(Jesus:) There will always come a point where your own tolerance level will be stretched by someone even stranger than you, or stranger than the last "strangest" person you've had to cope with. It's the "embracing the leper" process in the life of St. Francis, and of many true followers of Mine. Shutting anyone out who doesn't look according to one's own standard simply doesn't live up to what I said about loving the least of My brethren the way you would love Me or claim to love Me.
Remember the scene with the prostitute in the movie about Dorothy Day? Dorothy was able to see My light and beauty in her and was thus able to love her the way she would love Me. It's something I want you to learn, to practice and stretch you spiritual muscles on.
You just expect everybody to be perfectly up to par with your personal standard and can hardly understand how they can dare fail to live up to it. That certainly wasn't My attitude, when I was around...
When it comes down to it, that essential task of loving others is truly a great challenge for you.
Maybe you haven't fully come to the conclusion yet of how much more blessed it is to love everyone, instead of seeking to be loved by them. Seeking to be loved by everyone will only leave you disappointed by everyone's incapability to live up to your unrealistic expectations, and will make a spoiled brat out of you, and finally a bitter and hardened old man. The only thing that can break that spell is to break out of that mold of your unrealistic expectations and do what you can instead, to make life a little easier, a little more livable for them.
The Enemy would like to stop you, he tries to irritate and aggravate you. He tries to nullify the veracity, the realness of what you're trying to do by showing that you're not able to live up to what you're preaching.
That's why Gandhi went way down to the total rock bottom of poverty, not shunning to do the lowliest tasks himself, because he knew that anything else than that would have been hypocrisy, and anything else would have always allowed the Devil to point his crooked finger at him and call him a hypocrite: "So what are you really in it for?"
You've got to stay on the rock bottom of the ground that what you're doing it for - whatever it is you're doing - is love, and without love it's nothing. Without love, you might as well quit doing it, whatever it is.
It'll go haywire, because the Devil will always tell you you're nothing but a hypocrite. He likes to expose people for the sinners they are, especially when they're sincerely trying to do any good, just in order to discourage them. While it isn't My goal that you actually do let him discourage you from doing the good you want to do, I also do allow it in order to make sure you're really doing things for the right incentive, that the right power is behind it; not just any desire to put yourself in some grand limelight or be able to tell the world, "See? We show you the way you're supposed to do it," but just humbly do whatever you're doing for love, and let that love be clearly seen in your interaction with those around you and closest to you, even if sometimes they may seem to be harder to love than anyone far away you don't have to deal with.
"How real is your love?" is the question. Can you even love one who has fallen to such depths that with all your tolerance and understanding you cannot understand and tolerate them? How far does your understanding and tolerance go? How much are you willing to deal with cases that go beyond the limit of what you deem acceptable? Where are your limits? Where is the point at which you'll say, "thus far and no further"? "Thus far my love and tolerance and understanding for people will go, but no further."
There always comes a point of a little bit more love and understanding than you've previously had, and in your case, it's a whole lot more you need, although you may seem to be doing fine in comparison to others. But how fine are you doing in comparison to the way you and I know you should be doing?
You see that everything else is only a distraction? Everything else can sometimes only busily keep you going through the motions of busily avoiding the very essence of life, and what life is all about: "love thy neighbor" - that person or those persons closest to you, the ones you're living with, and having to deal with face to face, that you cannot avoid or evade - "as thyself." You'll always discover a point where the love you have for yourself excedes the love you have for others, eventually, especially when you're confronted with a person you can't help but think that surely you must be better than they. Sure, you're bad, but thank God, you're not that bad, right?
But if you can truly treat someone like that with an attitude and an approach that shows them that you don't consider yourself any better than they, then you have reached the point of genuine humility. That's the point where they can see that yes, your love and what you preach and say and claim to believe is real.
Until then, you're just one of a whole bunch of talkers who wish they knew what they're talking about. When you can accept and truly embrace the lowest of the low and let them know you're one of them or they're one of yours, that you consider that there is no difference between you, but they're equally loved by Me as you are, then you've become real, man!
I've always been the Hero and the Champion of the one lost and forgotten and neglected sheep. If I knew the 99 were safely in the fold, My sympathies, My concerns and My love would go out to that one lost sheep, strangled out there somewhere in the brambles, the brushes, the shrubs of the confusion of this world, and often I have wondered why those in the fold were always too busy pleasing themselves to ever come out and assist Me.
It's part of being the real thing. Your love for the one lost sheep, the lowest of the low, the least of these My brethren, determines just how real you really are!
There is a whole lot you can still learn from Gandhi: there is a goodness that goes beyond any confessional differences. There is a goodness that expects of you to be kinder to those who are not your own, who are different than you, than to your own kind. That's what many of the Jews couldn't understand about Me: how could I be so kind to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, the heathen, the "wicked?" Surely, I had to be a sinner, too, like them.
What I was showing them was that in the eyes of God, it wasn't going to matter anymore whether you were a Jew or a Gentile, but whether you were a child of God by being a child of good. Those who chose to do good over evil, and those who chose to recognize, accept, receive and believe in the Good when they saw Him or heard about Him, those were to be God's children from henceforth.
And likewise there will come a time when I will make it clear to the world that it doesn't make any big difference whether you're calling yourself a Christian, but how you live is what matters, and how much you have given and done in order to make sure that those others, who apparently did not know Me, or perhaps did not want to know Me because of of some despicable and loveless sample of one of those supposed believers and followers of Mine, would be given the chance to see a true picure and illustration and token of My love by the way you lived.
God would not be God, nor would He be righteous, if He only allowed nominal Christians into His Kingdom, who - although they were supposed to have known the truth - lived a worse sample of what I stood for than some or even many of those who claimed not to believe in Me, because they didn't want to be any part of the hypocrites.
Can you blame anyone for not wanting to be a Christian today with the sample that Christians at large give to the world? Just as it is said "he is not a Jew that is outwardly a Jew" (Rom.2:28) - in the flesh, so I will also say, he is not a Christian that is outwardly a Christian, in name and in title only. But how much are you really Mine? How much can you really claim to be Mine? How much can you really say that you are My bride, that you have loved Me intimately, have heard My voice speak to your heart, and how much have you obeyed that voice? How much have you gone forth, accepting and bearing My seed and bringing forth fruit unto Me? How many children have you borne unto Me? Can you truly call yourself Mrs. Christ? Are you truly My wife? Have you truly employed your life in service to Me, or were you just one of the countless slaves of Mammon, who every once in a while offered a little token, a small sacrifice to Me, as one would throw a bone to a dog under the table?
That's why I have said, "I will have mercy, not sacrifices." I'm sick and tired of little sacrifices that mean nothing, I want love. I want you to love Me and the people, period, that is the only acceptable sacrifice.
