Unshackled Echo ~ April 7, 2018 ~ Love Is All You Need

Today's Unshackled Echo was previously published on

February 26, 2015.

Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.”

- Matthew 22:37-40

Are you looking for a life of purpose worth living but feel sick of fighting to know what's right, to remember all the religious do's and don't's, and to do them? Why not trade them all in for two rules, that are really just one rule, and follow Jesus? It's so simple that a child can understand and do it. Love. That's what it all boils done to. The Beatles actually had it right. All you need is love. Place relationship with your Creator above everything else. Do things that will bring you deeper into that relationship, that improve your conscious contact with He who called you to come. Don't do the things that increase the distance between the two of you.

Come to understand that God loves you, YOU, just as you are and not as you should be, to steal a great truth from Brennan Manning.  The messed up, broken, confused, scared, angry and rebellious, self-hating ego maniac that you are at the depths of you is so precious to Him and valued by Him that He took the weight of your past, present and future, you know, the weight that's crushing you, upon Himself and died in your place, and mine. Understand that? Got that value in your mind? Good. Now don't treat yourself as less than precious, as if you have no value. Treat and look at yourself as though you are worth the King of Kings being beaten and executed to pay your ransom because the Creator of the whole universe declared you worth that much. Awesome. That's how we are to love ourselves. Now that you got that, treat everyone you run into like they are that precious and valuable too.

That's it. Just love. But wait! That doesn't sound easy at all! Nobody said anything about easy. I said it's simple. It's not easy. It's impossible. It's so unbelievably hard to even think about doing well that most of us would rather have a list of 600 plus do's and don't's that we can fail at than to just fail so epically at only one.  But we don't have to have the ability to do it. Jesus said that if we will choose to follow Him and seek relationship with Him that He will live in us and we can live in Him. Awesome. The Lord of the universe will live in me and love through me and make it possible for me to live and love as He does. And all I have to do to have that relationship with Him is accept that He accepts me, believe He made the way, choose what the Father wants over my wants (deny self). 

Abba, I belong to You. You bought and paid for me on the cross. Help me to surrender every part of myself to You today so that You can love through me unhindered, even when it comes to seeing and loving me. Help me not to do the things that would take me away from You are would cause someone else to run from You or feel farther away from You. Draw me closer to You today. Amen.

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