What We Need to Know 1.

Although what you think is important, and we cannot act in the world without first setting our minds in order, your soul is not in your head it is in your heart.

Love has always been of secondary importance in the world's religions.
It is the perennial bridesmaid.
Many have made it second to moral rectitude; others have made it secondary to the powers of the mind, or what we believe; others have made love secondary to what we do in the world.

The Bhagavad-Gita says that the way of love is greater than those who mortify the body, those who seek knowledge, and those who do good works.

Paul says that you can prophesy and know everything but if you have not love it means nothing.

We have been misled.
We have been told that those other things were more important than love.
The world has told us that money and status and possessions will make us happy.
They will not.
It is our relationships that make us happy and what is that but love.

It is important to get these things straight in our minds before we begin to act.
Jesus said,"'first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor's eye.'" Matthew 7:5 (NRSV)
It is important that we get these things straight.  But that is no end in itself.  That is preparation for what we do next.  Which is how we live our lives.

I am not going to tell you how to live your lives.  That is up to you.
I can only tell you how I live my life.  Which is to be true to those things which I know to be true.
And that is:
That God is near the heart.
That God does not punish us.
There is no enemy.
There are no sides.
God treats us all the same.
And that is with Love.

In the parable of the workers in the vineyard each earns a penny.
We are all equal in the sight of God:
The most intelligent scholar is equal with the community idiot.
The most devout Christian is equal with the Godless.

Bur that does not mean that all receive nothing.  You're forgetting the penny.  And the penny is Love.

But we are not here merely to receive.  We are here to give.

Ask yourself - What does my heart say? - and follow that.


(Scripture quotations (marked NRSV) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission.  All rights reserved.)

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