JESUS LOVES ME BY HERB ROUSH Sr. TABLE OF CONTENTS http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/toc.html PREFACE http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/preface.html INTRODUCTION http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/intro1.html CHAPTER 1 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page1.html CHAPTER 2 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page9.html CHAPTER 3 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page12.html CHAPTER 4 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page17.html CHAPTER 5 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page22.html CHAPTER 6 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page38.html CHAPTER 7 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page47.html CHAPTER 8 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page53.html CHAPTER 9 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page59.html CHAPTER10 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page65.html CHAPTER11 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page71.html CHAPTER12 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page86.html CHAPTER13 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page94.html CHAPTER14 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page101.html CHAPTER15 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page113.html CHAPTER16 http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page121.html EPILOGUE http://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page130.html
First, to my Father and His altogether lovely Son, my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Who graciously revealed to my needy heart the true nature of real love. May they be glorified. Second, to those nameless ones whose names are written in heaven, through whom He touched me with the reality of His love, and without whose patient ministry I could not otherwise have known or written these precious truths. May their joy be full in seeing some fruit of their labors. Last, to all those who have languished in a loveless prison, ever reaching out in hope of discovering a true and lasting love, only to be further disappointed and discouraged; who perhaps have stopped reaching, to sit in their loneliness, watching others as they search. As God sent Titus to comfort the depressed Apostle Paul, may He send this comfort to your lonely prison and free you to the light and liberty of His eternal love. May your heart-assured conviction be: "Jesus loves me, this I know." To these ones, and to these ends, I dedicate this book. i
8:30 As he spake these things, many believed on himhttp://www.jesuslovesme.org/newWeb/pages/jlmBook/Page22.html. 8:31 Jesus therefore said to those Jews that had believed him, If ye abide in my word, `then' are ye truly my disciples; 8:32 and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 8:33 They answered unto him, We are Abraham's seed, and have never yet been in bondage to any man: how sayest thou, Ye shall be made free? 8:34 Jesus answered them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Every one that committeth sin is the bondservant of sin. 8:35 And the bondservant abideth not in the house for ever: the son abideth for ever. 8:36 If therefore the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.
* * * * * None of us likes to admit the possibility of being a slave. We boast about who we are, and are repulsed by the idea of anyone or anything infringing upon our freedom. But bondage is not always to man. It can also hold us in the prison of ideas, opinions and thought patterns. The bondage Jesus spoke about was a spiritual bondage; and the path to freedom was the truth. Since the day I became a Christian, Jesus has sought to free me from the bondage of the mind. He does this by constantly bringing me to life situations whose pressing circumstances test the v | One of the most common cries of the human heart is: "No one understands me." All of us, at one time or another, have expressed the frustration of the inner man with these solemn words. It is not merely a statement of self-pity, as we are often told, but the honest realization that we live lives of quiet desperation. We sense that there is so much more to us than others comprehend, and we yearn for someone to reach and hear us. We see ourselves like actors playing our appointed roles in society and the home, projecting the image our part demands, while the real person we know ourselves to be remains unknown. The example of the clown who weeps behind his mask is familiar to all of us. The desire to "be ourselves" overwhelms us often, but just as often is stifled in the realization that only further misunderstanding and rejection will follow. This concept of our personalities is not new to modern man. Those who peopled Japan in ancient times had this concept of the soul: "the little man inside." The pygmies of Africa, almost the lowest in the human scale, have a word in their language for soul that means "man on the inside." We often glimpse this undeniable fact and see ourselves imprisoned and isolated while surrounded by those who claim to know and love us. Many have reconciled themselves to a lifetime of loneliness after reaching out without success to others. 1 Exiled and alone, they sit in silence watching others while they search. Some have accepted without question the role they must play. Deceived by the thought that the role and the man are one and the same, they comfort themselves with the philosophy, "That's the way life is." This book is written to you. Not the "you" everyone knows, but the "little man inside" that for years you have supposed no one knew or ever would. God knows that man, understands him and loves him. At this point, I am not so interested in telling you what kind of person you are, as I am in helping you to discover why you are what you are. The effects I speak about must have a cause, and the greatest book known to man on the subject of human behavior records it. That book is the Bible, God's precious Word. We know it is His Word because it tells the truth about us, and knows us as we are. In the Bible, the first book, Genesis, is the book of beginnings. In it the origin of all things is found, and the peculiarities of the human personality are explained. You, as a person, are not merely the product of fate, nor the natural result of environment and training, but of nature. In Adam, your father, you will find the reason back of much of your behavior. Each of us, his children, are really living in our own way his experiences in the Garden of Eden. When God created Adam, He placed him in perfect surroundings -- a beautiful garden, abundant food supply, pleasant circumstances and unlimited possibilities of life.
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The whole earth was subject to him, and every living thing awaited his command. Blessed by God with a helpmeet (exact counterpart) named Eve to share his life, he enjoyed unbroken communion with her and with God. As he walked and talked with the Creator in the cool of the day, it was, indeed, paradise. Adam was himself with Eve and with God. Naked and not ashamed, he walked in quiet self-acceptance, resting in the undisputed fact that he was what he was by the grace of God. Resting in the wisdom and love of God, he saw himself as the expression of God's creation, hence known, understood and loved by both God and Eve. All of this changed when Satan, through the serpent, cast the shadow of doubt upon the integrity of God; changed His truth into a lie; and accused Him of withholding good from Adam and Eve, hence causing them to doubt His love. The unbelief of their hearts was expressed in their act of disobedience, and so sin entered the human family; and spiritual death was the direct result. Death means separation - separation from God, and from each other - and the evidences of this death are plain to see in the events that followed.
