Tag: love one another

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February 2016

February 18th 2016: Galatians 5:2-15

You can follow today’s reading by clicking on this sentence.

‘…but through love become slaves to one another.’

It’s a big challenge this one. I’ve been wondering recently, how much of a sacrifice for the sake of the Church I’m part of leading is enough? Would it be where I live? The hours I put in? The parts of my life which shrink to accommodate it? The songs I lead? The things I teach on and the things I don’t?

And then a sentence like this one pops up.

We’re not called to relationship with God and one another for anything other than to serve one another. I am to serve the people I lead, as I seek to serve God, giving back to him from the abundance that he gives to me. That, as they say, is the whole ball game.

Not to say I don’t have to look after myself. Members of Emmanuel have been telling me for quite some time now that I need to look after myself, take care of myself, but I am also called, by Love, to do the sacrificial things, the difficult things, the frustrating things, as well as the joyful, the life-giving and the exciting things, that best serve my community, as the transforming power of the Spirit works in me, just as it does in others.

 

 

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

September 7th 2014: Romans 13:8-14 (Talk Text)

What does it mean to love one another? Here are a few ideas. See if you like any of them…

 

  • Being nice to people
  • Being nice to people you don’t like
  • Being generous, or sharing what you have so that others don’t go short/go hungry
  • Treating everyone the same as you.
  • Expecting everyone to agree with you.

 

At different times I think most of us, if we are honest, have limited our ideas of love to one of these, or a mixture of them. It can be pretty difficult to love at times can’t it. Some of us have bad experiences of giving or receiving “love” from those who we trusted to care for us, but who instead let us down. Some of us have done that to people we cared very deeply about. It’s easy for us to spend our whole lives feeling guilty, like we don’t deserve love from anybody, or from God. One of the things that this kind of thinking does is make it very hard for us to love ourselves.

 

As we look at the reading from this morning, Paul is telling us that the whole of the law, that complex system God created for people to relate to Him, themselves, and one another, can be summed up in the phrase “love your neighbor as yourself.” Growing up in Church I was more than aware of the old phrase, “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Many of us have heard this many times. We think we understand what it is to love God (although I’m not sure any of us really do), we work hard at loving other people in some of the ways I’ve described above, but we’re not very good at loving ourselves.       A few years ago, a fellow minister pulled me up short when I was saying about how much I loved God, and sought to love others, but I didn’t want to love myself, because I was always sinning, always messing up etc. He very clearly explained to me that in order to love my neighbor, those around me, I had to love myself too. To say that I love God and my neighbor without loving myself is to lie. Don’t become all about yourself though. We are to put others first. Living in a community of faith and hope like Emmanuel, my dream is that as each of us puts others first, we too will have an other who will put us first. Wouldn’t that be great?

 

Without love we cannot please God. God is love and those who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. So how are we to live in love?

 

Well, I think what our reading this morning invites us to do is “clothe ourselves in the Lord Jesus Christ”. This doesn’t mean wearing Jesus like a coat, that would be a bit too odd. What it means is, I think, get to know Jesus, get to know Him and His ways of living. Understand what He asked people to be, how He asked people to live. After all, it was him who said that the whole of the law was summed up in the command to love. If we clothe ourselves with Christ, putting Christ first rather than what the bible calls the desires of the flesh, but which means here, our own selfishness and our own desires, we will see that we are meant to live for God, to serve Him and others. Jesus came to serve us, and as we follow His way, one of the best ways we can do this is to lay down our life for our friends, our neighbours.

 

Who is our neighbor? Everyone, not just the people who live near us, or the people sitting next to us this morning.

