True Love.

Love is not desire, as Professor Dallas Willard would say. Desire seeks to have it's way with what is desired. It wants to eat it. It craves it, but it does not love it. Desire does not want to serve the beloved, for the beloved is not a beloved at all but is rather the belusted; treated by the one desiring it's own way without any respect for her at all.

Love seeks the good of that which is loved.

True love is marked by giving, not getting. Just as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for us, so we too are to exemplify His love for one another by living for one another in an exceedingly sacrificial way. Go above and beyond in loving one another. Evoke the beloveds' beauty with your love. Bring out the best in the one whom you love. If you want to love as Christ loves, you must give your whole being to the practice of love, treating others as you would want to be treated. You cannot do this apart from God. You need His generous love abiding in you in order for you to truly love as Jesus has loved. The more time you spend in the presence of the One who is Love [God], the more readily you will become a loving being. Dwell with Him, love Him, and learn to love like Him.

-burton 261E

The University of Knowledge.

It brings me great grief to be amidst the presence of a handful of students and a professor fifteen years older than I all laughing at the pitiful and hopeless people who still hold some kind of belief in "God," equating this belief with the belief that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy actually exist. They laugh as though those people who place their belief in God do so with hardly any thought past "He just does.", and that the thought that those people do put into His existence contains little, if any, depth at all. The professor rips away any bit of potential evidence for God's existence, extracting a well constructed thesis out of context and picking bits and pieces out of history as though these small chunks contained the real remnant of truth. The very basis or starting point of most arguments that aim at destroying belief in God begin with false pretenses, and they do not give even remotely a fair representation of the biblical view of God in relation to humanity. To rebuke such false statements is difficult when the starting point of the statement claimed starts with a lack of the bigger picture. I want to so desperately present the whole picture in its entirety, but in order to do so requires an audience that is willing to listen. Thus far, I have found nothing but meaningless knowledge and questioning that leads herds of beautiful minds nowhere.

We all place our belief in something. It may not be God, but every human being believes in something as the ultimate cause or the primary source of all living things, and if he does not believe in an ultimate cause or a primary source then he believes in nothing, and to claim belief in nothing is still claiming belief in something. It is impossible to believe in nothing unless you also (along with that belief in nothing) don't believe in your own existence (or don't believe that you do exist), thus if you believe in your own existence you believe in something--namely, yourself. When I was religious, focusing on morality and obeying rules, I placed my trust in the law. When I was an Atheist, I put all of my trust in myself and it brought me much depression, purposelessness, and pain, for I knew that with all of the powers I could personally gather, those powers, in the end, matter very little at all in relation to everything else that has gone on over the progression of time. Now that I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, I put all of my trust in God and He has given me hope, joy, peace, and a great sense of purpose. Where are you putting your trust? Is it in yourself, humanity, material objects, rules, or people? Examine yourself and see what you believe in, what you hope in. Would you die for that belief? I will die for mine.


-burton 261E