True Friends have no Ulterior Motives for being your Friend.

 A true Believer is not one who uses people in pursuit of things and is not one who develops a friendship in order to manipulate the other party for the reason of personal fame or personal gain. 

The world perceives "Christians" as self-serving and manipulating people rather than be self-sacrificing for people. The history of Christendom is littered with self-serving dishonest practices of "Christians" for advancement of egoistical positions to maintain their "spiritual self-identity".  

What a sad representation of Christ when the only thing He asked of us is that we would love each other in the same way He loves so that the whole world would know who He is! We have failed miserably in the love mission of Jesus. And we continue to fail. This is one case where history will not repeat itself because we have constantly failed to express His love from the time that He initially asked us to love.

Why does authentic, caring and loving a community with other Christ followers and non-Christ followers remain so elusive, one reason is the institutional system, merely offers selfish people another opportunity to serve their own ambitions. Many people have never learned to live with the same self-sacrificing love that Jesus demonstrated to engage others beyond his own personal needs. They view people around them either as those they can exploit if they are cooperative, or forced to subvert if they dare challenge or question, and if they fail to subvert the shame and blame game is played until the resisters leave voluntary or are excommunicated.

We will only be known as a loving people in the world only when we learn that the essence of love is in putting people before things, goals, ambitions...and yes even doctrine, and cease from using them to meet our own needs. We will never understand the freedom of love until we know how loved we are by our loving God.

I have heard preacher's say that they would not step down from such a high calling of being a preacher to fulfill the call of lesser importance, that of being the president of the United States. Yet, they and many of the people they preach to fail to fulfill the greatest of all callings, the calling of Jesus Himself, that of loving people the way He loves people. Jesus did not have self-ambition, start any projects, plan any Sunday-event-meetings, or invent world wide ministries. He simply loved the people that He had an across-His-path encounter with. He is our great example...the one who loves us and taught us to love as He loves.

Folks the only way that the people of the world will get to know who Jesus really is is to love has He told us to love, love the way He loves. We as believers discard personal relationships in the pursuit of other things we consider more important...correct theology, doctrinal correctness, performance behavior, spiritual eliteness, behavioral conformity, personal acclaim and the list could go on. We have to realize that ANYTHING we make more important than loving people will only make us more a part of the world system that sacrifice people as sacrifices to the god of self-reliance.

We become so occupied with accomplishing something for God, that  people become a means to reaching our goal, not the object of our affection as they are to Christ.