Jesus was very clear that loving God and loving people are inseparable..., that loving your enemies is what sets apart true lovers of Christ.

Problem: 

• We elevate the spiritual over the emotional... We distrust the emotional.

• We no longer measure our love for God by the degree in which we love other people.

Truth:

• Ignoring our emotions is turning our back on reality.

• Listening to our emotions ushers us into reality, and reality is where we meet God.  

• Emotions are the language of the soul. They are the cry that gives our heart a voice. 

• However we often turn a deaf ear through emotional denial, distortion, and disengagement. And in neglecting our intense emotions we are false to ourselves and lose a wonderful opportunity to know and and love God

In our efforts to serve God many of us skimming in our relationship with God. We are hurrying, trying to make the most of every minute. we are exhausted, feeling overloaded, overburdened. In this doing for God our being with Jesus ends us being minimized. 

We are so  emphasizing getting things done, production, visible, external fruit that people can see that we end up giving away something that is not actually in us.   We can only give what we possess; we cannot give what we don't possess. The truth is so many folks are talking and giving away stuff that they've not had time to actually allow to get deeply nourish in their interior life with God and themselves.  

We need limits and balance in our lives. 

The Pursuit: We Be Before We Do

I am part of a much larger stream outside of my own. Each [stream] has its own set of distinctive gifts—gifts of transformation. There's so much to learn from the global Church. 

This global church actually has three branches to it: 

1. The Protestant Stream 

2. The Catholic Stream

3. The Orthodox Stream

FACT: Every streams have problems. When God sees the church..., He sees one Church that spans continents, transcend cultures, and has a long and rich history that is the light and soul of the earth.

The failure to define "success" properly has done great damage... For most of us numbers is success. Bigger is better—bigger influence, bigger platforms, bigger impact, bigger budgets, bigger churches. The logic is simple: If you are not growing and getting bigger you are probably failing. 

Yet, the definition of success in Scripture is very simple: Becoming the person God calls you to become and doing what God calls you to do in His way and according to His time table.  It's possible that your ministry organization can be growing numerically and yet failing. And it's possible that your ministry and your numbers may be declining and still be succeeding. And so all numerical growth, whether its bigger programs, more attendance, bigger budgets, more groups, more church plants—all that takes a back sit to listening to Jesus to and abiding and abounding to Jesus, listening to His will and doing His will. What that looks for you in your situation will be different than me or someone else. 

When we define success wrongly, our best energies get invested wrongly. We spend our times on the wrong things. We are stressed , we are anxious, the yoke of Jesus is no longer easy and light, it suddenly becomes hard and heavy. We find ourselves envying. Without the joy, peace and long-term fruit that flows out of having a deep sense of right and centered in what God wants it to be. And of course, it only produces shallow discipleship. 

Discipleship is such a messy work. It's slow work. It was for Jesus and the twelve... It wasn't a conveyor belt of a manufacturing plant. It wasn't trying to scale it. It was messy and customized relationship with the people.