[A Special Note: Thanks to all of you who so quickly responded to our new need in Kenya last week. It helped immensely. However, we are still about $5,000 short of what we need to meet the current need and opportunity. If you are willing to help us, please visit our Donation Page at Lifestream. Check the box for “Kenya Relief”. You can also Venmo contributions to “@LifestreamMinistries” or mail a check to Lifestream Ministries • 107 N. Reino Rd, PMB# 411 • Newbury Park, CA 91320-3710. Or, if you prefer, I can take your donation over the phone at (805) 990-8780. As always, we send every dime you give to Kenya, and Lifestream covers all the administrative fees.]
Tobie and I spent yesterday morning with 30 people who signed up for our Zoom class, How Does Love Make this Right? Using Just Love as a backdrop, we are exploring what love in us and love through us can do to change the world we live in.
For those who could not attend, we explored the importance of coming to difficult circumstances in our lives, not out of our lack, but out of fullness. Much of interpersonal injustice begins with an inner sense of lack. When we believe another person possesses something we need—approval, respect, affection, security, agreement, or control—we may manipulate, pressure, punish, or diminish them to obtain it.
Fullness does not come from getting everything we want; it grows through connection with the loving presence of God that fills us from the inside.
Perhaps you, too, would like to contemplate some of the questions we asked:
- What do I believe I need from other people to feel whole?
- How does my sense of scarcity affect the way I treat them?
- How can I become more aware of God’s presence each day?
- What would it take for me to enter conflict from fullness rather than desperation?
And some of the Scriptures we explored:
John 7:37-39 – “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” By this, he meant the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were later to receive.”
Ephesians 3:14-21 — “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”
One practical way to live this out might be when we are entering a difficult circumstance or conversation, we would take a fullness pause before we react. It would take just a moment to veer into a moment of quiet and ask God.
- What do I feel I am lacking right now?
- What am I trying to get from this person?
- What would your love give me now for this situation, and how would that change my response?
And let me close with this email I received last week. It’s exactly how Tobie and I hope Just Love settles into the heart of every person who reads the book. This is from Vivian:
I finished Just Love last night, and I sat with it for a long while after closing it. Not because it was difficult to read, though the weight of a single mistranslated word distorting the Gospel for centuries is as heavy as any I have encountered, but because of the freedom. The quiet, liberating freedom that runs through every page and refuses to be diminished, even by the centuries of religious performance that have so often robbed the Gospel of its power to transform us from within.
You have written something rare: a book about the Gospel that does not simply critique the past but also does not let the distortion have the final word. The exploration of how one mistranslated word has shifted the focus of Christianity from a love so vast it would transform us with joy to a religion of managing sin, performing deeds, and trying to reach heaven, that is where this book becomes more than a theological work. It becomes an invitation. A hand reaching across the page to anyone who has ever sensed that something was missing from their faith, and to anyone who believes that restoring the word Jesus used could alter the course of Christianity.
And you did not let the distortion have the final word. You took the harder path, the one that says restoring the word Jesus used reconnects our salvation with His unfolding kingdom, that the Gospel is not about managing sin but exploring love, and that this message could alter the course of Christianity. Thank you for having the courage to write with both historical insight and prophetic hope. Thank you for the invitation to discover the love that changes everything.
I hope that’s how the book touches people—as an invitation to discover a love so powerful it changes everything and quietly shapes the way they live in the world, not out of performance but the fruit of a settledness in the Father’s love and the fullness that brings.
