Lifestream. Letters to the Bride

(Note:  First, I am thrilled to announce that we’ve secured the necessary funds to rescue the water enterprise in Kenya. Thank you for your generosity once again.  And now, here’s the last chapter of It’s Time: Letters to the Bride of Christ at the End of the Age. Whether he comes in the next fifteen years or the next one hundred and fifty years, how do we live in light of his return? We have already released the first part of this book in print, and now we will combine it with the last part. You can also access the previous chapters here.)

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It has been 2,000 years since Jesus promised to return. How do you keep your hope up that he will? Do you ever wonder whether we’ve missed something here? Since I don’t have a clue when he might come, I don’t see how it’s relevant to the decisions I have to make today.  

Janine, office manager and grandmother in Ireland

Hi Janine,

That has been my dilemma most of my life. In my younger days, people talked about him coming before I would graduate from high school. I dreaded the idea of judgment, and I didn’t want my life cut short here. As so many predictions of his return came and went without effect, the hope of his coming fell into the background, irrelevant to how I lived.

If we knew he was coming in two years, wouldn’t we make different decisions than we would if we knew it wasn’t going to happen for another fifty? Perhaps that’s why we don’t know. Anticipating his return is a matter of the heart, hoping in the final resurrection, rather than information for financial or career choices. I’ve known many who thought they had it figured out, only to make horrible choices that ruined their lives.

As these days have darkened with growing polarization, global conflicts, natural disasters, and environmental challenges filling every news cycle, his coming now seems almost a necessity to rescue us from ourselves. Now, I cannot wait for the moment when the same Jesus who walked the hills of Galilee, surrendered his life to the cross, rose victorious over death, and revealed himself to countless people throughout history, will bodily reappear on planet Earth. He, whom we’ve only known by presence, will become materially present, and we will know him as fully as he has always known us.

At his coming, Jesus will expose the dark powers that rule the earth, and the old order of those who compete for influence and power will dissolve into nothing. Kings, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, and CEOs will all lose their power, national identities will be obliterated, and suffering will cease at last. Though I have lost sight of it at times, I’ve never doubted that he will yet come.

That’s when God’s work of redeeming Creation will reach its climax. In the blink of an eye, all we have known will be reconstituted into a new heaven and new earth that will abound with his love and life. What we’ve known in glimpses, we will see in fullness when sin, fear, and pain are abolished.

Creation has longed for it since humanity crashed into the wall of its waywardness. The day of his coming is why the Psalmist pictures the trees singing for joy, the seas resounding, and all Creation rejoicing: God is coming to judge the world (Psalm 98). I know many of us were taught to fear his judgment, but Creation doesn’t, and I don’t anymore. On that day, he will set right all that has been corrupted on this planet.

The end of this age will also be the beginning of a new and better one. Jesus will take his rightful place as Lord of all, and Creation will thrive in a justice born of love and tenderness. The oppressed will go free, sickness gone, the lies we’ve believed will dissolve in the light, and we will forever be with him in his eternal kingdom. To those who find their fulfillment in the world, that day may be tragic. But for those who have found their home in Jesus, it will fulfill every unmet desire and unsatisfied dream.

Why Is He Waiting?

One of the great mysteries of human history is how slowly God appears to move by our perception. God’s purpose seems to unfold at a painstaking pace. People have navigated the darkness of human fallenness for centuries, and Israel bore 1500 years under the weight of a law they could not keep. The early followers thought his return was imminent over 2000 years ago. Even in the Incarnation, God was not in a hurry. Jesus came to rescue the world as an embryo in the womb of a maiden, then spent thirty years as an infant and young man before he began to share the glory of his kingdom and prepare for his atoning death.

All we’re told is that he came “in the fullness of time” (Galatians 4:1-5). Paul didn’t explain all that meant, but he compared it to children under a tutor who had become heirs and no longer needed to be schooled. Jesus didn’t come the first time at some arbitrary date, but only when events on the earth allowed the Incarnation to play out to maximum effect. Perhaps human culture had to grow in its capacity to appreciate grace for him to open the door of salvation. Before that, God used law and punishment to control humanity’s destructive instincts. And yet today, many who claim to be Christians still struggle to embrace his love as the transforming power of the universe.