The openness Adam and Eve had once enjoyed between themselves was gone. Their eyes were opened and they saw themselves as they were - naked - and they were ashamed of that nakedness. Self-acceptance turned into mutual rejection, and they busied themselves sewing fig leaves 3 together to hide their shame in each other's presence. The blessed liberty of "being themselves" with each other was gone, and they began to hide, revealing only that part of themselves they deemed worthy of acceptance. Judging what was good and evil in each other, they became actors wearing a mask; and the "little man inside" began his long, dreary exile. In the cool of the day they heard God's voice; but instead of walking confidently and talking openly with Him, fear filled their hearts and they hid from His presence behind the trees in the garden. God's first word to Adam in his lost estate was in the form of a question: "Where art thou?" Adam's children to this very day follow their father's practice of blaming others for their condition, hiding from God and one another, and never coming to grips with life's most important question. Ashamed of what and where we are, we go through life playing the hiding game, hiding from God and from one another. Wearing our self-made mask, we build walls about ourselves that keep others from the real person, and keep him inside. We cannot believe God loves us as we are; and so we begin a lifetime of performing in His presence, hoping to earn His acceptance. We cannot believe that man can accept and love us as we are, so in our shame we wear whatever leaves will please him, in hopes of earning his love and acceptance. Our behavior betrays the fact that the fall of our father Adam left each of us with the basic emotional and spiritual problems that plagued him: fear, inferiority complex, and a haunting sense of guilt that seeks and finds relief only in hiding from man and God. Many and varied are the devices the human personality creates to cope with these basic needs, as any student of psychology will tell you. We ascribe technical terms and names to our problems in hopes of isolating them, thus helping us to cope with them. But when all our devices fail, we resort to Adam's way of escape - hiding. The hiding game begins early in life. As children we are open and honest with all we meet, just being ourselves without concern over self-acceptance. This is the sweet innocence that endears children to us. Without guile or deceit, they fully expose themselves to all, naked and unashamed in the presence of man. But soon they experience the first pains of rejection from others, and little by little begin to build their own world of unreality. Pressed into the demands of a society that forces unreal roles upon them in school, job and home, they retreat further and further into the silent world of nowhere. Adulthood arrives, and too often they find the outer man not true to the little man inside. It is safe and secure in that prison. No one can hurt the real self, for he is never revealed to others. No one can reject him, for he is never offered to anyone. Only the image man, the masked actor playing his part, is ever seen and known. 5
. All of this is fine, but sooner or later we make the discovery that we have taken into our hiding place a companion that none of us can live with forever. That companion is loneliness. Loneliness was one of the effects of Adam's fall. He was alone in the beginning and God said it was not good for him to be alone, so He gave him as a precious gift, an helpmeet, Eve. Adam never knew loneliness in his perfect estate, but he and his children have lived with this destroyer ever since his fall. Adam knew loneliness the day he hid from Eve; for, doubting his acceptance as he was, he revealed only that part of himself he judged her willing to receive. Haunted by the realization that the image he projected was not true to the real man, the little man inside learned to live alone and lonely. Another once wrote, "The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence." Loneliness creates an unbearable stalemate in most of us. Desperate to be known, accepted, understood and loved, we peer through the iron bars of our hiding places, daring at times to risk an exposure of our real selves, only to be greeted with hostility and rejection; and so we are driven deeper into ourselves. We are like a timid flower who longs to unfold its beauty to the world, but is beset by frost and insects, develops a blight, clasps its petals firmly 6 itself and hides its face from all. We search for someone who can be trusted with the revelation of ourselves without rejection, and listen with hope to the talk of love among mortals, only to find in experience that too often the only communication we are ever offered is mask to mask, not face to face. So, shut up within, we live our quietly desperate lives. Our only companions are our fears, guilt, sense of inadequacy, and loneliness. Many times we are driven so deep within ourselves that we lose all hope of reality and all sense of personal identity. We search for medical, psychiatric, and spiritual answers and help, clinging only to the hope of survival for life. We say with sorrow, "There is no one I can talk to, for no one understands me." Oh, timid soul, there is Someone Who knows you, understands you, and to whom you can tell all your heart and still He will love you! Please read on to the happy revelation of a God Who loves you as you are, and where you are; a God Who will be your Saviour and Friend in Jesus Christ, His Son! The way of self-acceptance is to find acceptance with God. We need desperately to see ourselves -- our true selves -- through His eyes, accepted and loved as we are, if we are to be free. We will languish in our prisons forever if we wait for some human who will love us when we are unlovely, accept us when we are unacceptable, understand us when we are beyond human 7 understanding. Only God, in Jesus Christ, can meet the needs of your heart. In His presence we can be what we are without fear . . . take off our mask; be freed from the need of man's acceptance; learn the glory of being alone without being lonely; and blossom in the sunshine of His love. In Him and His love we will discover our origin and destiny. Created to receive the revelation of His eternal love, we can find in Him the principle of our existence and its only end. To know the true power of His love in Jesus is to see earth metamorphosed; to live in the assurance of His love is to experience no winter or night -- a life where all tragedies, dreary duties and fears vanish. My immediate purpose is to assure you that there is Someone Who knows you as you are, and where you are. Never mind for now about your sins and failures. Please read on as He seeks to bring you under the banner of His love at Calvary's cross, where His forgiveness and provision for you were revealed. Let him fold you in His eternal love and acceptance, and set you free to walk with Him in the cool of the day in precious and real fellowship. Read in faith that God has found you and will speak to your deepest heart needs. 8
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