I have been. I truly had to find my worth in Jesus. He has had to show me who I am in and through Him – took Him almost 45 years to do it and I will always be a work in progress. He is the potter and I am the clay, and I have felt this molding process. Learning to love like we are commanded was and sometimes still is the hardest thing I could ever accomplish because I had some severe wrath. Now, I do everything out of love for my fellow man because if I dont why would I ever do it? God gave me healing hands and He has told me some to heal to learn how to use them, but if I don’t have any love behind these hands what is the point? That would be me doing it for self-gratification and that is not love towards God. He gets and is awarded all the glory because I am nothing without Him, nothing! Everything I do is out of love for Him, and with that love I can love others. It is the most precious gift-love.

Don’t ever forget your first love! Have a fabulously blessed day!