I have heard many people tell me that they love God and they love Jesus, and when I ask why, most often they say, “I love God for all the good things he has done for me.”

But I say that if you only love God for what he has done for you, your love is nothing to brag about.

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Personally, I do not claim to love God. Yeah, I know that one of the most important commandments is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. And also to love your neighbor, but honestly: how do you love someone you never met, don’t really know, and can’t even see or touch?

The love that we are told to have is not an emotional love, but an expression of compassion and respect that transcends the emotional love that is all we can really feel as human beings.

Spiritual love is the kind of love that God has for us. Yeshua said in John 3:12 that if we cannot understand earthly things, we won’t be able to understand spiritual things, and that is why the way God loves us is beyond our ability to comprehend, or to duplicate on earth.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

So, nu? What am I leading up to? It’s this: if you love God for what he has done for you, that love is useless. That’s right- useless, and I’ll tell you why.

What did Yeshua tell us in Luke 6:32-33?

What credit is it to you if you love only those who love you? Why, even sinners love those who love them.  What credit is it to you if you do good only to those who do good to you? Even sinners do that. 

So, if you love God for what he has done for you, there is nothing special or powerful about that love. What I am saying is that to love God for what he has done for you is not really love, it is appreciation.

I believe we should love God for what he has done for everyone else.

When I have been asked if I love God, I say I love what he has done for us- he gave us life, he gave us intelligence, he gave us the right to choose what we will do, say, and who we will follow (which has turned out to be a double-edged sword), and he has given us Yeshua so that we have the option to be saved from ourselves.

I don’t say I love God because I do not feel “love” when I think of him. What I feel is gratitude, appreciation, awe, and respect, but not love, not like I love my wife or my family, or comfort food.

Now that’s just me, and it doesn’t mean you have to feel that way, also.

Maybe you can feel that emotional love, but if your love for God is emotional, then I really believe it is not the type of love God requires because emotional love is human, and I think God wants us to learn how to love as he does; not emotionally but spiritually.

Do you recall how many times we are told, “Be thou holy as I am holy”? I think we can paraphrase that to also mean, “Love others as I love others”.

God’s love is one that goes beyond emotion; it is a complete understanding of the other person and having a consuming compassion for them, even if that person may be evil. That doesn’t mean we condone or accept the evil they do, but that we love them in the way we are willing to forgive them, to help them, to work with them, and to minister to them.

But that doesn’t mean we do not punish them for what they do, for sin always has consequences to the one who sins and, sadly, more often than not to innocents who become collateral damage from that sin.

God forgives sins when we repent and ask him to forgive us by means of the shed blood of the Messiah, but his forgiveness is spiritual and is the only way we can be in his presence after Judgement Day. However, while on the earth in this mortal form, when you sin you will get your tuchas in a sling! You cannot escape the wages of sin, and if you do not suffer for them here on earth, you will have to deal with them in the afterlife.

God’s love is not motherly or doting, it is the epitome of “hard love”. He will punish the ones he loves severely for the unrepented sins they commit, and he will not forgive those who do not forgive others (Matthew 6:14-15).

God will always love you with a love that is beyond anything any human could ever understand or comprehend, even as he condemns you to Sheol, and it will hurt him more than any hurt any human could ever feel for a lost loved one.

Let’s end with this: if you say you love God, that is not a bad thing, but you need to ask yourself what is the basis for that love? If it is only because of what he has done for you, that is not enough.

I believe the best way we can show just how much we really love God is to do good for others without thought of reward, of being held in esteem, and without publicity or bragging.

As Yeshua said, tzedakah (charity) should be done in secret so that the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing (Matthew 6:3). Give to those who need without asking for anything back, help those who need help without needing to be thanked, and forgive those who wrong you, whether by accident or on purpose, regardless if they ask forgiveness or even care that they hurt you.

If you ask me, that is how we should love God.

Thank you for being here and please comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers, Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for this week, so let me wish you Shana Tova (Happy New Year), and during these next Ten Days of Awe may your review of the past year help you see how you can better show your true love for God in the coming year.

How many times do we hear the call for the rich to pay their “fair share” of the taxes, or to do more for the poor?

Maybe we can say that the bad rep the rich have today started in the Bible?

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Yeshua said it would be easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than it will be for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24), implying (unfairly, I believe) that just because someone is rich they can’t be saved.

And he isn’t the only one: in James 5:1-3, he says…

Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you. Your wealth has rotted, and moths have eaten your clothes.
Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire. You have hoarded wealth in the last days.

So, nu? Was every rich man in the ancient Middle East a lousy person?

And what about Matthew 6:24:

No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.

And let’s not forget one of the most misquoted verses from the Bible, which is 1 Timothy 6:10–

For the love of money is a root of all the evils; because of this craving, some people have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves to the heart with many pains.

