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Every person, no matter how sweet, nice and loving, has the inward seeds of selfishness and death. But they also have the evidences of life as demonstrated in their compassion and caring for others. So they appear to a greater or lesser extent to be a source of life to others who are thirsting for life themselves. But they are only second-hand sources of life no matter how wonderful, thrilling or satisfying their presence is.
In our desire to bring more life into our souls and bodies we attempt to form relationships – intimacy at some degree – with others who attract us by the evidence of life we see in them that we crave to experience for ourselves. The most obvious examples of this is in our attractions to physical beauty in all its various forms. Body language in gestures, mannerisms, voice tone and facial messages are closely related. We see these in varying ways as communications of life that we desire to share and assimilate.
Pleasure is an aspect of receiving life that is high in our priority. Pleasure means different things to different people and is sometimes opposite, but it is always a craving for life in some way. Often however, our lust for pleasure imparts some measure of death to others in our attempts to extract life from them for ourselves. We are operating on the false assumption, though usually subconsciously, that to add life to ourselves we must subtract it from others. Or, conversely, to impart life to others is to subtract it from ourselves.
These basic assumptions and cravings underlie most of the interactions between people in this world both individually and collectively. It is some of the essence of selfishness and is what we all inherit from Adam. When Jesus stated that we must hate our family members in contrast to loving Him to be enabled to be a disciple in His kingdom (see Luke 14:26), He was trying to draw sharp attention to this issue of where we try to get life from. We are so naturally and almost exclusively dependent on drawing life for ourselves from those around us that we can't see the ultimate danger in our dependence on those sources. We are only working with second-hand life which is all that any of us possess no matter how alive and attractive it appears. And in extracting life for ourselves from those around us it is further reduced in its satisfaction content.
So we increase our frenzied clamor to get more and more from others and from possessions, or we sink into despair and depression and surrender to the death-inducing effects of others extracting life from us.
Theologically we say that God is the only source of life. But what we really believe is demonstrated by how we live, particularly in our “free time”. What we do for entertainment to receive relief and pleasure is the clearest indicator of what we really believe can give us life and satisfaction, even if we deny it verbally. Those who insist they don't use entertainment to satisfy themselves usually look to work or other achievement oriented activity to create a sense of self-value and identity.
Our need to receive life revolves around our need to feel valuable and our perspective on our identity. Our perceived identity is usually the composite and accumulation of all of our previous preferences of how we have tried to get life for ourselves in the past. Our identity also is perceived by what others think of us and how they have treated us, strongly affecting the way we view and value ourselves.
But most of these factors that have such overwhelming influence on shaping our perceived identity are not necessarily factors at all in identifying or revealing our true identity. Only in true reality which is rooted outside the artificial, fake environment of this world, can our true identity be found by communication with the original Designer of our heart and soul. Our real identity is not even a compromise between the two realities. Our real identity and value is solidly rooted outside the distorting atmosphere of the complex illusions created by the relationships and messages around us.
All our relationships other than with the real God are sources of second-hand life mingled with seeds of death. We are all under the drugging influence of seeds hidden in the fruit of the Tree of Death, the so-called good and evil fruit that our parents indulged in from the Garden of Eden. The only antidote is accepting God's redemption through Jesus and reestablishing our connection to the Tree of Life. There is only one source of life that does not contain poisonous seeds of death as all the other sources do. If we reject that source in preference for other sources we will eventually succumb to the death-producing effects of the hidden poison that we ingest. No matter how intense our pleasure or perceived satisfaction we receive from our human sources, we are still receiving hidden sources of death if we trust them to be our vital source of life.
