1 Peter 1:22. Love one another deeply, from the heart.

Very few people really have experience true love in this world. Not all come from happy and close families. If you were born in a family where your parents were always fighting one another all the time, you will need a special grace to resist following in their footsteps. Jesus never rejects anyone who begs for the grace to overcome their faults. And as you get closer to God, He then reveals even more of your faults as you advance. He also shows His Spirit living in you, where you are one with Him and that reminds you that you are very special to Him. If God was to show all our faults all at once we would be horrid stricken and die. The old saints use to call themselves things like ‘the vile worm of the earth.’ I never understood them that well, but I am beginning to now. God is so loving and patient with us, and is always willing to help us, but we must persist in our asking. Sometimes we have to beg and beg for something to happen. The reason being I believe is so that when He does give it to us, we won’t let it out of our fingers that easily. We will fight to keep it and I also believe we are fighting for other people to receive the grace who wouldn’t receive it otherwise.

What saddens me so much is seeing Christians hating other Christians the way they do. Matthew 5:7-8. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”

The Importance of Mercy

We all need mercy and the only way for sure to get mercy is to give it to each other. We will be reward accordingly to how closely we follow Jesus. And as Christians we are called to love one another even our enemies. We have to remember most people who live evil lives do so, because they were brought up to hate, not love. Christians have the advantage of knowing Jesus and therefore know what brings eternal happiness. We can even experience joy while suffering trials, if we keep our eyes not on ourselves but Jesus. When your eyes are on Jesus what are you going to see? His love and mercy towards you, which never ends, it is infinite. And then you see Him in Heaven with you, never to suffer pain of any description again.

There is a favourite YouTube channel I love where Jesus talks to this visionary so as to past it onto us. I trust this person is a genuine visionary so I listen. And the thing that really intrigued me was when Jesus tells her, that there are many Christian Denominations in Heaven and ask “Are you surprise by that?” I definitely was, aren’t you? I was just thinking about it the day before and thought that we would be just be one big family, but apparently there are other branches of the Christian faith present in Heaven. Something for us to think about. The way I am thinking about it at the moment is the body of Christ has many parts and we all need one another to function properly, maybe that applies to Churches also.

We Have all Sinned

Since we all have sinned, it would be no surprise to you, if I said hate, anger, bitterness, unforgiveness, self-righteous, being judgemental, fighting, dominating others, greed and so on cannot give you lasting peace or happiness. Far from it, instead it gives you torment. We all been there and we know what it feels like. There may be a moment of pleasure and a sick pleasure at that. The pleasure only last for a little while and then it eats us up and we are then filled with anger for others or ourselves. There is no lasting pleasure in the kingdom of darkness only sorrow, confusion and hatred. One of my favourite saints went down to hell and this young women of fifteen years said to her, she was in hell, because she lived only to please herself and she said despite of all the torture in hell, if they could only love, they wouldn’t call it hell. So when we are going through a hard time think about that, we are only experience a very light taste of hell on earth. Some people who have committed suicide reported when they came back to life, they committed suicide because they didn’t think anything could get worse than what they were experiencing. Once in hell they knew their pain on earth was nothing compared to what they were suffering in hell.

There are so many people who think hate is more powerful than love and even more glorious. I remember hearing of one ex-Muslim who converted into Christianity and said ‘it is easy to hate and seek out revenge, but it is so much harder to love and forgive.’ Does that come as a surprise to any of us? I don’t think so, but is nice to hear it said from a person who lived by hate, who now is in love with Jesus and following Him instead. Praying for your enemies so that they may come to know Jesus as He really is, keeps your heart from hardening up into unforgiveness and hatred. And we know we are forgiven as we forgive others.