I suspect his second coming will also come in the “fullness of time.” I doubt he is waiting for a prescribed date, though, by his foreknowledge, he would know it. I’m sure there are many factors that will determine when this planet is ready for the final act of redemption. Peter told us that any delay is a sign of his great patience to redeem as many as possible (II Peter 3:8-9). Perhaps the world must grow darker yet, or he’s waiting until our only hope is in him, not what we can do to fix the planet.

Jesus must reign, Paul writes (I Cor 15:25-27), until all his enemies have been subdued under his feet. Then he will abolish all rule, authority, and power and present the kingdom to his Father. Does that just happen at the end of the age, or is it a work he’s been doing behind the scenes? Honestly, I don’t know, but it does seem the forces of evil still prevail in human history.

Or it may be that the Bride herself has something to do with it. What if he stands at the door of the world even now, waiting for an invitation from the redeemed to step across the threshold? The bullies have taken over the house, and the world is in chaos. They know that those final days will be filled with pain, but they invite him anyway. “Lord Jesus, come quickly.”

I wouldn’t be definitive about any of this. We make a grave error when we assume we know the motives of God. Paul reminded us not to judge each other’s motives because we often don’t even know our own (I Cor 4:1-5). How much more difficult would it be to guess what motivates God beyond the fact that he loves us deeply and is taking the surest route to redemption?

Revival First?

Many of my friends are anticipating a worldwide revival before his appearing, like the Great Awakenings of old. They will chase all over the world if they hear any sign of one.

Am I looking for a revival? Not in the same way. While I would love to see a fresh outpouring of his Spirit to draw people to himself, I have no preconception of what that might look like. Most of what we call revival is people groveling in the shame of their failures through public repentance, rather than coming alive in his love. It’s easy to forget that all movements of God go to die in the structures we create to contain them.

Where I see people focused on revival through prayer networks and prophetic words, the life of Jesus is mostly absent. Their focus is largely on their own success and their efforts. They manipulate obscure passages of Scripture to bolster their hope and exploit crowds of people with false comfort. They find comfort in outlandish “manifestations” that are easily manipulated by crowd dynamics. I’m reminded how wrong the Jewish messianic expectations were when Jesus first came. Looking back, we can see how clearly Scripture mapped out these things, yet we often forget that we do so through the benefit of hindsight.

Jesus told us not to seek revival somewhere else. “The kingdom of God will not come with observable signs. Nor will people say, ‘Look, here it is,’ or ‘There it is.’ For you see, the kingdom of God is in your midst” (Luke 17:20-21).

I already see a fresh wave of God’s Spirit inviting people to a deeper touch with Jesus. Those he is stirring are not looking for a man to follow, a certain type of euphoric gathering, or the political power to dominate the culture. Instead, they are coming alive to God’s presence within them. They are learning to rest from their own labors, either to draw closer to God or to become more righteous. They are growing confident in his love and talk of Jesus as a real presence who is leading and guiding them.

This work of God is decentralized and lies beneath the radar of those looking for outward signs. These people are rising simultaneously all over the world because it is a work of the Spirit, not a fixation on a human leader, author, or influencer. As the Spirit of God draws them back to first love—how deeply they are loved by God—they become more at rest in him, freer to love others and more attuned to his voice as their life unfolds.

There’s a huge difference between being led by the Spirit and living by principles, no matter how good they may be. Seek revival, and you’re guaranteed to miss him because he will come in ways you won’t expect. Follow him, and you’ll find yourself an increasing part of God’s redemption in the world.

Living in Redemption

How do we live in anticipation of his return? I’ve seen too many people, focused on the immediacy of his second coming, forgo college, quit their jobs, and abandon their responsibilities because they think they won’t matter. That may be why God doesn’t reveal the time of his Son’s appearing. If he did, we would make poor choices based on our own presumptions rather than following his lead.

Anticipating his coming doesn’t fix on a date. The early Christians were invited to live that way thousands of years ago. Expectancy about his coming helps us hold on to him in the unfolding circumstances of our lives, to endure the unendurable, and to find his calming voice in times of trouble. It is less about our material concerns than it is yielding to his kingdom growing in us. Embracing the assurance of his ultimate victory will sharpen our priorities in the present.

Many seek to promote fear with false conspiracies and geopolitical predictions. They know how easily they can manipulate our fears to seek vengeance for the “other” and to seek retribution for those we perceive as our enemy. However, the end of the age is not about vengeance from God’s perspective; it’s about redemption. Give in to vengeance against evil, and it will blind you to God’s love, replacing it with hatred for those who aren’t like you and make you a party to the us vs. them theatrics that are tearing our world apart.

