How to Make Your Christian Experience Instantly Better

If a woman becomes the recipient of a man’s unconditional love, something beautiful will be set in motion. That love will eventually return to him…the exception is if the woman willfully refuses to receive the man’s love because she believes lies from herself and others…I believe that your Lord experiences this with respect to the woman of His dreams, His beloved bride…He does not look at us with our eyes. He sees us with different eyes altogether…Jesus Christ sees you as part of Himself. Holy and blameless…We have no right to an inferiority complex. We have no right to perpetual guilt. We have no right to see ourselves as unworthy…Consequently, you have a choice: to look through His eyes or your own…Settle it now and forever. The Lord Jesus Christ has removed your sins as far as the east is from the west (Ps. 103:12)…

-Frank Viola (@frankviola), From Eternity to Here

It’s “relationships 101,” but we are not trained to do it.  But, when you do, every relationship in your life gets instantly better.  People become attracted to you and like being around you.  They feel like you care, like you love them.  Yet, most of us just don’t do it.  It’s seeing and understanding the world through the other person’s perspective and accepting it as their reality.  When you do, empathy and true love can occur.  You start to know how you can sacrifice for that person; the acts that will touch their heart and create room for supernatural growth.  It’s the starting point to the question – “What is the definition of love?”

Take God for example (good one to take, right? ).  His ultimate act of love toward us was becoming one of us, experiencing all that we experience, seeing our perspective, and then dying to rescue us from our condition so that He could marry us.  What?  Shouldn’t He be mad at us; offended that we see the world through the eyes of sin instead of His holiness?  After all, isn’t He a just God?

Why yes, He is just.  But His perfect ability to sympathize with our weakness (Heb. 4:14-16) motivated Him to fulfill His need for justice Himself.  His ability to love perfectly satisfied His justice by swallowing it whole.  How do we return God’s love back to Him?  By seeing ourselves and the world from His perspective and sacrificing ourselves accordingly.

Your turn…what do you have to add?  Questions? Learn anything new?

*The first post for this book is here. The next post is here.