The first step to any change is the awareness that something is not right in the eyes of God; it is disrespectful and dishonoring. In your heart, you know these words or acts would not come from Jesus. Therefore, they must not come from you because Christ lives in you. Many Christ-followers have not been aware of their discriminations or racism until now. However, now that you are aware, you will need to break your learned cycles.
It takes a while to unwrap and understand the complex prisons of our beliefs and brokenness, our unawareness of God’s word, power, and Christ’s love design, and our unawareness of abuse. Unless we know the aspects of Christ’s love design and how the enemy has used our brokenness, we can only make a little better choice. We trade up in each relationship, but we remain in our prison.
This love passage in the Passion Translation gives us a picture of Christ’s perfect love design. He instructs his disciples to give and receive his aspects of love equally. If you want your relationship or marriage to follow Christ’s love design, it has to start with you. You are one half of your relationship. To have a healthy relationship, you must work on yourself first.
Jesus came to earth and lived among us to show us how to live and love like him. He endured the realities of living on this broken earth. Jesus saw crucifixions, governments vying for control, and all the hardships people faced because of these conditions. He showed us it is possible to love others as you love yourself equally when you love God first and foremost. The conditions in the world didn’t change his example of perfect love.
The enemy lives in the dark spaces between the truth of God we know and what we don’t know in his word or how our faith is worked out. Jesus told us that we error because we don’t know the word of God or his power. (Matt 22:29) The problem with not knowing or assuming something opens us up to being deceived. To add to many Christian’s confusion is the fact that we are not shown a clear path to understand what the peace of Jesus is, how it works, what we need to do with Jesus to let it flow.
The depth of our peace correlates to the depth of our relationship with Jesus Christ.
Christ’s words reveal that we will have visible and invisible storm elements in our lives from time to time. Some storms are expected, and we can see them coming. Other storms just pop up because we live in this broken world.
Christ’s peace is always flowing through us, even if we can’t feel it or we don’t think it is there. When we accepted the salvation of Jesus, we received all of him, not certain aspects. However, we must choose to work with him.
We can only love others and let them love us from the love design we know. We can only do what we know until we learn and do something different.