The Cycle of Joy: Love Elevated

The purpose of life is to experience true, deep, and lasting joy.  This type of joy is found in the right focus of love. This isn't just a random feeling; it's a profound, spiritual state that comes from a dynamic, self-sustaining cycle where every step is fueled by the one before it. The key to accessing this life is to maintain a constant FOCUS on the divine pattern outlined in the Great Commandment, elevated by Jesus Christ’s New Commandment.

FOCUS to Find Joy

We must consciously choose where we direct our energy and attention to activate the cycle:

1. The Foundation: FOCUS on God

The entire process begins with our foundational choice to FOCUS on God. This is the Great Commandment: to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. This spiritual focus is the ultimate access point, ensuring that your joy may be true, deep, and lasting.

Action: When you choose to love God, you open the channel to receive God's love and energy.

Result: This love is the energy that fills your reservoir, giving you the spiritual power needed for every other step.

2. The Conduit: FOCUS on Self-Stewardship

The next step is to steward that love by turning it inward. After loving God, you must FOCUS on self-stewardship by nurturing yourself in a healthy, holistic way—spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

Purpose: This self-care is not a selfish indulgence, but a commitment to be a healthy conduit. It ensures you are serving from an overflow of energy and strength received from God, not from depletion.

Result: Being a healthy conduit means you have something genuine to share with the world, a sincere desire to bless others, thus making you ready to share from overflow.

3. The Outflow: FOCUS on Others (The New Commandment)

This final step is the practical outflow where love becomes visible through service. Here, we FOCUS on others with the highest possible standard of love: Jesus Christ's New Commandment.

The Elevated Standard: Jesus raised the bar, commanding us to "love one another: just as I have loved you". This sets a standard of selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional love, intensifying and fulfilling the Great Commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.  You  become a 'living sacrifice', by loving those around you with a pure love.

Fulfilling the Command: Your commitment to serve others must be modeled after Christ's own actions.

The Conclusion: FOCUS  => True, Deep, and Lasting Joy

By maintaining this constant, intentional FOCUS, you close the loop. This act of sacrificial service generates a return of love and growth —you receive more of God's love and deepen your capacity to love Him even more. This dynamic process produces the constant, profound state of true, deep, and lasting joy.  In addition, the process is iterative because it involves a sequence of steps that are repeated, with each repetition building upon the results of the previous one.  The return of God's love and a deepened capacity to love Him more then becomes the input for the next stage of the process and the next effort (the subsequent iteration) starts from a more developed place, leading to a richer return, which further enhances future efforts.  Therefore, the resulting joy becomes even deeper until we experience a fulness of joy.