John 10:17 Meaning Therefore the Father Loves Me

There is a laying down of life that is not loss but release. When the ego, the mental image of who you take yourself to be, is set down willingly, something is not destroyed but freed. What you release was never your true life to begin with, only the form it wore.

And so it is taken up again, transformed. The one who surrenders the small, defended self discovers a deeper aliveness that death cannot touch, because it was never dependent on that form. To let go of what you thought you were is how you come into what you actually are, and that is why such surrender is met with love rather than punishment.

The Father is your own awareness of being, and the life laid down is the self you have been holding. To change what you are, the present self-concept is released, dropped as a man drops what he no longer grips, so that another may be assumed in its place. The old life is not killed by struggle; it is let go, and a new sense of being is taken up freely. The power to lay down and to take again rests wholly with you, for you are the one being playing both the one who releases and the one who resumes.

Awareness loves this movement because it is how it expresses itself and grows. Sender and sent are one, the Father and the son the same being in two offices. You lay down the man you were and take the man you now feel yourself to be, and no outside hand does it for you. What you assume and hold you become; that is the whole of it.

The self is loved by its source because it releases its lower life on purpose in order to receive the higher one back, the descent into flesh undertaken so that spirit may rise again through it. To lay down the life is the willing entry into the body and its death, the soul spending its animal existence on purpose rather than clinging to it. To take it again is the resurrection of that same life on the higher plane, the raising of the identical energy once it has passed through surrender. The love of the Father is the answering flow of spirit to the self that gives itself away to be renewed.

Within a person this is the deep pattern of losing to gain: the vital force poured out into matter is not lost but recovered transformed. What is set down deliberately is what one is able to raise up again.

Father: the higher source and origin of the self, whose love answers the willing surrender