Did You Not Know?

My biggest takeaway from this video is watching the empathy Russell has and the phrase, “Did you not know?”

Most of the world is full of spiritually youthful Christianity, people who love God and worship Him, sure, maybe even have for a lifetime, but they’ve yet to have a face-to-face encounter with the Man Himself. Saul was this way (originally). Every person’s life changes when they hear Jesus speak for the first time, and every single person will walk away different.

Paul was the greatest example of this, a Christian who killed Christians, thinking he was doing God a favor. Sounds like the world today, Christians criticizing others while thinking it promotes Truth.

When your testimony encounters Jesus Himself, without an intermediate, preacher, friend, or father telling you about Him, but when YOU encounter Jesus for the first time, when He walks up to YOU, says your name, and says He loves you, everything changes.

You walk away with what I see here: empathy.

Empathy is the vernacular of Jesus Christ, gentleness, His Spirit. When people mess up or are corrected, it [Christ’s empathy, Christ’s mercy, His sufficient grace] isn’t critical or abasing, it’s genuine, full of the Spirit of Peace, armed with the principality of forgiveness, and simply trying to explain, Did you not know?

The truth is, you probably didn’t.

We were not all raised in the same home, around the same people, in the same circumstances, and our knowledge isn’t the world’s truth yet. So, where is the Love? Where is the mercy? Why aren’t the ones who follow Love, armed with hearts wrapped in His grace?

Paul’s encounter changed his vernacular, and I don’t think he was screaming, DID YOU NOT KNOW!? They were given with pause and reverence. Did you not, know? 🥺 (What a gift, to use emojis to articulate and confirm human expression in language).

God is Love. Anyone who believes in love believes in God. But they [the world] don’t see it that way yet because of how we act. We need to clothe ourselves with repentance, being thoroughly penitent for the things we have misunderstood in our hearts, and pick up Love, God’s very own Spirit.

Until then, we’re living in a divination, a distraction, a distortion, and an albeit delusion of the Truth. God is tender love, rich in mercy, and wrapped in loving-kindness. He was sporadic in giving out forgiveness and freedom as a catch-all, not expecting anything in return. That offended Christians and never should have, and I pray it stops offending us today. But those bold and brave enough to answer, those willing to be purified and touched by God, well, they change the world and minister to the citadel of Jesus’s heart. Those who endured until His coming were and will be saved.

We must fear, but only the Lord [and what He thinks] and that we may not be a distraction to His love, His truth, His reality — we need to be in fear that maybe WE missed the mark, WE didn’t really know, and [we must] change.

Repentance isn’t a relic of the past; it’s the Genesis of our New Covenant. It’s the message that baptized Jesus, and it’s the one that will baptize you, splitting heaven open immediately and covering you with the spirit of holiness and a burning desire to do what pleases Him. Repentance is a changed life; repentance is the harvest of our toil. Repentance is a relationship and HIS inheritance, to commune with us without sin tearing us apart consistently.

Also, if God repented1, how much more should we? And if God canceled the world once [through the flood] and it didn’t change, why are we doing the same thing and expecting different results? God realized that forgiveness is the only thing that could fix the world, and He sent His Son to embody, embrace, and embolden that. Now we must do the same. We must accept forgiveness, for ourselves, and for others.

Forgiveness, mercy, and hearts wrapped in grace need to be the hill we, too, die on. And our words need to sound like who we’ve been talking to most, not the critic, but Christ. Did we not know? Surely not, but now we do. Grace, grace!