The answer lies in this Spiritual principle: Your outer expression of love is in direct proportion to your inner experience of love. As you experience God’s presence within, you are experiencing love, because God is love. What you experience within yourself is what flows outwardly to others. When you feel angry within, that anger usually finds a way of escape through words and behaviors. So, it is with love. As we live in a conscious awareness of God’s presence or love, it finds a way to flow outwardly to others; through random acts of kindness, a smile, a gift, plus a variety of other loving expressions.

The love you feel within is the love you express without. Inner experience determines outer expression. As you are within, so you are without. These are all ways of saying the same thing….The love you experience within, by being consciously aware of God’s presence, is the love that will be touching others. As we are inwardly aware of love and being loved by God, it influences our perceptions of others, our attitude toward others and literally creates an external atmosphere that enriches others. People just feel better when they are around a person who is living in conscious awareness of God’s presence, or Love.

Your inner awareness of the Presence transmits and translates Itself to the unexplainable love others feel when they are around you. Your conscious awareness of Christ in you becomes a healing influence to those in your world. Your self-concept of being an unloving person must cease. That is not the truth about you! God’s life is your life and therefore God’s love is the love expressing Itself in, through and as you. Self preoccupation, as a self separate and apart from God, will short-circuit the flow of the Divine love within you to others. As you become Self aware, that is, aware of the Christ life that constitutes your life, spiritual, un-conditional God kind of love will flow, transforming, and nourishing everyone and everything in It’s path.

Go within. Seek. Decide that you will not be denied this inner experience of Spiritual Love, God. As the Prophet of old, “wrestled with an angel until he received a blessing,” so our determination should be to experience Love, which is God in expression. The two are inseperable. You cannot experience God without feeling love and loved. Nor can you feel love, being loved or loving without simultaneously feeling God’s presence.

The more you live in a conscious awareness of Love, God’s presence within you, the more other’s will feel loved when they are in your presence. As within, so without.

The main problem with this erroneous thinking is that someone always keeps “raising the bar.” I have sat in church staff meetings when the senior pastor has said…” Our people are getting a little slack in their Christian walk, so we need to think of some ways to raise the bar on what it means to be a good church member and a good Christian.” After nearly throwing up, I gave some serious thought to the sickening proposal. I quickly deducted that trying to become more spiritual is a lot like trying to become more pregnant, or more white, or more black. You either are or aren’t.

The only thing you can become is more consciously aware of who you already are. Once we truly accept the spiritual principle that there is only One Life and that Life expresses Itself as you, me and everyone else, we can then accept the Truth that what is true of the One Life, God Life, is true of my life. Why? Because what is true of the Creator is true of His creation, and what is true of essence is true of the form which essence takes. There is really not a “my life” to improve or become more anyway. God’s life is already complete and since His life is my life and appears as my life, the completeness of His life is the completeness of I call “my life.”

So, once I become consciously aware of His nature, and realize that His nature constitutes my nature, I now rest in the fact that there is nothing more to “become.” All that is left is just to be who I already am, which is all He already is, expressing Himself as all that I am.

Trying to become something you think you’re not is work, struggle and frustration. Simply being who you already are is rest, joy and peace. Moving from becoming to being is a journey you’ll eventually want to take. The scenery is a lot more beautiful from the higher elevation.

The truth is, there is One Life and that One Life IS my life, and that One Life doesn’t need improving. Whatever I focus upon tends to grow and expand in my experience. Therefore constant focusing on a self that needs improving, expands the concept of a self that needs improving….and will continually bring supporting evidence to my attention.

In Spiritual Living the goal is SELF Realization. That SELF is the One Life expressing Itself AS my life. As I focus on the Life of Christ AS my life, I begin to realize that as He Is, so I AM. In other words, what is true of the Christ is true of me, because He is the I or Self that I Am. As I realize that He Is the I AM that I AM, I relax and allow that Christ Self to express Himself as all that He is AS all that I Am. Now the focus is off me, as a self separate and apart from God, and on Him as the Self that I Am. Herein, is moving from self improvement to SELF realization. Herein, is moving from focusing on a self that needs improving to a Self that is ALREADY complete in all ways.

So since God’s life IS my life, that spiritual Life does not need improving. Some of the Apostle Paul’s highest spiritual revelations are statements he made about the discovery of his own spiritual identity. Some of his Self revelations were….”It is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me.”……and….”The mystery that has been hid through the ages is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”….and…”.I must decrease, He must increase.” In other words, the idea that I have a self separate and apart from God must decrease and the truth that Christ IS my life,…Christ IS the Self that I Am, must increase.

