There is Only One True Gospel: The Gospel of Love

“This is my commandment: Love one another as I love you.”
Gospel of John, Chapter 15:12

There are people today who preach a gospel of hate. Worse yet, they preach it in the name of God, who is Love. Love and God are synonymous, love and hate are opposites-- thus God and hate are opposites. Hatred is a byproduct of evil. The byproduct of hatred is violence. Evil and violence are never of God and they cannot be rightfully perpetrated in God's name.

There is no evil or hatred to be found in the God who says “love one another as I love you.” This is the authentic God who loves everyone equally; regardless of race, religious preference, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, political views, social standing or personal brokenness. This is the God who came to earth as Jesus Christ. This is the God who reached out to the masses of marginalized persons, took them under His personal care and loved them despite their diseases or sinfulness. He loved lepers and prostitutes, tax collectors and the lame, beggars and even those who disagreed with Him. He projected Love personified to the world around Him. Hate and violence were NEVER a part of His message. The message was simple: Love your God, love yourself and love your neighbor (including your enemies) as you love yourself.

God created each and every person in this world. We are all equal in God’s eyes. When God looks at each of us, He sees only the beauty of His handiwork. He sees beyond black and white, Christian and Hindu, male and female, gay and straight, American and Mexican, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, rich and poor, PhD and GED.  Everyone counts in God’s eyes and everyone has a special resting place in God’s heart-- There are no exceptions.

The word “Gospel” means Good News. Hatred is never about good news. Hatred is about envy, jealousy, prejudice, ignorance, self-loathing, resentment, self-righteousness and the need to divide others for personal gain-- be it for power or money or both. Hatred is about human self-righteousness-- the condemnation of others who have been unfairly judged by society as unacceptable, less than human and somehow unworthy of proper human dignity and treatment.

Those who preach the gospel of hate today are bent on gaining power and wealth at the expense of the vulnerable. Jesus had no interest in power, fortune or fame. He came to redeem the vulnerable and marginalized. And, certainly, Jesus was a victim of the self-righteous Gospel of the World (of hate, power and gain) of His day. It condemned him to death.

God is always about inclusiveness. God is about uniting us under a banner of love, of putting our differences aside, of agreeing to disagree, and of learning from each other so humanity can move forward together through the Gospel of Love. But humans are too often about polarization in the name of God, of "us" against "them," of separate, divide and destroy, which is the Gospel of the World. The gospel that cannot produce Good News for it is not of God.

So the choice is ours. We can choose to live by the self-righteous Gospel of the World, which harms and marginalizes people, or we can choose to live by the authentic Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Love, which unites all people and does no harm to anyone. When we choose the Gospel of Love, we allow our souls to shine!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

No One Can Calm Your Codependent Crazies, But You

Image
Ah, the codependent crazies. Those needy, needy feelings. I remember well the deep emotional pain in the pit of my stomach: The throbbing sting of shame, fear, loneliness and anxious desperation. Those feelings that are like fingernails on the blackboard of your soul. They eat you alive from within as they dig deeper and deeper into the black hole of your inner-emptiness. Yes, I remember them well. And I remember evenings of mental and emotional insanity-- squirming with a magazine, pacing back and forth, indulging in chocolate, chasing up and down the stairs hoping the doorbell would ring, and staring endlessly at the telephone for a sign of hope. All I needed was a call from my false higher power; a call that would help me to know that I was OK, that I was needed, that I was worth thinking about in some good way. I was dying to be emotionally caressed on the head like a poodle desperate for the attention of his master. And certainly I had made that other person into my mas...
Read more

If The Eyes Had No Tears, The Soul Would Have No Rainbow

Image
I'm sitting in a Panera Bread in Los Angeles, eating my cinnamon scone and preparing to cut my trip here short. I'll have to return home tomorrow and then fly to Omaha, Nebraska for a funeral. A young father in his 30s died there last Friday, leaving behind a wife and three small children. There are always questions in these types of situations: Why? Why someone so young? Why someone who had a wife and kids? The "why" questions can be endless, and there's never a quantifiable answer.  I don't believe in "it was just his time" or that God called him home. There's too much cruelty to these pat answers and they make God seem like a beast. What purpose could there be behind such imagined acts of God? I see no redeeming purpose to seizing a young man from his young family. I do believe that life happens. When someone dies and there is no acceptable answer to "why," I believe it's simply the human condition. It's the way...
Read more

The Bride of Gingy

Last night I was watching Scared Shrekless . The first “horror” story in this Halloween movie is called “The Bride of Gingy.” And Gingy’s bride is nothing short of an overly-clingy codependent nightmare. If you are familiar with the Shrek movies, you know that Gingy is the gingerbread man. In “The Bride of Gingy,” Gingy goes to see the village baker because he is lonely and wants a sweetheart of his own. So the village baker agrees to make a gingerbread girl for Gingy. As the baker begins to mix-in the proper amount of sugar, according to his recipe, Gingy insists that the baker include 10 times more sugar than the recipe calls for using. He wants his bride to be truly sweet. Within a short time, Gingy meets his dream girl, Sugar. Suddenly we see them skipping hand in hand through flower-filled fields while the song “Happy Together” by The Turtles plays in the background. But “happily ever after” is not how this story ends. Next we see Gingy and Sugar together in his gin...
Read more

Where There Is Kindness, There Is Goodness

Image
Author’s Note: The next few meditations will be from a retreat I directed recently called The Good News According to Disney . If you aren’t familiar with the films that are referenced, I’d suggest to take time to see them and to look for the deeper meaning within them. Many people today still live by the biblical adage “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” They actually believe that they will be at peace if they achieve revenge or restitution for any mishap that has befallen them at the hands of another. They believe they will reclaim their personal power once they have achieved their revenge, but this is impossible. Disney’s Cinderella (2015) reveals the true secret to owning one’s personal power and to retaining it no matter what we experience in life: “Have courage and be kind.” On the surface this motto looks a bit simple and wimpy. But in reality, it holds great power. That power comes from the heart of a person, or in this case Ella, who sees the world not a...
Read more