“Love your enemies.”
“Do good to those who hate you.”
“Do not resist evil.”
“Turn the other cheek.”
If you’re a Christian and someone says, “I want to take advantage of you,” the truly Christian response is to make like a doormat and let ’em walk all over you?
And if someone says, “I want to hurt you,” a true Christian will meekly bend over and take it—even asking for extra punishment and abuse?
If that doesn’t sound so good to you, click here to read on.
There are a lot of “Christians” running around saying that in order to be a Christian, you have to believe this or you have to believe that.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Beliefs are important. But let’s listen to how Jesus Christ himself defines a “Christian,” or follower of Jesus Christ:
I am giving you a new commandment: You must love each other, just as I have loved you. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples: if you have love for one another. (John 13:34–35)
Jesus Christ does not define Christians by their faith, but by their love.
Paul echoes this in his famous statement, “For now there are faith, hope, and love. But of these three, the greatest is love” (1 Corinthians 13:13).
Jesus also said:
If you love me, keep my commandments. (John 14:15)
And:
Whoever has my commandments and keeps them is the one who loves me. (John 14:21)
In other words, a real Christian is not someone who believes correctly, but someone who loves other people and does what Jesus Christ says to do.
Let’s look at some real Christians whose stories have surfaced recently.
For more on real Christianity, please click here to read on.
That might be the Sunday morning newspaper headline oh, about 13.75 billion years ago . . . if newspapers were possible in the primordial quark-gluon soup.
I know, I know, the Bible says the world was created in six days. But God gave us the Bible to teach us about spiritual things, not material things. The creation story in Genesis is not about the creation of the physical universe, but about the stages of our own spiritual growth as we become “new creations in Christ” (see 2 Corinthians 5:17).
So if the world wasn’t created in six days, how was it created?
If the world was created by God as Genesis says, then it was created by one God. That’s why we see the same physical laws applying everywhere in the universe. Those laws, and creation itself, express the nature of God because everything comes from God.
In particular, we can see God’s love, wisdom, and action expressed everywhere we look. Love is the substance of things. Wisdom is the shape and structure of things. And action is the function of things.
This is a huge topic! If you want to know more, please click here to read on.
This lyrical, mystical, and highly spiritual book is one of my all-time favorites:
For further description and review, please click here to read on.
Money
Here is a comment that jesusandthebible made on my article, “Is Wealth a Blessing or a Curse?”
So you can love God and mammon, as long as your heart and character are right? But if your heart loves mammon–as well as God–Jesus says that heart actually hates God (Mt. 6:24). Jesus commands his disciples not to lay up treasures on earth (Mt. 6:19). Instead, sell treasured possessions, give to the poor, and have treasure in heaven; for where your treasure is, there will your heart be also (Mt. 6:20-21; Lk. 12:33-34). The only rich follower who did that in the Gospels was Zacchaeus, who gave half of his goods to the poor and repaid four times as much as what he had gotten from fraud (Lk. 19:1-8).
Thanks for bringing up these passages! There’s more here than can be answered in a brief comment, so I’m taking it up in its own article.
When reading the Bible, it’s important to:
With that in mind, let’s take a look at these passages.
For more on God and money, please click here to read on.
John McAfee in Belize
As I write this, John McAfee is on the lam. Yes, the founder of antivirus software giant McAfee Inc. has now apparently been classified as a human “virus” by the police in the small Central American country of Belize, where McAfee has made his home since 2008. They are hunting for him as a “person of interest” in the murder of his American expatriate neighbor Gregory Faull. McAfee denies that he had anything to do with the murder. But he has gone into hiding, fearing that if the police catch him, they will kill him.
In a recently launched blog, McAfee alleges that he is being unfairly targeted by police and the media. However, the recently released e-book John McAfee’s Last Stand, by Wired magazine contributing editor Joshua Davis, paints a picture of McAfee as a man possessed by “ambition, paranoia, sex, and madness.”
For more on wealth, blessings, and curses, please click here to read on.
Jesus said, “love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39). But what is love? And who is the neighbor?
Though love may seem like some sort of vague emotion, it is really the substance of our lives. God is love—and so are we! Love is what drives everything we think, feel, say, and do. Loving our neighbor is not some pleasant add-on to our lives. It is the essence of our being . . . if we are being truly human. Love is also the attractive force that draws us closer to one another.
What does it mean to love? It means to serve others and give to others from ourselves, and to feel joy in other people’s joy. Love is not just a feeling. Love is also an action! And when we are acting from love, we will find the closeness that we long for with our neighbors.
And the neighbor? The neighbor means the various people around us. But more specifically, it means everything good about the people around us. Loving our neighbor is looking for the good in people and loving, appreciating, and supporting it in them. When we truly love our neighbor we bring out the best in them . . . and in ourselves.
For more on what it means to love your neighbor, please click here to read on.
The Gold Standard
In an article in the November 19, 2012 issue of Forbes magazine titled “Gold and the Wicked Magicians,” Steve Forbes advocates a return to the gold standard. If major world currencies such as the U.S. dollar were tied in value to gold, he says, the resulting monetary stability would provide a solid foundation for a prosperous economy.
On the political front, for decades Congressman Ron Paul has been advocating a modified form of the gold standard that existed in the United States throughout its rise to becoming the world’s leading economic power in the 1900s.
But this is not a financial or political website. It’s a spiritual website.
And I’ll go on record:
I’m for the gold standard . . . the spiritual gold standard.
For more on the spiritual gold standard, please click here to read on.
David and Holly Petraeus
Up until a few days ago (as I write this), David Petraeus had a life that many would envy, and that many more looked up to. He had retired from the U.S. Army as a four star General after a stellar career that included over thirty-seven years of distinguished service, culminating in some of the highest postings in the Army. Upon retiring from military service, Petraeus took up a new position as head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), having been nominated for that position by President Barack Obama and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate.
In his younger years, shortly after he graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Petraeus married a highly intelligent and capable young woman named Holly Knowlton, daughter of Army General William A. Knowlton. The two of them have now been married for thirty-eight years. Holly Petraeus has become known as an advocate for military families. She is currently serving as director of the Office of Servicemember Affairs at the recently formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). David and Holly Petraeus have two adult children, Stephen and Anne.
The picture-book quality of this story of a highly distinguished general with a long and spotless career, and his long and fruitful marriage to a distinguished and capable wife, came to an abrupt end on November 8, 2012.
For more on divorce and unfaithfulness, please click here to read on.
Note by Hurricane Sandy Survivor Mike
Amid the destruction and death caused by Hurricane Sandy there are stories of hope and redemption. A young man named Mike, washed out into the bay from his home on the Jersey Shore, managed to make his way back to shore and the shelter of a neighboring home. There, in the dark, he wrote a desperate note asking anyone who found it to “tell my dad I love him,” and ending with the words “God all mighty help me.” Unlike over 100 other victims of Hurricane Sandy, Mike survived. He was reunited with his father. For Mike, God was a source of hope in the midst of a terrible tragedy and ordeal.
But already the voices have started. Already, fundamentalist Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other clerics are calling Hurricane Sandy God’s justice and God’s punishment on the wicked people of New York, New Jersey, and New England.
It’s the same as after every tragedy and natural disaster. While hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people suffer and die, there are those who, instead of seeing God’s mercy and God’s help in the midst of human suffering, see only God’s wrath and God’s judgment upon those whom they believe God has condemned.
For more on punishment vs. mercy, please click here to read on.
Lee & Annette Woofenden
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Great Truths on Great Subjects
By Jonathan Bayley
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Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 