Doors to Love

Using the story of Gautama Buddha (founder of Buddhism) and the ministry of Jesus, ithis video encourages every listener to grasp the power and strength of Divine Love.

I came to my understanding of Revelation through a broad study of the world’s religions. That study reveals that love enters the world through many doors. To emphasize that point, I’m going to start with the story of Gautama Buddha, the founder of Buddhism.

Gautama was born Siddhartha, an Indian prince. In India, society was broken into four castes – what we today would call “social classes.” At the top were the nobility and the intellectuals called Brahmins: these two classes wrestled for control of the society. Beneath them was the warrior class. At the bottom of society were the untouchables – those that did manual labor. Whatever caste you were born into, you were stuck there.

Being born into the noble caste, Siddhartha was protected from fear, hunger and death for most of his childhood. When he finally escaped the castle and saw how the untouchables lived, he was seized by guilt. Eventually this guilt drove him from his home into the world of religion.

Siddhartha’s goal was to end suffering, and he set about it with a mighty will. He fasted and tortured himself, trying to find a way to conquer pain. He failed. He failed miserably. His followers abandoned him, and he was left alone.

Siddhartha found himself sitting, abandoned, under a Bodhi tree. His great realization was that he had to change himself. He had been noble. In his quest for knowledge he had used the discipline of the warrior and the learning of the Brahmins. In the end, though, he found freedom sitting quietly under the Bodhi tree – like an untouchable – and became a Buddha.

This is the essence of Buddhism: don’t let society tell you how to be. When you suffer, look carefully at the world around you, and figure out how you need to change so that you can change the world. Gautama taught that we should not rely upon society to help us, because society exists through negative conditioning, or karma. Karma teaches us that we are not worthy of the choices enjoyed by the mighty. Buddhism breaks the cycle of karma by insisting that we must trust in ourselves.

Jesus offered this same lesson to his Apostles. The most impressive incidents happened while the Apostles were sailing. In the first, a storm blew in while Jesus was sleeping, and the Apostles feared they would sink. Upon being woken, Jesus complained “Oh you of little faith,” and commanded the wind and waters “Be still!” In the second incident, Jesus walks on the water toward the boat, but Peter is impatient to greet him and leaps overboard. To Peter’s astonishment, the water holds him up. Excitedly, he begins to walk toward Jesus. The wind and water rise again, and Peter loses heart, beginning to sink into the waves. Jesus grabs his hand, and Peter regains his footing. Disappointed, Jesus is again the critic “You of little faith!”

What is Jesus complaining about? Not that the Apostles lacked faith in him, because they came to him for security and found it. No, it was that they lacked faith in themselves. Hebrew culture had taught that they were not worthy of the power of the Most High, that which the Apostle John names Love.

This, then, is the goal of this ministry: that those that hear its teaching should realize that you are wondrous creatures, designed in the Image of Love, and finding your greatest power through its expression. That starts in small ways: love joins us together, and in that joining we become stronger. But, as taught in Revelation, it ends in great works – works that would be fearsome to even think about without knowledge of the power that supports us.

Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest conquerors in human history, once said:

Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and I have founded empires. But upon what did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded his empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for him.

Jesus believed in us. My hope is that every listener will seize upon that belief, and find strength to believe in themselves.

In opening, I stated that love enters the world through many doors. Most of us try to walk through those doors into places of worship and spiritual study. They are the doors of shrines, churches, synagogues, mosques, and meditation centers. But the door lies within: it is the human heart.

Believe in yourself. There are as many doors as there are people. When your heart is open, what comes through you is more valuable than any measure of wealth.