January 4, 2020
Category: Regenerative Faith
We were having our home church meeting this morning and we read through 1 Corinthians 13, “the love chapter”. You know when you have one of those “aha” moments that are just especially for you and when you try to describe it to others it just doesn’t have the same meaning. That’s what this morning was for me but I’m still going to write about it :-). I wrote some in my prayer journal and I’ll share some of those prayers here…
Wow, Lord, we just read 1 Corinthians 13. Something became clear to me while reading and chatting about it. You tell us the most important commands are to love You and to love our neighbors. And then this verse talks about how you can have faith to move mountains and the gift of healing and prophesy but if you don’t have love you are like a clanging symbol…your “right” actions are meaningless.
There are so many Christians who are about doing the “right” things but they harbor hate, bitterness, ego, and self-righteousness in their hearts instead of love. This turns out to be a disaster. This is why people outside the church always point out hypocrisy as the reason they don’t believe in God and Jesus. I don’t think people would be as offended with Christians if we all had true love in our hearts and treated others with love and respect. Love covers a multitude of sins.
I know this is a really deep conversation that can’t be summed up in a simple blog post but it just created a vision in my mind on who we are supposed to be in the lives around us. Its not about telling “truths” at people as much as its about seeing others as God does. Instead of fighting and picketing abortion clinics, why don’t we mentor a girl who is pregnant or a teenage mother so we can help her through the tough decisions – whatever they turn out to be. This attitude gives us the opportunity to be a guiding light through her life. Instead of raging about politics (or anything else), why don’t we invest in the lives of the people around us and then we find out that those we are raging against are similar to us in so many ways and that all of us need God’s complete and transformational love and forgiveness.
Steve and I have talked about this a lot over the past 10 years and we don’t like the trends of trying to change the world by creating laws. That is a “trickle-down” philosophy – if we can make laws against things that go against our beliefs – that somehow those laws will “trickle down” and create change in our nation and the people of our nation. In doing so, the people around us as only the laws we agree in and we see them the same way. We are removing ourselves from creating transformation in our own lives and those around us. We’re passing that responsibility to the government. We feel justified in fighting for “truth” when we aren’t living that truth with those closest to us.
Do you think it will truly change someone’s life more to create a law or to love that person no matter what? This world has many great things to offer but we can easily see that it is a broken and hurting world. Do you think people need more people telling them that they are bad people or they are making horrible choices or do you think people are yearning for acceptance and love and hope? We know that that true acceptance, love and hope can only truly come from Jesus and his power in our lives.
I think that remembering that Jesus told us the two greatest commands have to do with love have a purpose. They can transform our own lives and the lives of those around us. Let’s not forget to keep the “main thing” the “main thing”.
One thing I want to do some more writing about the Kingdom of God being an “upside down” kingdom. Jesus did things completely upside down from the the culture he was born in to. I think we often forget what “upside down” looks like in our culture today. I don’t think it looks very much like our overarching Christian culture today. So stay tuned and I will write my thoughts on that sometime soon!