TLS....

I use this abbreviation as the title of my blog, because it was the same as the original proposed name of my current church. On the topic of this unusual name for a church which does not include cliche words such as 'Christ' or the name of a denomination or location. It actually does contain a very important word that is critical to understanding the message of Jesus is primarily a message of "Love".

I personally feel too often, how often do people, in general, not only 'Christ-followers', 'disciples', 'Christians' or whatever 'label' people may want to call them, often see Christ as just the 'legend', 'the man', a historical figure, great teacher, but not the lover?

Recently, I have been putting my own parents' relationship (or lack thereof) under the metaphorical microscope a lot in efforts to understand how my upbringing has affected me as a person, including the most important aspect of my life which is my relationship with Jesus Christ.  My conclusion is while both parents may have loved me individually as their child in their own way, they had very little love for each other and this can be a point of concern if I/we (we as in you the readers) only think of 'God the father' but forget about 'Christ the spouse'.

SO.... Seems like I discovered the KEY in what gives us the "Identity of being IN CHRIST" huh...I was struggling to find the keywords of "Christ" with "bridegroom" and "bride" together with Biblegateway's search engine and decided on a different approach and interesting that the suggested result is also from one of the gospels: https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=one+flesh&qs_version=NIV

When you look at the entire chapter of Mark 10 in Context as I was reading Mark 10 on the bus before church on Sunday (long story but didn't end up making it cause I was on the wrong bus for short), Mark 10 also makes reference to divorce because of 'hard hearts'.

I have been trying to do a mini-word study given my limited online resources as I don't currently have access to the same resources I was taught to use for original biblical language word studies. Anyhow, to the point, I looked up the word "practice" and discovered 2 things. One, when Paul uses this word in his epistles, it seems he uses it as an 'action word', as in to put God's word/law/will into 'practice'. And two, I did not try to look this up in all English translations yet, but the NIV translation of 1 Corinthians 13, which I typically use, Paul does NOT use the word "practice".

I am trying to assert that although Christians do recognize that salvation is by "grace". A lot of people seem to miss out on the fact that the gospel message is actually one of love [1 John 4:19-21, John 3:15-17, John 15:9-17, 1 John 3:16-18]. And while I do recognize love is an action/active term, there is also an inherit risk/danger of only associating God's love with what he's done for us, such as in the examples in the book of Job. Regardless of whether the Job story is a real historical account or not, although Christians do say 'our faith shouldn't be based on feelings', I also have learned the opposite is also true, in that our faith should likewise not only be based on actions.  Meaning faith solely based on either actions, or feeling is as James put it "dead" [James 2].

Christ came into the word as a person to show us a taste/sample of what it means to have 'a personal relationship' with Jesus Christ [John 1, and the rest of the gospels]. Apparently, I had discovered earlier this week, through a breadcrumb God gave me that I had already previously posted on this topic in this blog: http://life-of-agent-k.blogspot.ca/2009/04/stand-watch-men.html

Not to sound conceded, but I will now add a comment on that post to fill in the missing words and 'proclaim the mystery of our faith' [https://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=proclaim+the+mystery&qs_version=NIV]