Redemption can happen wherever God’s love encounters the chaos of a fallen world. That’s what Jesus did in his living and his dying. If you truly anticipate his redemption at the end of the age, you will embrace it as it appears in your life today. You’ll wake up looking for ways God’s love in you can touch the agony of human failure and pain around you.

So, instead of trying to control the chaos of darkness or even defeat it, you can leave that to Jesus, whose task it has always been. Yours is to learn to live in the chaos, looking for ways God wants to make his love known in us and through us. Who is he giving me to love today, and how can I support them as they traverse the chaos? Where is he asking me to lay myself down to help alleviate the sufferings of others so that love can do its work?

For most of my life, the only strategy I had in facing the chaos of darkness was to ask God to fix it, whether that meant healing my diseases, changing my misfortunes, or punishing those who caused me grief. When he failed to do so, it was easy to question his love for me or if I was doing enough to merit the fix I wanted.

Now, I’m learning to negotiate the chaos around me inside his redemptive purpose. Isn’t that what Jesus did? He didn’t fix all the chaos around him, but submitted to his Father’s purpose in the lies of the Pharisees, the brutality of Roman rule, and even the betrayal of his closest friends. So, now I ask, how does loss draw me closer to him? How does my pain open a wider door into my dependence on his love? How do the unjust actions of others reveal the darker places still in my heart?

Yes, I talk to him about healing my cancer. I would love that. But when he hasn’t done it yet, I ask how he wants to walk with me through it. He can heal it at any time, but I have lived long enough to know that his miracles are not at our beck and call, and he has many other ways to love us when we are tormented by darkness.

That kind of love rearranges our hearts from the inside, making us more loving, gracious, and a comfort to others. Watching for his redemptive hand around me each day has become an adventure that sets me at ease in crisis and shows me how to sit with others in their pain. I don’t have to fix them; I just get to be present as love does its work.

And I anticipate with joy the day when all the chaos and conflict will be overturned by Jesus’s final redemption. I also look for that in every circumstance I encounter. Where does love lead me, and how will gentleness and kindness help me discover the better version of me?

I now understand that the work of redemption cannot be reduced to institutional programs or political agendas, where we strive to impose virtue on the reluctant. Jesus didn’t use such tactics, nor did he teach his disciples to do so. Those who seek to dominate this world in his name have no idea who he is. His kingdom is an invitation, never an imposition. People emerge from the darkness when they experience a love greater than themselves. You don’t learn that from books or in seminars, but only by facing your challenges with the love, courage, and wisdom of the Spirit.

I don’t know how he will sort out his redemption in the world. I don’t know how he works out justice in the life to come. I don’t know how he will make up for the incredible damage some people have suffered at the hands of others. Not all accounts get squared in this life, that’s for sure. How does the villain find his justice, and his victim her recompense?

But I know him, and I entrust all my unanswered questions to the Father I love and to Jesus, who will get the final word on everyone and everything. He is loving, kind, and fair in ways I could never imagine. I look forward to the day that all of this will finally make sense. What was life all about here, and what will eternity look like when chaos is no more?

Come, Lord Jesus!

Janine, we began this book with the call that it’s time for the sons and daughters of God to be revealed. Whether Jesus’s second coming is just around the corner or still a hundred years out is not in my purview. But it is for me to live the redemption I hope for in the way I treat people today.

Won’t you join me?

These pages carry a gentle invitation to draw into the deep places where our love and trust in him aren’t based on us getting what we want, but the simple and profound magnificence of his presence in us. This is how Jesus prepares us for whatever may come. Too many followers of Jesus are playing the world’s games, thinking they are following Jesus. They have been deluded by the lie that the kingdom comes by coercion. Their wounded hearts look to lash out at their perceived enemies. Their only hope is to be loved back into life, where the tactics of darkness hold no sway.

Throughout my preparations for this book and its writing, I have been gathering twice a month with a team from across the world. We gaze with him at the world as he invites us to learn love more deeply and share it generously, especially with people we have mistakenly seen as our enemies. We hope many others are doing the same.

We are learning many of the things you’ve read about in this book. We are continually drawn to the great need in our world for followers of Jesus to be more deeply tuned to his Spirit, finding their direction not from human reasoning, but by catching the wind of the Spirit. His victory is coming, and his grace will be sufficient for every challenge we face.

