My Wife's Wisdom

 My wife and I were talking the other night about how theology is discussed and described. She hates reading how theology is discussed, and expressed such disdain with strong language. But what she said about it is both simple and profound (as my wife has a brilliance and a gift for explaining so simply a child could understand concepts which I and others make into overly complex theological statements which PhDs struggle to comprehend).

     What she said was that "God is love. Christ is God. Therefore Christ is love. If you are living in Christ, you are living in love. If you aren't living in love, then you aren't living in Christ and have no idea what this is all about. Love is the foundation of joy, peace, patience, self-control and all the rest. If you take love away, you have nothing. What is God? Love. What is the Holy Spirit? Love. What does it look like if you're in Christ? Love. What does it mean to be a disciple? Love."

     Consider this. If a person is a disciple of Jesus Christ, he will be love incarnate. If it is the Spirit of Christ acting and speaking through him or her, then every word, every action, the whole energy surrounding that person will be that of love, because God is love, and as we make that transformation through the Spirit of Christ into the completion of Christ's resurrection, we will manifest, glow with, exude, and radiate God Himself which means we will manifest, glow with, exude, and radiate Love incarnate. And the person who doesn't, isn't staying put in or making his or her home in Jesus Christ because that person isn't staying put in or making their home in Love.

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Continuing from my wife's wisdom from the other day, as Paul wrote, if a person should have the most blatant of manifestations of the Spirit of Christ, speaking in languages that they don't know and prophecy, if a person should strip himself or herself down to being naked on the street because they gave everything they owned to the poor and then handed their body over to the fire, if a person did all of these things and more, but did not possess agape, did not manifest the core character and nature of Jesus Christ who is God incarnate, agape or love, then it is all worthless.

     The manifested nature of God which is love is the fulfillment of every command and condition in the Torah. Even those commands concerning cleanliness were really all about loving one another enough to not spread disease within their camps, towns, and cities; something which was very possible with eating or serving certain undercooked meats, defecating within the camp, or having a woman on her period strolling through the camp without anything to catch the menstrual blood and it splattering in places people don't want. Human waste and human fluids carry pretty much anything that person might be infected with.

     Without agape, without this manifested core nature of God, there is no joy, peace, patience, kindness, and so on. The God who is agape is the foundation of all of these, and when that foundation is missing they cannot stand. Furthermore, when that foundation is missing, there is only fear, aggression, feeding, and sexual desire, all the survival responses and motivations, which remain, especially fear which the foundation of all of these, and thus the foundation of the "works of the flesh" which Paul described.

     As John wrote, the person who doesn't love, doesn't know God, because God is love. It doesn't matter what this person says, or what he preaches, or whether he can quote Christ's teachings verbatim. If this person's words and behaviors are without love, without the manifested core nature of God, then he is not under the control of the Spirit of Christ, he is not staying put in or making his home in Jesus Christ, he is not inheriting His eternal life at least in that moment, and is operating from a foundation of his own survival motivations, he is operating from fear most of all, and from his own faulty heart and mind.

     A person is either operating in and with love, or they're operating from their own fear, aggression, and bodily cravings. They're either manifesting Jesus Christ, manifesting agape, or they're manifesting their own malfunctioning mind.

     Love, agape, isn't just an important part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ, it's the core foundation of everything it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Everything else can be tossed, and will in fact pass away, but not this one thing. Not love, because God is love. And because God is eternal, so is His core nature.

     Love cannot be emphasized enough, because it is God within us, and the evidence of God within us. Anger, self-righteousness, religious factionalism, and all the rest are not of God, but of ourselves at best, and of demonic powers at work at worst. And a person cannot be called a disciple of Jesus Christ, and should not be called a Christian, if they are not manifesting this love which Jesus Christ Himself preached and practiced.