No, believers aren’t helping you because “Jesus said so.” We do it because we actually love you.
As a former atheist (yes, I said it again) One thing my old team would say was nothing less than Christians are nothing more than a bunch of phonies. “I can help someone without needing a God to tell me.” Their logic is actually very correct. Imagine that someone came up to help you and brightened your day. You smile and give thanks to them as they are about to leave. Instead of receiving more beautiful energy, you hear back from them “to be honest the only reason that I’m helping you right now is because someone else told me to.” Immediately you’d feel a sense of profound unauthenticity. Who would want help from someone who doesn’t want to be there? While I will grant that any help can be accepted at times, if it’s done without honesty, it strangles the beauty in it entirely.
The reality is I actually had to deeply consider this as a newly converted Christian. I truly had to comprehend that if this is how it actually is, that’s an issue with me. Of course, we have the power of Christ in us, a force that numbs the innate cravings we have for good…but am I really just serving and loving because “Jesus said so?”
The easy answer to this
After some time, the reality of how this works stabbed deep into my ignorance. While I’m far from omnipotent, I do know the logic aligns perfectly with how this works.
God loves us and shows us his love all the time, but when it comes to service and charity, he doesn’t have to push us. It’s not that God gives us anything regarding our love for others, it’s that he removes the conscious wall in this existence so we can see others for how we actually see them.
Every human has dramatically profound love for every individual on earth…but most people never experience this feeling because they have the drunk goggles of the natural man on. When we follow Christ, he comes in and removes these drunk goggles from our mind so we can perceive others with 20/20 vision. It’s not that we are acting because of the bible or because “Jesus told me to”… but because we have perfect vision instead of blurry vision.
Imagine that you had a certain form of dementia that made you lack comprehension of the most important people in your life. All your memories and love for them vanished as they became nothing more than distant strangers. Now imagine that with new technology, science was able to fix this dementia issue in your brain so you can comprehend them the same way that you used to. Your mind would be correctly functioning again.
This is nothing less than what is happening to us on a worldwide scale when we allow God to fix our distorted view of others. He corrects our perception and allows us to see others the way we actually see them, not with the conscious distortion of the natural man. God doesn’t actually need to do anything other than this, because once he removes this, he knows we will act independently…based off our own profound love for everyone on earth.
-Jarom
NO ATTACHMENT IS FREEDOM 