The first task is to be ‘held on to’ in the embrace of his love. That becomes our confinement until it fills and expands our heart. Then love overflows out to others. Love wants to flow. It is our decision to either prevent or release the flow of love.
GOD CREATED US TO KNOW THE FLOW
Having compassion is the ability to feel or identify with the pain or need of another and to caringly respond. To see another person as ‘the same’ as yourself despite the differences between them and you...
The first task is to be ‘held on to’ in the embrace of his love. That becomes our confinement until it fills and expands our heart. Then love overflows out to others. Love wants to flow. It is our decision to either prevent or release the flow of love.
GOD CREATED US TO KNOW THE FLOW
Having compassion is the ability to feel or identify with the pain or need of another and to caringly respond. To see another person as ‘the same’ as yourself despite the differences between them and yourself requires the understanding of the common status we have with one another In God/in Christ. This is why Paul says that we ‘regard now no man according to the flesh’. The flesh is the disposition of living a life as if God were not present or were separated from us.
We can see everyone as being in the flow of God’s love, even if they live with a mindset of being far from Him, or that He is absent or doesn’t even exist.
PAUL SAID THE FOLLOWING TO PEOPLE JUST LIKE THAT
Acts 17:26 And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their pre-appointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might seek for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own philosophers have said, ‘ For we are also His offspring’
The flesh disposition of God being far or absent from us leads to our boundaries becoming territorial. Wars get fought over territory. Belonging to the same territory causes a group to defend their territory and everyone in it against ‘the enemy’. The territory can also be defined as something that any one person calls ‘mine’. So even within a group or a family we tend to defend territory.
TURNING THE FLOW ON AND OFF
1John 3:16 By this we know love, because He laid down His life (psyche – soul) for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives (psyche) for our brother. But whoever has this world's goods (bios – ‘a life’), and sees his brother in need, and shuts up (locks off the flow) his heart (spleen/bowels of compassion) from him, how does the love of God abide in him? It doesn’t say the compassion is not there, it just says it gets shut off locked up (kleio - key)
OUR MINDSET CAN BE DISCERNED AND RENEWED - LOVE INSTEAD OF FEAR
John trudging off to school. Us waiting for a friend. The mice in the maze. Our lives. What is the ABC truth?
So if we take God out of the equation as absent then life in the flesh is a life of conflict and war. With God in the centre life is peace – He is our peace, He has broken down every wall (Ephesians 2:14-18).
Colossians 3:10 and you have put on the new man (enlightened with a revelation of, and a commitment to, the shared life of Jesus) who is renewed in knowledge according to the likeness of Him who created him, where there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all and in all. Therefore, as chosen ones of God, holy and beloved, put on (plunge into) tender mercies, kindness, humility, meekness, longsuffering;
Our territory and citizenship is now the Kingdom of God (Philippians 3:20) and our task is to love everybody into it. This has to start locally, very close to home, just as knowing God’s love starts by our being confined and embraced closely by God. It is daunting to think of solving the global territorial wars of hatred just as one willing but solitary person or even one caring group. But what we do close up, empowered by the ultimate source of all love makes more change in this earth than we could ever measure. You just have to hit one pin in a bowling alley and they can all fall over. God magnifies your effort and he strategically places you in other peoples’ different ‘agenderised’ territories.
Ephesians 3:20 Now to Him who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that works in us.
