I think one of the most amazing things in the universe is that God is love and that is something that has really been hitting me for about the last nine months.

The Bible tells us that God is love.

It is important to realize that God is love. That is that God doesn’t just show love or that he doesn’t just have love, but that God is love. That means that you can never separate God and love. That means that God always operates with love because God’s very essence is love. For many of us, this requires a paradigm (a way of thinking) shift. I know it did for me. I was raised to believe that no matter what happened to you good or bad it was God who did it to you as a way to rewarding you or punishing you for being bad or in a sick way kind of beating you while you were down. This idea is not one that I had alone. When I became a Christian, I learned that God loved me and that Jesus came to make a way to heaven for me, but I really didn’t change the concept that all the bad things that happened to me were God dealing out punishments and temptations and beatings. When you realize that God is love some thing has to change because no longer can you believe in a loving God and see him beating you or tempting you. No longer did the two fit together. I had to change what I thought about God to fit what I learned about God being love.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a concept of tough love. However, what is tough love. Tough love is not beating your child or tempting them with things that would hurt them. No, tough love is when you have to withhold from them a reward they did not deserve because of their attitude in the hopes of correcting bad behavior. God does this in much the same way. God is ever ready to give us rewards in the form of blessings whenever we chose to follow him. When we chose to sin, we effective make the choice to cut God off and God uses tough love to not give us the blessings (some of the time because he does operate in grace and mercy as well).

Although we may not understand it, God never operates without love. Everything he does, he does in love because he is love making it impossible for him to be without love. Furthermore, when God loves, he loves with his whole being because he is entirely love. A revelation for another time. I will finish with this thought. No matter what we may think of God, he is never without love because God is love.

Sometimes you really think you understand something then you learn a new concept about it that kind of blows you away. Take a look at what I recently learn about what part of what being a prophet is about.

Most people when they think of a prophet think of the person who sees the future or sees into a person with divine inspiration and speaks about what they see for the building up and edification of the person or the body of Christ. However, not all that the prophet sees is for the body and this is what I recently learned.

Not long ago, I saw a vision that I knew was from God. This vision had the picture of many people in danger that I knew were traveling. I began to pray and I could not shake the feeling that the danger was not going away. I got my wife and we prayed together and eventually the feeling went away. Later, I discovered that at the time we were praying together, the van, which was pulling a trailer, had jack-knifed on icy roads and was about to plummet off of a bridge and into a frozen river. The people in the van and the van following them said that the hand of God reached down and picked them up and placed them back on the road because nothing they did saved them. I realized that it was not my prayer that did it, but it was God and that God sent me the vision not for me but so that I would pray so that he could move to save them.

When we pray, angels move in the spirit realm. A prophet will often times see into the spirit realm and see the ebbs and tides of things happening and needs to know that is his or her cue to pray and not there cue to run to the nearest mountaintop and proclaim how great they are that they heard from God. I have made that mistake many times in the past and hope that I have learned and grown from it so that in the future, I can pray effectively and accomplish much.