JANUARY 31 THE JESUS QUESTIONS JQ#02 “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you …and if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” (Matthew 5:46-47)

 JANUARY  31  THE JESUS QUESTIONS   JQ#02  “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you …and if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” (Matthew 5:46-47)

LIVING FOR JESUS   Daily Prayer   

JESUS, there is a “Peace” as I start my morning and write the Name “JESUS”! Lord I thank You for asking me two simple questions when I started my Journey to You — (1) “What is TRUTH?” and “Who do you say I am?”. Just two simple questions that when I truly answer them I know that God’s WORD is TRUTH and that YOU ARE THE SON OF THE LIVING GOD!  These “honest” answers have been a Guiding Light {{Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path. (Psalm 119:105)}} and a Shelter in the Time of Storm. Lord, I do believe that You are the Son of God, the Savior, the Christ and I have supreme confidence that the Power that has been given by the Father to the Son is the same Power that surrounds even the spoken Name of Jesus! Lord Jesus, I feel Your Mercy and Grace when I speak or write the Name of Jesus and I praise You that You so freely bestow Your Grace on “whosoever” calls upon the Name of the Lord! JESUS, JESUS, JESUS.     AMEN

THE JESUS QUESTIONS

JESUS with His JQ#01 got us to thinking about how we treat others and to use those “natural” abilities God endowed us with to better mankind and the Lesson was that we should give of ourselves “physically” since we “are salt” and to give of ourselves “spiritually” because we “are light”. We are to do these things because we are made in the image of God and Lesson #1 foreshadows Jesus “giving” Himself “physically” on the cross for the atonement of our sins and that He lived His Life “Spiritually” as “the LIGHT of the world”. Now with JQ#02 we hear an echo of “And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” (1 Corinthians 13:13) as Jesus draws our attention to the Truth of Love — Love is not what you get from others, “True Love is measured by how much you GIVE AWAY”!! Jesus is telling us simply to live our lives from the inside out and the more you give away, the more you will have! We certainly tend to measure the amount of “love” in our life by listing the number of people that “love us” but Jesus is saying your “reward” will be given to you because of “the number of people you have loved”!!! I know this is TRUE because the Greatest Love known to mankind came from God which He bestowed on an undeserving world — “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes on Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) I would say that God set a pretty good “example” in “loving the undeserving” and Jesus showed He “loved” the Father by obeying the commands of the Father, even to the “giving of Himself for the sins of the world” — So the Greatest Examples of “LOVE” come from those that GAVE LOVE — and we should appreciate the fact that it was “LOVE” that motivated God’s decision to Sacrifice His Only Begotten Son for “undeserving sinners” and we should try to learn Lesson #2 from JQ#02 that Jesus is trying to Teach us about “love”. We are not “Holy” because others “love” us with worldly “love” — we become “Holy” when we “Love” others with a “Godly Love”, and we are to give God’s Love to those God Gave His Love to — the unloveable and the undeserving; then and only then will we know real “LOVE”!!! To introduce JQ#02 the Holy Spirit brought to my mind Romans 8:37 where Paul had declared one of the Gospel’s main TRUTHS that Christians are “more than conquerors” when we “Love” as God Loves and we trust “all things” to Jesus Christ who demonstrated the Great Love of God by being Obedient to the Father’s command in “all things” as He suffered the Cross for our unloveable-sakes. Paul also reminded Christians that this “Victory” over “all things” including the powers of this world comes only through Jesus Christ and we should also understand that Jesus was motivated by the “Love of God”. How can we claim to have any “Victory” in our lives apart from God? God has established the “Right Way” and the “Wrong Way” and they are as constant and unchanging as God Himself. We see that as man “progresses” through time that the only constant of man is that each generation and even the greatest of men in each generation all “fall short of the Glory of God” and that God and His Laws are as Eternal and Unchanging as the rising and the setting of the sun that God has placed in His Universe to remind us daily that we are just a small planet in the midst of more stars than even our greatest scientists can count! Surely with all our intelligence it should be simple for man to see that the best efforts of all our most brilliant minds put together cannot unravel even the smallest detail of God’s Infinite Unchanging Glory. Yet we are arrogant enough to want to declare God as irrelevant and we insist on going it alone? Why our selfishness drives us to such self-inflicted agony cannot be explained aside from the reality of our world that we all “want” all “things” to be all “ours” and we ignore God and His TRUTH, who from the very beginning established all the Laws of the Physical Universe. God also established all the Spiritual Laws of the Universe as well! It can be observed by mankind that the Spiritual Realm does exist. We seem to ignore the fact that the Spiritual Realm has a greater effect on the Physical Realm than vice versa. It is a part of observational science to conclude that unhappy, dissatisfied, and angry people cause more harm to themselves and others around them than do happy, content, and loving people. All these “motivators” are “spiritual” emotions and even our courts express the consequence of expressing ourselves physically relative to our spiritual states. Realize that God is the Creator of all things and that there are Spiritual Laws and Physical Laws that are undeniably interwoven into the fabric of Life by the Creator. There is a reason God continuously commands us “to love” and “not to fear”. Think on your “emotions” as you try to answer JQ#02  “For if you love those who love you, what reward have you …and if you greet your brethren only, what do you do more than others?” (Matthew 5:46-47) and God will guide you in your thinking about “loving others” and I’m betting you’re going to find that the more you give away the more you have and you are simply going to “love” it! After all — everlasting life is a pretty good “reward”!!!