So, if you believe you have a selfhood apart from God, your natural inclination will be to improve yourself. The truth is your true Self is the life of God individually expressing His Self AS Your Self. Upon this realization you are free from  trying to improve your self, and free to realizing your true Self, the Christ Life, who is the Self you already are. The switch is from striving to improve someone you’re not to relaxing and just being who you already are.

Pass through the words and thoughts which continuously occupy your mind, and rise in consciousness to that place of silent knowing…beyond words and thoughts.  In this quiet place you will notice Me…the I AM that I AM. I am not only the I AM that I AM, but also the I AM that you are. I AM the One Life. The Life of ALL. When you are aware of Me as the I AM that you are, you are aware of All that I AM…Life, Love, Healing, Restoration, and Wholeness. There is nothing lacking in the I AM that I AM, therefore, there is nothing lacking in you, because the I AM that I AM is your true identity..Who you really are. You are not your mind, will, emotions or body. You are the individual expression of Me… the I AM that I AM. So, come to Me for Me. Seek Me alone. When you have a conscious awareness of Me, you have All that I Am, and I AM is all you will ever need. Go ahead, rise now above words and thoughts. Be still and know that I AM God. You will find that I AM waiting to meet you there. In my Presence, there is fullness of joy. I Am that I AM. I AM the I AM that you are. Besides Me there is none other.”

The reason we contemplate scriptures (the written word) is because it one of many ways to prepare our conscious mind to receive the Living word revealed from within. It is not just the written word we need, it is fresh relevant spiritual revelations about the written word that makes it come alive in our every day living.

No human being can make truth come alive to you. That is the work and function of the Spirit within you. Men and women can be channels through which truth flows, but only the Spirit within you can take the written or verbal presentation of truth and make it come alive to you personally.

The reason we seek and contemplate truth is to clear our conscious and subconscious mind of the religious error we’ve accumulated through the years, by blindly and un-thinkingly accepting whatever was dished out to us by a “professional peddler” of religion. Contemplating spiritual truths and allowing the Spirit to teach us tears down the error and rebuilds our lives with truth.

The goal is to move from the “letter of truth” to the “spirit of truth.” The words written in black ink on a white page in the Bible are an external visible representation of the inner invisible truth written by the Spirit within the heart of each of us.

“Knowing” something is not “thinking” or even “believing” that something is so. Knowing something to be true is based on an inner certainty. The inner certainty comes from within you. Jesus told us that we really didn’t need a teacher to teach us spiritual truth because that is one of the jobs and functions of the Holy Spirit or Presence of God within us.

In this information age we currently live in, many spiritually hungry people have been deceived by denominational hiarchy into believing that the only way they can understand the Bible or spiritual truth, is through years of formal training in seminaries. This simply is a lie and not consistent to Jesus’ teaching whatsoever. You can study truth for years and still be ignorant to the spiritual intent of the AUTHOR….GOD. The way to know what the author of a book has in mind is to spend some time with the author and ask him/her about their original intent in their writings. Some of the most defeated and unhappy people in the world are those who have memorized large quanties of scrirptures but have never disciplined themselves to the harder task of “being still and allowing the Spirit to reveal the true spiritual significance of the passage.” Comparitively speaking, it is a lot easier to reach for a concordance, textbook or pull up a word study on the internet, than it is so take a passage, sit in the silence with a humble listening attitude and say…”Speak to me Lord. Teach me Your intent in this verse, principle,or parable.

Head knowledge alone of spiritual truths is void of power. It is the KNOWING of truth that has the power to remove error, heal, restore and do any other curative work that needs to be done.

Sometimes just knowing the literal translation of truth actually places you in fear, legalism and bondage. It is the spiritual interpretation of scriptures that we are promised will make us free. Spiritual interpretations come from SPIRIT. You must believe that it is possible for God to communicate with you DIRECTLY FROM WITHIN. Without knowing that, you will buy into the deception that understanding comes to only the highly trained professional spiritual leaders. That is mass deception and it is time to wake up to Christ in You… your inner teacher who was, is and always will be the Source of Truth, the Interpreter of truth and your Inner Teacher of truth.

Remember, the truth has no power in itself to make you free! It is your and my individual knowing the truth from within that has the infinite power to free us from any form or shape or error and bondage.