We share Creation’s joy for those who reflect God’s glory in the world. The time of his coming may be at hand; the time for us to reveal his love definitely is.

“Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.” (Revelation 22:20)

That phrase makes my heart soar in a way it hasn’t before. I’m convinced we live in the moments before the dawn. Certainly, darkness seems to rule everywhere we look, but for those with eyes to see, the skies have already begun to brighten ever-so-slightly on the eastern horizon.

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Order Part 1 of It’s Time from Amazon in Kindle or paperback, or read previous chapters online.

Note: This is the tenth in a series of letters written for those living at the end of the age, whenever that comes in the next fifteen years or the next one hundred and fifty years. Once complete, I’ll combine them into a book. You can access the previous chapters here.  If you are not already subscribed to this blog and want to make sure you don’t miss any, you can add your name here.

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In your last letter you wrote, “The performance-based approach to God blinds us to the relational journey.” Can you unpack that more? Every day, I succumb to temptation, when I know better, struggle to apply godly disciplines, and feel his disappointment far more than I feel his love. I’ve been at this for over twenty-five years and want to find my footing on an authentic journey with Jesus.
Leo, surgical sales rep, and father of two in Tennessee

Thanks for writing, Leo. Your email makes my heart sad because I hear it so often. As much as Christianity teaches that Jesus has “paid the price for our sin” or “met all the requirements of the law,” it still loads us up with behavioral expectations that keeps us focused on our failures and blinds us to his love growing in our hearts. 

Even those who believe Jesus declared them righteous still labor under the obligation to appease him. Intuitively they know that the cross had to be about more than perpetual immunity that lets us live by our own desires without consequence. However, all our solutions to mitigate that put people back on the performance treadmill, which fails to yield the fruit Scripture says are ours—love irresistible, life in abundance, peace through trouble, and fullness of joy even in desperate times. Then we’re left to wonder where we went wrong or how God failed us? 

Let me see if I can help you get off that treadmill, Leo. It is well-designed to keep us so preoccupied with our personal righteousness that we miss the only thing that matters. Like the serpent’s lie in the garden, it preys on our best intentions. Who wouldn’t want to be like God, which is what our preoccupation with trying to be righteous seeks to do? It just doesn’t work because it depends on our effort.

A Different Way of Living

Jesus showed us how to live differently and then gave us everything we needed to walk as he did. He was not preoccupied with sin or living in fear of God’s punishment. He didn’t pursue personal piety or think himself excluded from God by the lack of it. 

But he was God, some might argue, so he didn’t battle the same temptations we do. Scripture tells us he did. Though he never gave into sin, it came for him unrelentingly, in ways we could never imagine. He experienced every temptation we do, and yet they couldn’t win over him. Why? Was he just strong enough to resist? Or did he hold a place inside his Father’s heart where temptation lost its appeal? 

I’m convinced it is the latter, and that is exactly what he offers us. Trying to gain personal righteousness is the greatest distraction I know to true discipleship. Those who focus on sin, especially those who work to abstain from it, will find themselves in a perpetual whirlpool of failed effort and its resulting shame, or they will pretend to have success in “major” sins as they seek refuge in the delusion of self-righteous arrogance. The second of those is far worse than the first. 

Both scenarios completely miss the point of God saving us from wherever our lives got twisted or broken. The salvation Jesus offered is to give us freedom from darkness and invite us into his life. By making it about heaven and hell instead, we emptied the cross of its power. We were taught that a “sinner’s prayer”, a commitment of faith, inviting Jesus into our heart, or being baptized, seals the deal. Having our eternal destiny secured, knowing his love became optional and no longer connected to the essence of salvation.  

You can’t live long in Christianity without being plagued by a call to righteousness and the competitiveness and comparisons it engenders that pit fellow believers against each other. And when we tie God’s favor to that, it gets even more destructive. If we do enough, he will bless us, answer our prayers, and keep us from harm. So, any time we endure hardship, we can blame ourselves for falling short of his righteousness, which leads to endless self-effort and second guessing our motives, or God’s. 

That’s why people can campaign for a biblical morality even as they treat people around them with indifference, anger, or deceit. The religious view of righteousness cannot produce a life of love. Perhaps Paul himself is the greatest example of that. Even though he was faultless as to the law, he became the “worst of sinners” by murdering God’s people. 

Aren’t We Supposed to Seek Righteousness?