 

If we’re going to lay down our lives for our friends, we might give time, money, food, prayer to them, just as we were talking about last week, but there’s something else we can give to them too. As I said earlier, everything we’re asked to do is summed up in the command to love our neighbours as ourselves. And again, as I said earlier, without God there is no love. God didn’t just invent love, He is love. It is His character, His personality, His essence. It defines Him even more clearly than my beard, my wheelchair or my dog collar define me. Jesus lived, died, rose and ascended to heaven to express in the most complete and powerful way possible that God loves us, so that we might have life and have it to the full. Most of us here this morning are here because we know Jesus, or about Jesus, in some way. Most of us are here because we were invited, or welcomed, or felt the need or desire, to respond to Jesus and His love, and to follow after Him. If you don’t know Jesus this morning, or you’re skeptical about Him and what I’m saying about Him, then come and talk to me afterwards. If you know Jesus though, I hope you’d agree that the message of life we’ve been given is the best news we could ever have.

 

So, one of the best ways we can have as Christians to love one another is to tell the story of our lives, as far as we can to tell people about what we believe and why we do. We don’t all have to eloquent, or preach standing on tables. I’ll never manage that. What we can be is open and honest. Do we really believe that God loves us? Do we really want to love others? Then let’s be a community that loves ourselves, loves God, loves one another, and invites people to join with us and share in the joy and hope that we’ve been welcomed in to.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

August 15th 2014: Luke 11: 27-28

Read Luke 11:27-28 here

He replied, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

Will we hear the word of God today? What will we think it is? Will we take it as our moral compass, our way of regulating the life of those around us and “calling to account” those with whom we disagree? Certain parts of scripture make a case for this cantankerous, and frankly entirely unappealing type of “faithfulness”. It’s as if we’re scared to be creative, to think for ourselves, to take responsibility, to live in a state of grace, and so instead we bind ourselves up in labyrinthine, contradictory rules and edicts, so that we can feel ever more guilty, ever more unworthy, and yet at the same time ever more morally superior.

What would it be like if the word of God we sought to obey was “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength, and love your neighbour as yourself”? Would we want to be the world’s moral police then? Would the height of our ambition be to prove which version of the Genesis creation stories were “true”? Would we justify our communities, our nations, blowing people to smithereens because they have “a divine right” to do so to get to a patch of land? I really don’t think we would. I think we would realise that to love is to sacrifice, to be humble and to put others first.

Jesus changed the world like that. We are following after Him. We can follow in His way.

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2014 Lectionary Ramblings Lectionary Ramblings

July 27th 2014: 1 Peter 4:7-14

Read 1 Peter 4:7-14 here

“Above all, love one another deeply”. This is what we are asked to do this morning. As we serve, work, proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ in word and deed, we are primarily called to love one another. The hardest command of Jesus, in my view, is to love God with everything we have, love our neighbours, and love ourselves. As I’ve said before here I think, some of us think we’re ok at 1 or 2 of those, but not many of us, if we’re honest, really cope with loving ourselves, others and God all at the same time. And yet this is what we’re asked to give our lives to.

What does it look like to love one another deeply? Well, ultimately I think it means to do everything we can to point one another to Jesus. This might be a wise word, a sermon or whatever, but more likely it’ll be the small act of kindness, the sacrificial giving, the offering of time, a listening ear. Time is the greatest gift we humanly have to share I believe. Not many of us are used to people giving of their time just to see how we are, to encourage and challenge, stretch and strengthen us. Jesus, though, died and rose so that we could spend eternity, unlimited time and space, with Him, and He with us. For us to truly love, and to be loved, we need to see that people are more precious than activities, that loving each other deeply is to prioritise seeing the work of God in another, or in a group of people,. drawing alongside them and asking God to help us to experience, and perhaps even to be, the sacrament of the present moment in the life of another.

As this passage goes on to suggest, and as we see all too often and easily in the present time, suffering is part of the Christian life and experience. As we deplore the treatment of Christians in Mosul and other, less publicised parts of the world, this morning, let us pray for them as they share in the sufferings of Christ, that they might know his presence and peace and, for us, that whenever we are brought into places and times of suffering for our faith, that we might faithfully love one another, love God and love our persecutors, deeply.