It certainly seems that the word of God doesn’t like rich people, and many Christian religions take this to the next level, actually making you take a vow of poverty to become a priest.

Do you know this story…

Thomas Aquinas was with Pope Innocent II (or maybe it was Innocent III) who was counting a large pile of church money. The Pope said, “You see, the Church is no longer in that age in which she said, ‘Silver and gold have I none'”.
Thomas Aquinas replied, “True, holy father; but neither can she any longer say to the lame, ‘Rise up and walk.'”

Now what about Abraham? He was very rich and yet God chose him from all the people on the earth to be the one he would talk to and promise to make a great nation from.

And what about Job? He was the wealthiest man throughout the region he lived in, yet he was so righteous that God challenged Satan to make Job do something wrong, which he didn’t despite the terrible tsouris that Satan unleashed upon him.

And King David and Shlomo (Solomon) weren’t begging in the streets for bread, yet both of them were mightily blessed by God!

Riches are not the issue; the issue is how we feel about them.

I have never been shy to say how I see the entire New Covenant as something less than scripture, but still important and necessary to study. It has a lot for us to know about the formation of the movement of Jews accepting Yeshua, and to see the writings that led to its becoming an anti-Jewish religion.

(Oh, but that is opening a can of worms that I do not want to divert us into a tangential discussion right now, so let’s just keep going with this message.)

It seems to me that what is said by Yeshua and James and Peter (who wrote the letters to Timmy) was somewhat unfair in that they all seem to say being rich is bad. It feels like the adage that goes “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”, except this is more like being rich automatically makes you a lover of money.

There is nothing wrong with the desire for more money, especially if that desire is to better your life, provide for your family, and as long as you are willing to use that increase to increase your tithe to God’s kingdom, which can be in many different ways than just through a collection plate.

(Again, tithing is a topic that can take us off track and is best left for another discussion.)

So, the desire for more money is not, in and of itself, sinful or wrong: what is important is why you want more money. And if you are praying to God to help provide the means or you to get more money, I suggest you plan to use a portion of that increased income to give back to God, in whichever way you can.

To share something personal, and not to brag or appear holier than anyone else, many years ago when I came in to a small inheritance, I used it to help buy more prayer books for the messianic synagogue I was attending at that time. I anonymously (so my left hand didn’t know what my right hand was doing) offered matching dollar for dollar to what people donated for the books, up to a certain amount. It wasn’t a ton of money, but it was enough that we got a lot more prayer books, which I did as one form of my tithing.

And yes, that synagogue existed almost exclusively on tithing, which was expected to be 10% but whatever we got, we appreciated.

Now, the rest of that story is I believe I was rewarded for doing that because the inheritance also allowed me to attend a school to get my IT certifications, which led to a job that eventually led to a job that paid me nearly twice the amount of the most I had been earning for the prior 8 years, allowing us to move here to Florida and making it possible for me to retire as soon as I hit 62.

So, long story short (I know… too late!) I suggest that you do not misjudge people who are rich just because they are rich, or demand that they give up some of that money in ways that you think they should. It’s their money and no one has the right to tell them what to do with it.

I believe very strongly that the people who demand that the rich give up more of what they have would be hard-pressed to give it up if they were rich.

Love of money is one thing, but demanding that someone with more than you give it up because you covet what they have is just as bad.

Thank you for being here and please comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

PS: For the record, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the average
middle-class family pays about 10% of their income to federal taxes, while the Internal Revenue Service reports that the top 1% of federal taxpayers pay 26.3% of their income in taxes.

We are told in the Bible that when Eve ate the apple it gave her the knowledge of good and evil.

And yes, it did, but I believe it did more damage than just that.

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Okay, so what else did eating that apple do to the perfect conditions in the garden of Eden?

First off, the down-side of being innocent is that you don’t really know when someone is lying to you, or even how to lie. You only know whatever you are told to be correct and trustworthy.

When God said to Adam do not eat from this tree or you will die, information which we assume Adam passed on to Eve, they believed it absolutely. But, when the serpent told Eve that she wouldn’t die, she didn’t think God lied; being the innocent, she just believed that the serpent was also telling her the truth.

So when she ate the apple, did she receive the knowledge of good and evil?

Yes, and no- she received more than that: she was also now able to choose for herself. Eating that apple gave her more than knowledge of good and evil, something which passed to Adam and became part of human DNA; and that something is self-determination.

In other words, before the apple event, Adam and Eve did what they were told and lived a life without ego or desire to be independent. Just like children, they were happy to accept and not question anything they were told.

But after that first bite, now knowing that they could make up their own minds (evidenced by Eve deciding to make Adam eat the apple, something I think would not have ever entered her mind before eating it, herself), they decided to hide from God because they felt guilty.

