I Responded to Love

I came to a rap session at the Vine House in March of 1974. My wife and I were disillusioned children of the 60s who had really wanted to be a part of a revolution of love and peace on earth. The Movement had miserably failed and we were headed to the hills of Jackson Hole, Wyoming when we started reading the words of Jesus in the Bible. Both of us were really affected by His words. They agreed so deeply with our hearts. He talked about love and unity and abandoning everything to follow Him in this pursuit of loving and caring for humanity. We wondered if there could ever be a place where we could find that love and experience a life that was real. We had never seen it or even heard about it in church or Sunday school growing up. So our journey led us through the front door of the Vine House that eventful Tuesday night.

When we walked through the door we could sense something very different in that place. The young people were singing and we could sense a love that felt in our hearts the same way we felt when we read His words in the Bible. I remember thinking “can this be real?”. I was so affected by what I saw and heard and the love I experienced coming from these people that I asked “can you live here?”. Then I heard the most wonderful answer to my question...”YES!”

I responded to love that night...love in a people who were united in heart, mind and soul. That love wasn’t just in one or two but in all of them! I remember saying to them “how did you get this life...what did you do to have love like this...” I didn’t want to hear the doctrine of Jesus dying for my sins. I heard that all my life. I wanted to see the result of it, if it was true. I knew that love for Him because of what He actually did for me was causing me to have love for my brothers and sisters. I didn’t see how the two could be separated. I sensed that kind of love for others in those people that night. The hope I had was that my wife and I could find that love and that we could be healed of all our wrong, hurtful ways by learning to love each other as He loved us.

The love I found that night at the Vine House carried great weight in my heart. So, when I asked them how they got to be the way they were, they told me the truth...that they had given up everything to follow Him because He had communicated His forgiveness to their heart. For the first time, the words of Jesus had authority. His words were calling me to something radical, a very high calling, a calling to live a life of love, to spend my life learning to live like He lived, walk like He walked...denying Himself to love others. I was compelled to obey that call, hear those words of His and do them, if I wanted my life to truly be built upon the rock of Salvation. I entrusted my life to Him...all of it, all of my ambitions, goals, plans, saying good-bye to the “good times” of the past, turning away from the selfish goals I had been trained all my life to pursue. The result was that I started having the power to live for others, which meant serving others 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I had an energy I had never had, the power of the love of God that began to motivate all my thinking, feeling and actions. This was real. This was exciting. This love caused me to want to stay there with the rest of the Vine House people and serve them for the rest of my life.

I have seen many people come and go from here in the last 35 years. At first it puzzled me as to why people would leave. But through the testing I have been through, I have come to see how deep Salvation really is because I have come to see how deep selfishness is engrained into my soul. I see how there is only one true Savior, whose love reaches deeper into my soul to cleanse me than whatever form of selfishness is coming out of me. I have come to see how His love never fails to reach me and to give me courage to face how I really am. I have learned that facing my sin is the first step to humbling myself and receiving unconditional forgiveness.

I have failed many, many times but somehow my brothers and sisters have been there to lift me up and to encourage me to not give up. Up to this point, I have been able to trust them but sometimes it has taken me a long, long time to get to that place. And when my brothers have failed me or when I have experienced injustice, I have always been reminded of the love God has for me and I have always had to answer the question in my own heart if loving Him and loving others is all I want to do, no matter what happens to me or how I am treated or whether I think others are loving me. And through all of this through the years, I am being healed and I am learning to love and to be compassionate and merciful to others where I was not in the beginning of this journey.

Many of my dear friends gave up, got hopeless about themselves or became bitter with their brothers and sisters. I watched the resulting decline of love, the increase of self-concern, and the lack of inner self worth take over in their souls. I understand it. I have experienced it, but I have come to know that it doesn’t have to be that way. What caused me to not give up? Trust! Pure and simple...I decided to trust God through His body above and beyond human failure and injustice. When I gave my life to Yahshua, I truly abandoned any hope of finding a remedy to the fatal flaw of selfishness in me and in humanity anywhere else but in the Body of Messiah.

There are many Jesuses that people have received from the 41,000 denominations in Christianity, but they do not give a person the power to love and we are all commanded to love one another as He has loved us. I have seen it countless times that someone comes to us with their Jesus, they do not surrender their Jesus to embrace the True One, they don’t find the power to live by His enduring love, or hold up under the rigors of becoming a disciple. So, they end up leaving with the same Jesus they came in with. Sometimes this takes years, even decades to come to the surface.

I have learned in the body that in order to be saved, a person has to receive the Message and the Messenger who brought the message. I remember years ago beginning to understand this from John 13:20 when He said to His apostles, “if they receive you, they receive me. If they do not receive you, they do not receive me.” I have been tested very deeply on this and everyone who joined with us at the Vine House was tested on this, too. To some it is very difficult to receive the message of giving up everything if they love their selfish life. To others the task of consistently receiving the messenger is sometimes difficult because most of us are damaged by bad authority. But to come to God we have to come to His authority in a living human being who is standing in front of us speaking words of eternal life. But more than this, I saw love and unity being produced in the people there as a result of the Spirit that was passed on through these words. This made me love him. I have seen this love grow in him over the years, but I have also discovered that our life ceases to grow and eventually ceases to exist if we stop loving one another.

Gene has never stopped loving us, just like our Master never stopped loving. He loved his disciples to the end. Loving one another is what causes our love to grow. If the evil one can blind us to the love in the hearts of our brothers and sisters because of the way they say it or because they might get it wrong sometimes, then he has defeated us. This is what happened to so, so many that have left.

I can see that over the many, many years I have been here, Gene has consistently led me, and all of us to Yahshua and not to himself.  And it is also true that many of us leaders did not love the way Gene loved. We have had many, many hurdles in our own souls to overcome. We have hurt those entrusted to us, but we are truly learning to judge those hurts and deeply repent for them. Many of us have been disciplined severely by our Father for these things and taken out of leadership because we did not represent the true character of Yahshua to His people. But what is sad to me is that I may never get the opportunity to express my heartfelt sorrow to those who I hurt and are no longer with us. I want to have that chance.  I also desire that those hurt by any of us to have the opportunity to see that our love for Yahshua and for one another has not died because of our lacks but instead is growing very deep through all the difficult things we have gone through.

My hope is that those who never trusted Gene or his message could come to the reunion and see that the love of God that Gene had has been passed on to many, many people.  Our Father’s love has begun to restore all things, getting the church back to what it was meant to be...a light to the world, a demonstration of the kingdom to come. I sincerely hope many, many people who just couldn’t quite see what was going on back then or those who got offended and left could come and take a second look and see that the “real One” is here and is making a people for His own possession. There’s still time to be a part of it. The door is wide open! We desperately need each and every one of you!

...shalom,

~ Eddie Wiseman (Hakam)