Given all that Scripture says about righteousness, these may be difficult words for many to swallow. Christianity has landed on a fixation with righteousness that produces the opposite of what it intends. Personal godliness is not the goal of our faith; it is the fruit of a life lived inside God’s love. If you’re not living in that love, nothing you do externally will make any difference for you or for God. 

I have long known that our preoccupation with personal piety and trying to fight temptation is the greatest distraction to people experiencing the love and life of Jesus and the fruit that bears. And yet, the quest for righteousness fits so well into our religious paradigm. Of course, God wants us to be holy. So, we think that means we must work against sin by devotion, commitment, and accountability. And while those can help us overcome specific sins, they will not lead us to his fullness. 

What if the word ‘righteousness’ is not even in the Bible? I know what you’re thinking, and I thought it too when I first heard that from a South African theologian. His email couldn’t have been timelier, since I was already well into this chapter when I got it. Even still, it took a while for me to understand what he was saying. At first, I was ready to delete the email, thinking this was yet another nutjob spouting some weird doctrine. Of course, righteousness is in the Bible. I could think of at least fifteen verses mentioning righteousness just off the top of my head and knew there were dozens more. In fact, it is difficult to talk about the Gospel or Christianity in our day without using the word righteous. 

But what if it is a mistranslation of a Greek word? That’s what Tobie van der Westhuizen from Bloemfontein, South Africa had concluded after eight years of study. The more I read, the more convinced I became that he was on to something. His research could have profound implications in what the Reformation left incomplete. With his permission, I share a bit of it here. 

How did he come to such a conclusion? Part of it was by reading Plato’s Republic in Greek. More than three hundred-and-fifty-times Plato uses the word our Bibles translate as righteousness. But reading Plato’s book with that in mind, it made no sense. Then he found English translations of that text that used ‘just’ and ‘justice’ instead of ‘righteous’ and righteousness’. Except for a few exceptions, only in the Bible is this word translated as ‘righteousness.’ 

Tobie began to read the Scriptures substituting the word ‘justice’ and ‘just’ for ‘righteousness’ and ‘righteous’, and it made much more sense. As I read the Scriptures that way, I realized God’s love had already won me into that reality even though I hadn’t had this language for it. We are currently airing some of my conversations with Tobie on my podcast at TheGodJourney.com. 

Any Bible scholar will tell you that righteousness and justice are related words, and most Greek dictionaries use justice as one of its definitions. However, justice offers a wider lens than our popular ideas about righteousness. Whatever you love about God’s righteousness is already inside justice, though justice expands it to include how we treat others. That’s why Jesus could say that love will fulfill the whole law. You can’t lie about or steal from someone you love. 

To most people, righteousness speaks of sinlessness, personal piety and devotion. Focusing on those things is a valuable tool for the religion we’ve sculpted around Christianity, but it puts people on the religious treadmill, striving for something they can never attain. It keeps them guilty and in fear, and thus much easier to manipulate. The only way to survive guilt is to take Martin Luther’s tack that our righteousness is imputed in Christ. Thus, we are declared righteous, no matter how we live. It allows people to live under a perpetual immunity at an abstract level, while still captive to darkness of their flesh. 

God’s Kind of Justice

That’s why people focused on righteousness never experience the life of God growing inside them. Jesus’s kingdom was not about a declaration; it was about a transformation. If God is focused on justice in an unjust world, it changes the emphasis throughout Scripture. Jesus’s new command to love one another as we are loved by him makes more sense. Instead of being focused on our personal piety, the gospel becomes relational—experiencing his love for us and sharing it with others. 

If you’re equating God’s justice with human justice, you’ll still misunderstand my point. Many think of justice as a legal proceeding often wrapped in vengeance—people getting what they deserve. But God’s justice is not about law at all, and no law could ever bring it about, even his own. God’s justice is laced with love, forgiveness, and mercy as he is more interested in setting things right by resolving our injustices through love. 

Think less about legal systems and more about the power of a just man or just woman living in the earth. I like to think of the “justness” of God—always for what is true, right, and fair, but in a context of mercy and grace. The outworking of forgiveness is not amnesty or immunity, but the opportunity to make right what damage we have caused another. That’s why God’s justice could never come through a system of law one can fulfill by checking the boxes. 

Take three verses for example, substituting justice for righteousness: 

• Matthew 5:20-21 – For I tell you that unless your justice surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven…
• Matthew 6:33 – Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice and all these things will be added to you.” 
• Romans 1:17 For in the gospel the justice of God is revealed—a justice that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: “The just will live by faith.” 

