This excerpt is from a lecture Perfect Love Casts Out Fear given by Elizabeth Clare Prophet at Summit University, published in the 2001 Pearl of Wisdom^®, Vol. 44 No. 6

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If you do not know it already, by and by, as you move on the path of life, you will come to discern the difference. Human sympathy is involved with self-pity and pity for others, but it is not love, nor is it compassion. Compassion heals because it elevates, because it has the strength of the dove of the Holy Spirit.

The world is full of human sympathy. Soap operas are full of it. The sympathetic attractions of people are like the sympathetic attractions of the planetary bodies that make up their individual astrology—the pushes and pulls of the magnetism of sympathetic relationships between bodies. Sympathetic relationships, then, are entertained by people who dwell mainly in a physical/astral consciousness. The vast majority of the world sustains its self-identity, its feeling of security, through human sympathy and sympathetic ties with people.

When people lack perfect love, they may suddenly cease to love you because you no longer manifest something that they expect from you. They expect you to perform in a certain way to meet their needs and when you do not, all of a sudden you no longer see their sympathetic and kindly attitude. Instead they become enangered or go into self-pity. They weep, they wail, they throw tantrums. They may become physically violent. They may decide that you are no longer their friend and put you out of their house or out of their club.

It happens with a bang, and you can’t even imagine how this could suddenly come upon people. Well, it cannot come upon people if they have perfect love, but it does come upon people when the basis of a relationship is sympathy. Perfect love means that because we are born of God and we know God, we have the instantaneous capacity to love God in each other.

Therefore we can continue to love God in each other no matter what the outer person does. We can love the light that is the fount of every living cell even if the entire consciousness that uses that forcefield is no longer in the service of God. We cannot simply stop loving God.

God is the fire at the heart of the cell that composes the pews that you are seated on. You know, some people hate inanimate things. They don’t like this, that or the next thing because they don’t like its color or shape or design. You do not have to experience hatred in any form, for “he that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.”

It’s very simple. If you cannot love, then you have not known your Mighty I AM Presence. Once you know your Mighty I AM Presence and make the contact, the fire of love is intense in its descent and it descends as the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son.