Do You Know I Love You?

Deuteronomy 7:13, “He (God) will love you and bless you and multiply you…”

Several times in my lifetime I have had a spiritual crisis of trying to understand or grasp the love that God has for me. In one of these crises God taught me that He does love me in and of myself, completely outside of anything I can, can’t, won’t or will do. And yet when I think of this love relationship that I as a Christian am supposed to have with God, and that He is supposed to have with me; I most often only consider my own heart and do I truly love Him. I think more often of Christ asking Peter if he loves Him than I do of Deuteronomy or even John 3:16 and Him loving us.

As a result, quit often in my prayers to Him I will be filled with this love of God, and I will ask Him, “Do You know that I love You?

Most often His response in my spirit is, “I know you do.”

And so while driving home the other day I was just filled with the love of God and I asked, “Do You know that I love You?” And yet this time His response was different.

He said, “I know you do… Do you know that I love you?”

Honestly it makes me cry now, as it made me cry then. Because even though His love surrounds me, even fills me at time, I cannot truthfully say that I "know" God’s love. I do not know or understand the fullness of His love. I do not see into His heart like He sees into mine. And I certainly do not understand God’s love. Even at this point in my life my understanding of God’s love seems so objective. I yearn for a more subjective understanding.

I can describe this like knowing Christ. So many Christians appear to live only knowing about Jesus, having never encountering Him in relationship. That is where I am with God’s love. I know that He loves me, I can explain some things as His love for me, but I truly don’t live in the full awareness of it.

God asks, “Do you know I love you.”

I reply, “I know You like me.”

Father help me to truly, subjectively not only know Your love, but to live in it.

Having written this yesterday my friend Aaron unknowingly shared this poem and video below with me. 

The Thorn 

by

Martha Snell Nicholson

I stood, a mendicant of God, before His royal throne

and begged Him for one priceless gift, which I could call my own.

I took the gift from out His hand, but as I would depart I cried,

'But Lord, this is a thorn and it has pierced my heart.

This is a strange and hurtful gift which Thou hast given me.'

He said, 'My child, I give good gifts. I gave My best to thee.'

I took it home. And though at first the cruel thorn hurt sore,

as long years passed I learned at last to love it more and more.

I learned He never gives a thorn without this added grace:

He takes the thorn to pin aside the veil which hides His face.

Mad As Hell

Ephesians 4: 26, “Be angry, and yet DO NOT SIN; do not let the sun go down on your anger,”

For the past several weeks I have been angry at everyone and everything. Angry with co-workers, angry with fellow drivers, angry with wait staff, helpers, detractors, kids, parents, you name it. I have inexplicably been mad at all of humanity with special attention on those who like to drive below the speed limit in the left hand lane.

For me I know some of it is physiological, and my annual physical cannot come soon enough. Certainly I can feel my thyroid medicine is off, and perhaps all the others are as well. But aren't we supposed to overcome anger. Shouldn't we have this mysterious harmony with mankind simply because we gave our lives to Christ? Isn't peace, patience, and understanding supposed to overtake us?

I was at breakfast with some friends a couple weeks ago and I shared with them my overactive irritability. Jim said he learned to overcome anger when he learned to embrace and live in the fear?

What? Now I’m pissed at Jim. Didn't he hear me say I was angry… not fearful?

My wife certainly is ready for a return of the “sweet Jeff.” And somehow she knows that I am really not some vicious dog, but more of a whinny tittie baby.

Snap out of it, I tell myself.

But that doesn't work. I am mad as hell. Now I know it is God bringing, or at least allowing this “anger response” to come to the surface. And finally this morning I had a brief moment where He too was not an object of it, and here is what He showed me.

He showed me that both Jim and my wife were right.

Have you ever had a rescue dog? They have be very neurotic. We have a little rescue Chihuahua that will bark at me like I am going to kill it. Is it mad at me? Certainly not, but for some reason it is afraid of me. They say because a man abused it.

That’s me. Not angry because of abuse per se. But this whinny tittie baby in my corner, wanting to be left alone, but when someone interferes with my peaceful corner, what do I do? An angry response to an irrational fear.

Get out of my way you idiot, I say to the driver… but it is really me being afraid I won’t get home in a reasonable amount of time. Or afraid I will be late.

You deserve to be fired, I think of my co-worker… but it is really a fear of not making money and having to struggle to pay my bills.

What are you thinking, I ask my children… but it is really a fear that they will find themselves later in life unable to take care of themselves, while I live in the reality I cannot take care of them myself.

Anger, irritability is part of life and a body that can respond very negatively to chemical changes, weather changes, and just change in general. But just because we are angry there is no need to sin. For me I am going to explore this fear thing further in hopes of overcoming anger in my soul, in hopes of being more like Christ. What will you do with your anger?