Do you see how the emphasis changes? As our hearts are shaped by his love, we find ourselves empathetic for others instead of using them to our benefit. That’s why Jesus said that doing to others what we would have them do to us would fulfill all the law and the prophets. This is how we participate in God’s justice—putting ourselves in the place of the other and treating them the way we would want to be treated if you were them. We all hate being treated unfairly but so easily miss when we do it to others. 

Of course, our preoccupation with justice can be just as much a distraction as a quest for righteousness, especially when we do it by our own effort. God’s justice flows out of a heart won into his love. Thus, our passion for God’s kind of justness fulfills itself in growing closer to him, not trying to act better. So, we seek justice by reveling in his love and watching it flow out of us to others. In the end, our preoccupation is with the Father, Son, and Spirit from whom all love and justice flow. Only by seeing how God sets things right in us with his love can we joyfully share that mercy, wisdom, and grace with others. 

In the end, it’s all about love. Give up thinking you can earn God’s, or that your struggles with sin negate it. God’s love is not something we attain; it’s a reality we relax into. It is the very essence of the Gospel itself. That’s why Paul wrote: “The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.” Galatians 5:6. 

All other preoccupations are decoys, and religion has given us many. When we focus on personal piety, missions, pleasing a religious leader, or our calling in the world, or even how the church should function, we lose sight of the Head. All those things are simply the fruit of a life of growing trust in God’s love that manifests itself in caring for others. 

Leo, I know this is going to sound strange, but if you are seeking to find the essence of godliness, don’t focus on righteousness or trying to abstain from sin. It won’t lead you to God or his life. What will do that is your awareness of his magnificence and discovering how deeply he loves you.

If our forebears had understood that, they would not have wasted all the time, money, and effort creating religious systems to try to manage people. Our focus on love would have engaged the world even more than our arrogant piety alienated them. Imagine a world where everyone is treated fairly and one that champions mercy above sacrifice. Is it possible in this fallen world? I hope so, but it is possible for me and you to do it in our corner of the world. Our wisdom and generosity can make up for the injustice others have suffered, as is true of God for us. 

Making Disciples

Wouldn’t this completely alter the way we try to make disciples? By focusing primarily on theological knowledge, disciplines, or sinlessness, religion draws us back to the Law, even if cloaked as “New Testament principles.” Conversion, according to Tobie is not believing the right set of doctrines; it is an engagement with love that converts us from slavery to our narcissistic flesh to an others-focused life of love and mercy. 

Thus, the kingdom Jesus envisioned is not an enclave of like-minded religious thinkers cloistered away from the world while holding fast to doctrines and rituals for comfort. He saw a growing company of just men and just women who would embody his love in the world, living as ambassadors of God’s kingdom in a world gone mad. 

What would discipleship look like then? It would most certainly be less about disciplines, rituals, checklists, and accountability to stop from sinning. It would mean coaching people to recognize and yield to the revelation of Jesus’s love in their own hearts and how to embrace that love as it renews their mind. Then it would encourage them to discover how to share that love freely with people they encounter. And where we struggle, we know that God’s love has still more to teach us. 

That’s it. It may be hard to believe but engaging that kind of love will change your life, freeing you to live inside God’s nature. You’ll discover the Scriptures are a valuable resource to help you know him, learn to engage God in prayer, and discover the conversations of community that will nurture our journey, but you will learn it relationally, not just as an obligation. 

That’s where you will find the connection you seek, Leo. Learning how to participate in his love will accomplish all that the law and prophets were meant to do, and it will happen where it does not depend on human effort. Slowly, you will find yourself living differently in the world because this love will change you at your core. It’s not an excuse to hide your dishonest and selfish ways but will increase our empathy for others so that we can no longer use them for our benefit or watch them suffer unjustly. That’s how love and grace will teach you to say no to fear, selfish ambition, and vain conceit. 

Then you can embody his kingdom in the world by living out easily and freely what Hosea said God wanted.  

And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. (Micah 6:8) 

Let love teach you the power of living justly, the wonder of sharing mercy, and the gentleness of walking humbly, just as God does with you. There is no greater joy than discovering that freedom and no greater purpose than being a light for justice and fairness in a world desperately craving for both. When the end of days comes upon us, those are the people who will bear his light and love in the darkness.

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You can access previous chapters here.  Stay Tuned for Chapter 11.