No one feels guilty if they do not think they did something wrong, and the innocent don’t really know what is wrong, which is why it was so easy for Adam and Eve to be fooled.

So, you may not agree with me, but I think one of the things that will not be part of our eternal existence will be self-determination. We will not have that double-edged sword to deal with and, as such, will be happy doing whatever we are doing when God places us where ever he will.

I understand many of you may think that I am supporting the idea that innocence is bliss, and you know what?

You’re right!

But only when we are in the eternal presence of Adonai.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for today, so l’hitraot and Baruch HaShem!

I am back after almost three weeks in England and Ireland, visiting friends and family (our friend Diana in Surry and Donna’s cousins in Ireland) and have a quickie post for today.

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The Shema is one of the most important prayers of the Jewish faith because it identifies us as a monotheistic religion.

The Shema goes like this:

“Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one”
(Shema Yisrael, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Echad)

In most synagogues I have been in over many years, the word, “echad” is almost always defined as “one”.

But the Hebrew word “Echad” has a secondary usage, with is “alone”.

Did you know that?

Now, I believe that using the definition of echad as “alone” in the Shema instead of “one” better identifies us as monotheistic, so my preferred way of saying the Shema (which I have heard in some synagogues) is:

Hear, Oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord, alone”

To me, to say the Lord is our God, the Lord is one is somewhat ambiguous, as far as being monotheistic, because there are many polytheistic religions where each god is, of course, a single god.

But, if we say the Lord is our God, the Lord, alone then we are specifying that the Lord is our only God.

In a world where there are many gods (even in the Bible they mention there are many gods), to state unequivocably that the Lord alone is our God is to define us as a monotheistic religion recognizing only the one, true God, who is Adonai.

I know this isn’t a life-changing revelation, or even close to being a salvation issue, but to me… I like “alone” better than “one”.

What do you think?

Thank you for being here and please comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for my first day back after three weeks, so l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!

I have been preaching through this ministry for almost 11 years, and the one thing I always try to avoid is my feelings getting in the way of God’s truth.

And let me tell you… it ain’t easy!

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The one thing that I have noticed in the many, many conversations I have either read or taken part in is that some people start off talking about God, but they devolve into a discussion that is more focused on making someone else agree with them than it is on finding the truth within God’s word.

And no matter how many verses I can give (which are not taken out of context!) that prove my point, they are adamant about their belief. So much so that they ignore what I say and continue to argue with the same rhetoric and indoctrinated spiel that they had burned into their heads from their early introduction to God and Yeshua.

In other words, they are deaf to anything different, and therefor unable to make a sound argument against anything different, whether it be right or wrong.

At that point it is no longer a discussion, it is a matter of pride.

Let me give you an example: I believe in X and someone else believes in Y. I use biblical verses that are not out of context, and my interpretation is in sync with other verses in the Bible (i.e., hermeneutically valid). The other person uses verses taken out of context, repeating what they have been taught without really understanding what they are saying, and they do not refute my arguments or even address what I am saying- they just keep repeating what they have been taught.

Soon, despite me being civil, they stop arguing and begin to attack me, personally, saying that I cannot really be saved or that I am under the law or just plain ignorant; often they get nastier than that.

At this point they don’t care about God or truth or anything other than proving they are right, no matter what, in order to support their pride.

Pride is the mother of all sin, and when it comes to those “hot” topics we believers love to argue about (you know the ones: Trinity, proper names for God, and Torah observance vs. Torah rejection-sorry, but it is, in fact, either one or the other), pride too often gets in the way of learning.

So, to bring this to an end, I beg you to please force yourself to listen to what the other person is saying, whether you agree or not, and do not listen just to know when they take a breath so you can interrupt- really hear what they believe. If you know them to be wrong, then by listening to their argument you can refute it. You will NEVER change someone’s mind by continually telling them what they should believe or what you know to be true.

Until you get them to doubt what they believe, you will never change their mind or even get them to hear you.

And you know what else…they may be right! And if you are too obsessed with making them agree with you, you may miss out on learning something that could be essential to your salvation.

Here is the absolute proof that pride has overtaken a discussion: one or more of the people involved have become so frustrated that their argument isn’t being accepted, they are no longer attacking the argument but attacking the person making the argument.

Always be aware of when discussion turns sour and pride takes over learning so that you do not fall into that trap, and if you even think the discussion is going in the wrong direction, it’s time to shake the dust from your sandals and politely go elsewhere.

Thank you for being here and please remember to comment and share these messages with everyone you know, even non-believers. Hey, after all, you never know how fertile the soil is until you plant a seed in it.

That’s it for this week, and for another three weeks because we will be traveling in Europe. Be blessed and I look forward to being with you again at the end of the month.

Until then, l’hitraot and (an early) Shabbat Shalom!