Pipeline Not Pie

2 Thessalonians 3:10, “For even when we were with you, we used to give you this order: if anyone is not willing to work, then he is not to eat, either.”

Proverbs 14:23, “In all labor there is profit, But mere talk leads only to poverty.”

The world seems divided into two camps. The socialists that believe somehow the rich have accumulated too much, and therefore need their wealth redistributed to bottom. In other words; tax, steal, or otherwise dispossess some percentage of the population, and give it to the rest. They argue that the top 15% shouldn't “control” 95% of the wealth. As you should surmise by the end of this, 95% of the pipeline flows through 15% of the population, but they do not “control” anything.

The capitalists on the other hand believe that somehow paying taxes is stealing from their pie that they worked so hard to obtain. They believe in an American “dream” that anyone can make it to the top. They believe their intelligence or skills made them who they are, and yet look how many lose everything. Look for how many the inflowing pipeline dries up, and the outflowing pipeline leaves them dry.

I am here to tell you that both camps are wrong. There is a third option. That third option is to believe by faith in GOD’s economy. An economy where differing responsibilities among the populous is understood and embraced, and where sufficiency, lack, and abundance are all a blessing. But how do we find this truth? How to we move away from the right and left, which are both wrong, and look upward for the third option… the Christ option.

I think it begins with first understanding money. Money is NOT wealth. Money is literally 0’s on a piece of paper that a system called banking keeps track of. In fact, in terms of printed cash, I would suspect there is less than 10% printed cash available compared to the trillions of 0’s on paper.

Money is a measurement. It is a measurement of labor.  Nothing more and nothing less… unless you want to include a medium of exchange, but even in that it is a measurement of someone’s labor you may not see. Let me give you an example.

Someone labored to get iron ore out the ground to make steal. Someone else labored to move the iron ore to a factory. Factory workers labored to make steal. Fabricators labored to turn that steal into an oil rig. Oil workers labored with that rig to drill for oil. More labor was used to move the oil to a refinery, and more labor was used to refine it into gas, and then deliver it to a gas station where we buy it for $3.00 a gallon. When we pay $50.00 to fill our tank up, that money pays all that labor. That money flows like a fluid in a pipeline back through all those hands. The gas station pays the refinery, which pays the oil producers, who pay for their rig, who pay for their steal. And as money FLOWS through the pipeline it eventually comes back to us. For me, I work in the mortgage industry. All that labor paid needs housing, which pays me.

And so money comes in, and it goes out. All based on labor.

Gold is $1300 per ounce. That represents the labor it takes to find and deliver an ounce of it. Some is found in the ground, some is found in peoples safe, but there is labor to find it. Did you know that Gold has been made from mercury by bombing it with neutrons? But to do this process it takes $4000 in labor to produce 1/3 ounce. So Gold is not rare, it is just too expensive (labor intensive) to get it other than the current way.

Money as a measure of labor is limitless. Money does not come from a pie where someone has, and someone does not. In fact, if you were to study the top 15% or earners in America, the likelihood of them having “money” more than about 10% of their income sitting in a bank is very rare. In fact it is in the pipeline system. Their money is moving, just like your money is moving.

Money comes in, and money goes out. The prudent have a storage of money, so that if the money coming in slows, the money going out does not necessarily have to slow. Or if the money going out suddenly sucks from tragedy or unexpected suspense, then too there is a reserve. The fact that some have reserves and some do not, in general does not affect the whole pipeline, with certain exceptions like today’s economic times.

What is important about money is that there is flow. There is what economists call the velocity of money.

So what does this tell us as Christians? How do we move away from idea of have’s and have not’s, to God’s economy of all needs are met? I think we must first understand that money is a measurement of labor. If you are to have it FLOW through your hands you must labor. I labor primarily as a loan officer. My friend Jim Spivey labors literally for God meeting people in their trying times for comfort and insight. I get paid by a publicly traded company. Jim gets paid by donations, often from people he does not even meet with. But God moves that flow through our hands because of our labor. Because we get up every day, get dressed, and go into the world to labor at what God has for us. We tap into God’s pipeline which has limitless flow. It makes no difference if George Soros, and Bill Gates have billions. The pipeline is there for us all. We only need to understand it is God’s pipeline; it is not the US Government pipeline, nor the Capitalists pipeline, and certainly not the socialist's pie.

We labor “as unto the Lord” and the pipeline flows in… we obey and the pipeline flows out… but I will say the outflow for another day. Simply tap into the understanding that money is a measurement that flows like an endless artesian well. Stop living without faith in the mindset that money is a pie, and that if someone has, I therefore cannot have too. Start living in the faith that today I labored just as God would have me, and as a result a measurement (money) of that labor is going to flow through my hands.